What's The Biggest Bomb/Blunder In TV History?

[Peter Paltridge]

36. Gilmore Girls without its creator

Very true. I don't have the issue; I hope they threw in a couple jabs at Logan.

Mumbo - thank you for that link. What an education! Never heard of that show and now I'll never forget it.

Haha. Having not watched Felicity, how does cutting one's hair equate to quality or lack thereof?

It's really a joke the way the media always cites that the reason. They always say "Felicity cut her hair!", but the real reason was that the show moved timeslots, I believe, and the viewers tuned in a little less. Narratively, the series was still going strong. Felicity realized the relationship with chose with Ben (the idol she followed to New York) was flimsy at best, and broke up with him. She then cut her hair - a classic University "I need to change myself" move - and spent the next half the season trying to fix the friendships she'd damaged by getting together with Ben in the first place (namely, her friendship with Julie, Ben's ex, and Nole, Felicity's ex). It wouldn't have felt real if the series had them break up, and then everything was happy-go-lucky for the rest of the season.

So, consequently season two was a little more depressing, Felicity had a new look some viewers didn't like, and the timeslot changes really cost the series some ratings. But the media chooses to focus on the hair, as if to warn girls short hair is unnattractive or something. Yeesh. Felicity looked fine.

Cracked.com mentioned that in the show's final season, Felicity magically went back in time one year -- which, at the time, meant 9/11 hadn't happened yet. Instead of warning the world, she spent her second take on 2001 trying to get her old boyfriend back. She succeeded. Then she cheated on him one episode later.

I think that is a lot lot worse than hair.

 

[Lord Dalek]

So this actually exists somewhere. And they made a second episode. Wow. I swear I would buy this on DVD if it was cheap enough, just to be able to have it.

Yeah I was under the impression it got junked like a lot of 60's VT television. Guess not.

 

[J. B. Warner]

How they overlooked Comedy Central's recent backfire known as "The Jeff Dunham Show" is beyond me. You've probably seen Jeff Dunham fans in your daily life at some point - the guy has garnered kind of a cult following recently, so I'm sure a TV show seemed like a good idea. But Dunham is a ventriloquist; doing a show full of sketches where his puppets interact with people who aren't him kinda misses the entire point of his act. Not to mention that most of his characters are very one-note and can only sustain laughs for the duration of one stand-up show (Achmed the Dead Terrorist was funny the first time we saw him, and only the first time - I have never laughed at him since), so seeing them do the same shtick every week wore out its welcome in a hurry. Seven very painful episodes later, Dunham has officially become played out.

 

[Kitschensyngk]

I saw Pink Lady and Jeff back when we had Trio.

Good lord, if it wasn't the sad excuse for comedy, it was the titular Japanese pop duo "singing" American pop songs.

 

[DisneyBoy]

Dalek, I can't quite get enough out of that youtube clip to understand just what it was about that series that was so odd. The KKK seem the obvious choice, but really...what was that about? Random images?

Agreed, the thing that gets me is because it didn't work, Conan and his crew lost their jobs in this mess. The Tonight Show may never be the same again.

See, I was happy Leno was on at ten because it meant that if nothing else good was on I could watch him. And I sometimes did. Where I think NBC messed up was in expecting there to be huge ratings on both shows. Conan needed time to settle into his position with older viewers (though I really liked the style of his show, very much in keeping with the older one) and Leno needed...well, he also needed more support. How much money was NBC really losing? It had better have been a lot, to warrant all the trouble changing plans has caused. Poor Coco. Really was looking forward to years of his Tonight Show.

Very true. I don't have the issue; I hope they threw in a couple jabs at Logan.

I read the issue, and it didn't (though I would have LOVED it if they had - but lets not forget Amy was the one who didn't kick the character to the curb in her last season, after Whory woke up and realized what a yutz she'd become, thanks in part to him). Anyhow, very glad Amy's departure made the list. I'm sure it helped that Gilmore Girls was recently named one of the top ten shows of the last decade.

Cracked.com mentioned that in the show's final season, Felicity magically went back in time one year -- which, at the time, meant 9/11 hadn't happened yet. Instead of warning the world, she spent her second take on 2001 trying to get her old boyfriend back. She succeeded. Then she cheated on him one episode later.

I think that is a lot lot worse than hair.

