We’ve all fallen victim to clickbait at some point in our lives, and surely you’ve put some thought into avoiding the shame of getting Rick-rolled, but you may not have considered that TV shows have been doing it to audiences for generations. Indeed, with the overwhelming quantity of shows out there, writers and producers have to do something to differentiate their shows from the rest, so why not pitch something so utterly insane that it has to get noticed? Here are some of the most truly irrational, bizarre ideas for shows that have ever (dis)graced the airwaves.
Kicking off this list with one of the worst TV shows of all time, ABC’s colossal swing-and-miss looked to capitalize on the success of the “beloved” series of Geico commercials about the titular Neanderthals. The great irony is that the tagline from those commercials, “So easy, a caveman could do it” could not be applied to the production of this disaster.
The ad campaign that gave rise to this abomination worked because there was no context and they were just commercials. We didn’t have to look at them for a half hour, nor did we have to consider the socio-scientific ramifications. The show portrays the cavemen as just another race, and the original pilot episode – which was never aired – even featured the use of the fictional racial slur, “magger.” It’s a good thing the show failed so spectacularly, as it otherwise may have set the precedent for other ad-based spinoffs. We don’t need “The Flo Show.”
While this list could be populated exclusively by Adult Swim shows, as the late-night programming on Cartoon Network is a hotbed of the strangest media you’ll ever find, this one really stands out. It’s more or less Scooby Doo but with boxing legend and face tattoo-haver Mike Tyson. He’s aided by a talking degenerate pigeon, because of course he is.
We move from a harmlessly absurdist show to one of the most offensive and tasteless TV shows of all time. This British show is exactly what it sounds like, sadly. It’s a sitcom about Adolf Hitler living next to a Jewish family. It was meant as a spoof of American sitcoms, but how could anyone have possibly thought this was a good idea? It got pulled off the air after just one episode, but how it even got that far is a mystery.
It’s entirely possible that this show only exists in the collective consciousness of straight teenage boys on hormone overdrive. It is a sex comedy told from the second-person perspective. “You” are the main character, as characters in the show address the camera directly as one single person, you.
While this could have been used in any number of clever fourth wall-breaking ways, it mostly just amounts to point-of-view softcore Comedy Central porn.
That’s right, SpongeBob. It was critical to include at least one massively successful show on this list to illustrate a point. When something has permeated culture the way SpongeBob has, we tend to just accept it for what it is. However, if you take a moment to really think about SpongeBob, none of it makes any sense and it’s a wonder it became the sensation that it did.
It’s a show about a business sponge, his best friend the vacuous starfish, a depressed squid and a capitalist crab, whose daughter is an actual whale, obviously. The sponge lives under a Pineapple because screw you, that’s why. They live at the bottom of the ocean yet drink water out of glasses and go swimming at the beach. It all sounds like the manifesto of someone who ate way too many mushrooms and proceeded to just stare at a fish tank for several hours. Perfect for Nickelodeon.
This Fox reality gameshow from 2005 only got one episode to air, because my God is it truly awful. The setup is that a woman who was given up for adoption at birth is tasked with choosing from an assortment of men who her real father is. One man truly was her birth father, while the rest were actors trying to convince her that they were her real dad.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the contestant would win a large sum of money if she chose correctly, but if she didn’t, the actor who successfully duped her would win the money. Not even Jerry Springer would stoop so low. The show seems to have been largely scrubbed from the internet except for the completely justified outrage articles and this YouTube clip.
Income inequality and transphobia aren’t laughing matters, and this sitcom manages to trivialize both. It’s about two men who have been laid off from their jobs and conclude that their path back to the work force is to pretend to be women in order to work at a pharmaceutical company.
While this premise is more straight-up offensive than it is bizarre, what makes it truly stupefying is the time of its release. Based on that description you may think it came out in the 80’s or 90’s, but you’d be dead wrong. This program somehow debuted on ABC in 2012. It did get cancelled after two episodes, but the fact that it ever made it that far is simply a failure on many levels.
When a show gets boycotted before it even airs a single episode, you know there’s a problem. This UPN sitcom from 1998 is about a black Englishman who comes to America to escape a gambling debt and winds up becoming Abraham Lincoln’s butler. The controversial pilot episode that never aired was reportedly a bumbling and racist trivialization of slavery in America.
The first episode that did air, however, was primarily a farce of the Clinton administration and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. While the show was likely not malicious in its intent, its complete lack of tact really makes you wonder how it ever got made in the first place.
What is it with reality shows that only set out to trick their contestants? This isn’t Punk’d. The whole setup is that it’s The Bachelor but with Prince Harry. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well of course it is, and Prince Harry is just being played by a look-alike. That’s it. That’s the whole show. It was cancelled after only four episodes.
Here are three words that should have never been put next to each in a sentence: “police procedural musical.” Solving crimes and singing don’t mix, a lesson this show from 1990 had to learn the hard way. The theme song was written by Randy Newman, yet not even he could save this mess. “You’ve got a friend in me” is something no one would ever say about this show.
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