Vacation Robo-Post: The 10 Worst Shows of 2008
The title is self-explanatory. And I could go on, but I have to stop somewhere, so let's make it 10. Your own nominations welcome in the comments. The coffee-stained envelope, please:
10. Keeping Up with the Kardashians. You could fill this whole list with the exhausted genre of celebreality shows, but let's stick with E!'s tribute to undeserving fame (well, I'll exclude Bruce Jenner), begun in 2007, which is possibly the first TV show essentially spun off from a sex tape.
9. Do Not Disturb. This short-lived Fox hotel sitcom made me long for death, or 'Til Death, whichever would come first.
8. American Gladiators. Besides being an outstanding source of baby names—Stealth! Venom! Fury!—there was little to recommend this big-haired strike retread.
7. The Andromeda Strain. More like strained, this tedious, stiffly acted remake tried to glom onto the zeitgeist with a trendy environmental conspiracy plot, but it simply blew greenhouse gas.
6. Alter Eco. ...and speaking of trendy environmentalism, while Discovery's new Planet Green channel had a handful of worthy series (e.g., Greensburg), this Adrian Grenier vanity project wasn't one. The star and his friends showed us how to build green mansions, how to buy expensive biodynamic wine, and, mainly, how cool and noble they are. On the plus side, Entourage is now Grenier's second worst show.
5. Little Britain USA. The British sketch comedy show crossed the Atlantic and went from amusing and overrated to pointless and perplexing. The funniest sketches involved characters already worn out on the original show, jarringly transplanted into American settings. But there were worse imports...
4. Kath & Kim. ...QED. The Australian mother-daughter sitcom didn't translate, losing the original's full-throated nastiness but managing to stay creepy and patronizing to its characters.
3. The strike. The root of much of TV's evil this year (see American Gladiators), it doesn't claim the number one position only because we had to share it with 1997 2007.
2. Rosie Live. The one redeeming factor: this was clearly a labor of love for variety fan Rosie O'Donnell. But the result was a self-indulgent trainwreck of poor production, lame jokes and painful musical numbers. Rosie was doing this one for herself, and it probably should have stayed that way.
1. Knight Rider. A lot of shows make the worst list because they are so poorly executed. This one makes the list because, as far as I can tell, it was perfectly executed: it resurrected the spirit of lousy high-concept '80s TV, and made me grateful to be living two decades later. "It's not a TV show so much as an ironic nostalgia lunchbox in video form," I wrote when it debuted. If only we could sell it on eBay and forget about it.
As I said, this list is hardly comprehensive, so feel free to toss your rotten tomatoes into the ring.
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Hole in the Wall comes from a much deeper circle of Hades than American Gladiators, to be honest.
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Heroes. 'Nuff said.
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I second Tom's Hole in the Wall suggestion and I thank you for putting Kath and Kim so high on the list. Ugh.
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Jon & Kate + 8, 2008 being the year in which Jon & Kate began shamelessly whoring (as opposed to shamelessly exploiting) their children and my wife forced me to watch.
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[...] So, sticking with the end of the year theme, I recently came across one of Time’s many lists for 2008. This one in particular listed the worst shows that were introduced..and some of them I agree with while others I disagreed with because they had at least some potential. You can read the whole list here. [...]
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1. MOMMA'S BOYS (NBC) - I'm not sure who deserves more blame on a show like this. The producer? The casting director? The first six minutes - six minutes! - was a preview of what we'll be seeing this season, and it featured a ton of bad behavior. This is the Bachelor, Meet My Folks, and Rock of Love rolled into one. It had the usual catfighty stuff the first night, where one mean girl made another girl cry. What killed it for me was when it revealed the New Yawk mom is a total racist. ("No blacks, no Asians, and no Jewish girls!") The fountain of ugliness gushed out. Seacrest, ick!
2. KATH & KIM (NBC) - hey, Selma Blair, staring blankly at someone is not funny. Molly Shannon, this is not an SNL sketch; it's a character we're supposed to want to see week after week. Supposedly there was this funny Australian show on which this was based but it got lost in translation.
3. HOLE IN THE WALL (FOX) - Picture taking one game from the array of MXC, and focussing an entire show around just that, week after week. What next, a show solely dedicated to the Pyramid challange from American Gladiators?
4. DO NOT DISTURB . . .
http://jermsguy.blogspot.com/2008/12/my-worst-of-tv-2008.html
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Hey Man,
I was part of this outfit called, the wurst show. I'm pretty sure that one took the cake. Here is a sample.
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheWurstShow
Talk about the wurst show!
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hey yon yonson was a better director than the whole 10 worst. he might have been 11. hehe well, i definitely have to agree on a few of the 10. knight rider and rosie live are mostly in the right place, but i would have switched them. rosie was definitely the worst. and i think i even saw her on thanksgiving! ruined my holiday. but i had to watch it because i didn't have control of the remote.
and i only watched about 10 mins of the knight pilot before *click*. didn't like gladiators the first time it was on...and didn't see all the rest. oh...except for Andromeda...and actually i thought that was ok. maybe that moves the wurst up a little for me...ok i'm done now 
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I'd have found a place for Countdown on that list. In slightly over a year, Olbermann went from being a corageous voice-in-the-wilderness to a misogynistic loon obsessed with his own self-importance, culminating in the notorious Hillary/RFK "special comment".
But if you can't include Olbermann, coverage of the 2008 election overall deserves a place on the "worst of" list -- even if you put it on your "best of" list. While you may have seen something worthwhile that I didn't, it was impossible to miss the various media atrocities this year (everything from Chris Matthews' 'tingle', to the Gibson/Stephanopolus debate, to the media's exaggerated reaction to the sins of Chuck and George) that made it painful to watch election coverage this year.
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[...] Explanations at link: http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/2008/1…rss-topstories [...]
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I'm a bit confused about what The Andromeda Strain did wrong. It seemed surprisingly decent to me, and the acting was certainly no stiffer or more awkward than the original's.
I don't think scripted TV sank any lower than Do Not Disturb, however. The original pilot managed to be racist, homophobic and deeply misogynistic in 22 minutes. Impressive stuff.
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[...] 2008 in review, TV critic David Bianculli on his tv top ten list; and tv critic James Poniewozik on his tv worst list and his Tuned-In (mostly tv) Persons of the Year (and his top 10 best 2008 tv stuff and top 10 2008 [...]
- poniewozik Loved the season. Mrs Tuned In wd have put u on the main list RT @boredtodeath Thank u for incl us in Time's Top 10. We'll take hon mention. - 5 hours ago
- poniewozik @carr2n Virgin is the best, LAX-JFK - 6 hours ago
- poniewozik Did NPR interview abt multiscreen multitasking. After, automatically reached for iPhone in pocket. Like don draper wd have for cigarettes. - 7 hours ago
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