A) The series got a proper finale, then the network asked for five more episodes. This was the storyline they came up with - if you love the original ending, you don't have to buy into this having happened at all.
B) These "back in time" episodes were my jumping on point with Felicity. I saw these, liked the sci-fi premise mixed with slow-mo romance, and really got into it. If you watch these episodes on their own, it's like a fun movie about a girl who tries to fix her romantic history for all the right reasons.
C) She goes into the past because her boyfriend, Ben, cheated on her. After four years of trying to make it work with this guy (a rather unlikeable guy to boot), you could hardly blame her for wanting to turn back time and get together with the nice guy (Nole) who was always there for her and had to play second fiddle.
D) She only cheated on Nole in the past because she re-fell in love with Ben, who was the only person who believed her wacky "I time travelled because you turned into a jerk" story. The character is largely defined by her obsessive love for Ben. It's too strong for her to resist, and in going back and showing her then-not-boyfriend Ben that he'd come to love her only to wreck it, he realized he needed to become a better guy. Flash forward to the future, Ben is repentant, and he and Felicity reunite.

No - I don't really believe Ben was right for her either, but hey, it's a fantasy, right? If the lead character doesn't get what they want, the show in a sense has failed, right? Kinda? Maybe? Nah - she belonged with Nole, darnit!

As for 911, most shows didn't touch that one. FRIENDS didn't. Ally McBeal was mocked when it tried to make a thinly-veiled tribute to the fallen firefighters in their 2001 holiday episode 911.

 

[Master Moron]

16. Networks & Stars Pass On Hit Shows (Did you know that HBO passed on Mad Men? Or, that Rob Lowe almost became McDreamy on Grey's Anatomy?)

How is Mad Men a hit show? It gets less that 2 million viewers and less than a 1.0 in the demos.

 

[Eleanor Hugbees]

How is Mad Men a hit show? It gets less that 2 million viewers and less than a 1.0 in the demos.

Well, it was the first basic cable series to win an Emmy for outstanding drama. Not to mention, it's been sweeping award shows since it's been on, getting everything from the Peabody Award to Golden Globes. It's asleeper hit.

What about Fonzie jumpng the shark on Happy Days? Wasn't that one of the worst episodes of anything ever? Cop Rock? Getting rid of Arsenio for Chevy Chase? I dunno.

 

[Master Moron]

See, I was happy Leno was on at ten because it meant that if nothing else good was on I could watch him. And I sometimes did. Where I think NBC messed up was in expecting there to be huge ratings on both shows. Conan needed time to settle into his position with older viewers (though I really liked the style of his show, very much in keeping with the older one) and Leno needed...well, he also needed more support. How much money was NBC really losing? It had better have been a lot, to warrant all the trouble changing plans has caused. Poor Coco. Really was looking forward to years of his Tonight Show.

NBC wasn't losing money. It was the affiliates that were pissed off because Leno was causing their local newscasts to get hammered. Previously, NBC just ignored their affiliates, but the Comcast deal caused them to suddenly care about their affiliates.

Well, it was the first basic cable series to win an Emmy for outstanding drama. Not to mention, it's been sweeping award shows since it's been on, getting everything from the Peabody Award to Golden Globes. It's asleeper hit.

Winning awards doesn't make a show a hit. If that were the case then Arrested Development would be considered a hit.

 

[HomeMoviesFan]

Mad Men is on A&E, which is cable, not a network. Those are decent cable numbers...

 

[Vyse]

Mad Men is on A&E, which is cable, not a network. Those are decent cable numbers...

No, Mad Men is on AMC. Either way, the numbers for it have been good for the network. It has probably won more awards than Arrested Development ever got. Plus, it helped transform AMC into a place for great drama series with Breaking Bad (which gave Bryan Cranston his first Emmy win) and now the upcoming adaptation of The Waking Dead.

It's been fun reading these comments, and I may break out the EW and quote it to explain some of these choices. As for my take on some of these selections:

-Fox cancelling Family Guy deserves to be in the Top 5. Even though Fox-uncanceled it, there's still egg on their face for getting rid of it in the first place. Plus, it reminds me of this classic clip when FG came back.

-The reality hosts hosting the Emmys doesn't deserve to be #12. While a disaster, I wouldn't rank it that high.

-I agree that NBC cancelling JAG is a big deal. Not only did JAG spawn a hit show in NCIS, but NCIS recently spawned another hit series in NCIS: Los Angeles.

