Really Bad TV

So you’re lying on the couch watching TV, flipping through the channels and all you can find are boring, stupid shows. So you put on your rose colored glasses (you know…the ones that make the past look so much better than it really was) and you say to yourself: “TV shows were much better back when I was a kid!” Well, I hate to burst your bubble but …no, they weren’t. Television has been plagued with really bad shows almost from the time it was invented back in the dark ages of radio.

Several years ago I bought a book called Bad TV, The Very Best of the Very Worst. I take it off the shelf and thumb through it every once and a while just to remind myself what it was really like back before Al Gore invented the Internet. The sad thing is I used to watch a lot of these shows and I LIKED THEM!! I don’t agree with a lot of the shows the author thought was bad. For example The Andy Griffith Show, Gomer Pyle, and The Beverly Hillbillies are listed in the book but everybody knows those shows are shining examples of television at its finest. However, some of these shows are really out there and it makes me wonder what people were smoking when they came up with them. The book lists shows from the 1950's through the 1990's including variety shows, music videos, game shows, dramas, kid's shows, made for TV movies, sitcoms and infomercials. Here are some examples:

My Mother The Car, 1965-1966 starring Jerry Van Dyke. A comedy (?) about a man who finds an antique car in his garage and can hear his dead mother’s voice coming from it continuing the guilt trip she put him on before she died. There are lots of Jewish mother clichés and in one episode she gets drunk on antifreeze. This must have been before schizophrenia was discovered. The show only lasted 2 seasons.

The Ugliest Girl in Town, 1968. An amateur crossdressing man gets a job as a female model in England so he can be with his girl friend. Probably inspired by the movie Some Like It Hot. The only good thing about this show was the theme song which was sung by the Wall-o-Bees and if you ever listen to it, it will get stuck in your head for a long time, so you have been warned! Tom Hanks had a TV show in 1980 called Bosom Buddies which was also about men posing as women but it was a little funnier.

Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, 1975. Not to be confused with NBC’s Saturday Night Live, this was an ABC variety hour which paired the gruff, cynical Cosell with guests like Siegfried and Roy, the Bay City Rollers, Charo, John Wayne, Barbara Walters (singing) and Shamu the killer whale. Did ABC think America would fall in love with Cosell if he were taken out of his usual role as a sportscaster? Didn’t work. Everybody still hated Cosell.

Mary, 1978. Mary Tyler Moore tried to make a comeback in a variety hour accompanied by Dick Shawn, Michael Keaton and David Letterman. Out of 16 shows produced, only 3 were aired. CBS flushed away $5 million for this fiasco.

Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, 1970. This was a Saturday morning cross between The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and The Monkees only with real chimpanzees. The chimps were spies for A.P.E. (Agency to Prevent Evil) and they also had a band called The Evolution Revolution. They wore crazy wigs and hippy clothes and had names like Mata Hairi and Commander Darwin. How could that not be funny! Lasted for 17 episodes.

So the next time you get tired of watching Jersey Shore or The Real Housewives of Orange County, go to YouTube where you'll find a lot of these shows (or at least parts of them) still bouncing around cyberspace for your enjoyment and astonishment thanks to Al Gore.