 

[Eleanor Hugbees]

Winning awards doesn't make a show a hit. If that were the case then Arrested Development would be considered a hit.

That may be true ,but ratings aren't the sole factor in determining a hit either, otherwise the Venture Bros.and King of The Hill would have been gone years ago and Family Guy would have never returned.

And like HomeMoviesFan said, those numbers are actually decent for a channel that used to run Gidget and Elvis movies back to back. Like I said before, it's a sleeper hit currently going into its fourth season.

Maybe i'm just a tad defensive, since I actually like that show.

 

[Hobbes829]

i prefer Gilmore girls season 7 to season 6. It repaired a lot of the damage. The fact that That 70s show went on without 2 of it's main characters in the final season is a much bigger blunder. At least when Amy left, you still had a writing crew that knew the characters. It's much worse if you lose the star of the show.

 

[Wonderwall]

How they overlooked Comedy Central's recent backfire known as "The Jeff Dunham Show" is beyond me. You've probably seen Jeff Dunham fans in your daily life at some point - the guy has garnered kind of a cult following recently, so I'm sure a TV show seemed like a good idea. But Dunham is a ventriloquist; doing a show full of sketches where his puppets interact with people who aren't him kinda misses the entire point of his act. Not to mention that most of his characters are very one-note and can only sustain laughs for the duration of one stand-up show (Achmed the Dead Terrorist was funny the first time we saw him, and only the first time - I have never laughed at him since), so seeing them do the same shtick every week wore out its welcome in a hurry. Seven very painful episodes later, Dunham has officially become played out.

Oh man, I can't stand Jeff's show or stand up. That dead terrorist thing for me wasn't funny the first time yet I still got accused of the "Oh he's just saying that cuz he's seen it so many times." I was like no bro, its awful. Still I don't think he's big enough( thankfully ) to warrant being on the list. Replacing Chappelle with Mencia on the other hand...

 

[HomeMoviesFan]

No, Mad Men is on AMC.

Augh, I knew it was one of them!...

 

[Master Moron]

That may be true ,but ratings aren't the sole factor in determining a hit either, otherwise the Venture Bros.and King of The Hill would have been gone years ago and Family Guy would have never returned.

And like HomeMoviesFan said, those numbers are actually decent for a channel that used to run Gidget and Elvis movies back to back. Like I said before, it's a sleeper hit currently going into its fourth season.

Maybe i'm just a tad defensive, since I actually like that show.

Venture Brothers isn't a hit, either critically or ratings wise. Though, you do have a point about AMC's numbers prior to airing Mad Men. What were they getting previously?

 

[TMC1982]

I'd rank The CW cancelling Smackdown! pretty high.

And apparently Ostroff is on the fence about Smallville despite great numbers for a Friday. If Smallville gets cancelled this season then that belongs on the list as well.

I'm willing to bet that Dawn Ostroff had Smallville moved to Friday nights, to give it a better excluse to cancel it. She also did that with Everybody Hates Chris and SmackDown! back when she was still overseeing UPN.

NBC canceling the original Star Trek should be on the list if them canceling Baywatch and JAG are going to be there. Star Trek I believe, was the highest rated (or one of the highest) shows in the 18-34 demographic. Unfortunately, at the time, the Nielsens only collected their data in terms of total amount of viewers.

The reality version of Fame deserves to be on this list too. It wasn't Fame by any stretch, just another American Idol knock-off with a familiar name affixed to it.

I heard that the dude who won it, Harlemm Lee (I think that's his name) lied about his age (he was already well into his 30s).

The whole eighth season of Dallas (which turned out to be a bad dream that Victoria Principal had) should be on the list. It was a cheap and insulting excuse to bring Patrick Duffy (who supposedly, got killed off at the end of the prior season) back. Knots Landing, the sister show to Dallas from that point forward, separated all ties with Dallas (in the Knots Landing universe, Bobby Ewing was still dead). I think this is what inspired the series finale of Newhart, in which the whole series was revealed to be a dream of Bob Newhart's character on The Bob Newhart Show.

Any show that tries to continue after the real life death of the lead actor (e.g. Chico and the Man with Freddie Prinze, Sr., Petticoat Junction with Bea Benaderet, The Royal Family with Redd Foxx, 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter with John Ritter, etc.) should also be on the list.

Many people didn't; including longtime fans of Lucille Ball.

It wasn't a bad idea, it was poorly executed. Also, I'd be highly surprised if you've seen it, as it hasn't aired once after its cancellation and will never be on DVD.

Life with Lucy I think failed in large part, because ABC gave Lucille Ball just about full creative control. Unfortunately, Lucy was unable to change with the times. She tried to do I Love Lucy and her subsequent shows in a 1980s setting. Lucy was well into her 70s at the time. And there was a concern that she would break her hip eventually from doing all of that physical comedy.

 

[DisneyBoy]

Any show that tries to continue after the real life death of the lead actor (e.g. Chico and the Man with Freddie Prinze, Sr., Petticoat Junction with Bea Benaderet, The Royal Family with Redd Foxx, 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter with John Ritter, etc.) should also be on the list.

Does Newsradio count? What about Suddenly Susan? In both, supporting characters died off-screen.

 

[MegaJ]

This list is silly for the most part. I mean, adding The Beautiful Life (a show no one has heard of) and Emily's Reasons Why Not (a show any barely remembers, not even as a colossal flop?)

I would probably say the biggest TV Blunder is probably The WB-UPN merger resulting in the CW as it's still floundering about and at the beginning they canceled a lot of great shows and ditched the only thing working on their network, Smackdown.

 

[ToonFaithful]

Taking Smackdown off The CW is one of them.

 

[TMC1982]

This list is silly for the most part. I mean, adding The Beautiful Life (a show no one has heard of) and Emily's Reasons Why Not (a show any barely remembers, not even as a colossal flop?)

I would probably say the biggest TV Blunder is probably The WB-UPN merger resulting in the CW as it's still floundering about and at the beginning they canceled a lot of great shows and ditched the only thing working on their network, Smackdown.

If anything, the WB-UPN merger is a much bigger blunder/bomb (due to shear incompetance/lack of foresight) than MyNetwork TV, which had nothing to work with from the start. The CW is floundering right now in large part due to their small minded thinking of running a broadcast network like it's a niche cable channel.

As for Emily's Reasons Why Not, any show that gets canceled after only one episode should be by default, be on this list.

I've noticed that the only sports mentions have been Dennis Miller on Monday Night Football and the XFL. I have some additional suggestions:
*Major League Baseball on CBS (1990-1993) - CBS pays at least $1 billion to show a half hearted, sporadic regular season schedule (in the process, destroying the institution known as the Game of the Week, when it aired on NBC previously), only to wind up losing $500 million at the end of the day.

*The Baseball Network (1994-1995) - Probably the only good thing to come out of the strike was the termination of this insipid joint venture between Major League Baseball, ABC and NBC. The most offensive part of all was the fact that playoff games prior to the World Series, were not nationally televised.

*The National Hockey League on SportsChannel America (1988-1992) - The NHL went from being on ESPN, which was at the time, available in at least, 80 million homes, to SportsChannel America, which was available in maybe, at least 40 million less. Oh and plus, the NHL still didn't have a national over-the-air contract in the United States (outside of the All-Star Game being on NBC).

*The NBA on ABC (2002-present) - Where do I start? Well, in less than five-seven years, ABC (and ESPN while we're at it) has gone through numerous lead play-by-play men (Brad Nessler, Al Michaels, and now Mike Breen), lead color commentators (Bill Walton and Tom Tolbert, Doc Rivers, Hubie Brown, and now Mark Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy), studio hosts (Mike Tirico, Dan Patrick, and now Stuart Scott), graphic and music packages, etc. The nadir had to be when ABC had the Pussycat Dolls intro their otherwise miniscule regular season telecasts (boy, I miss John Tesh's "Roundball Rock" on NBC and the CGI Boston Garden on CBS even more). Not to mention, that ABC's NBA Finals ratings have been some of the lowest in history (even worse than the tape-delayed days on CBS back in the late '70s-early -80s).

*Lisa Guererro, Erik Dickerson, O.J. Simpson and Tony Kornheiser on Monday Night Football. To me, that's far worse or more offensive than Dennis Miller being there. At least with Miller (although, it was a failed gimmick at the end of the day), pretty much got what you paid for.

*"Cute" Fox Sports mascots like Scooter the talking baseball and Digger the gopher.

*Bryant Gumbel on NFL play-by-play. Leave the play-by-play to your brother, Greg.

*The 1992 Olympic Triplecast