Examples of Condemned by History in Live-Action TV
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Genres
- The Jiggle Show. Starting in The '70s, there was a surge in the popularity of shows like Three's Company, Charlie's Angels, and to a lesser extent, the Wonder Woman (1975) series and The Dukes of Hazzard. They were long on beautiful actresses who didn't wear bras, but generally seen as a bit short on plot. Even at the time, they were seen as Guilty Pleasures. There were jokes that their fanbases were made up mostly of sexually-frustrated men who would be willing to sit through thirty minutes of flimsy dialogue for the chance to see Suzanne Somers in a bikini or Farrah Fawcett chase a bad guy while wearing a tight sweater. A glut of bad shows and a backlash against the decade's overt sexuality in the early '80s buried the genre.
The genre received a second wind in The '90s with Baywatch and its assorted copycats. During the 2000s, it was frequently joked that every show on the Fox network that wasn't 24, American Idol, House, M.D., Bones, Fox News Sunday, a Gordon Ramsay show or an animated sitcom was pure T&A. However, this second boom coincided with the rise of easily-accessible pornography on the internet, the presence of provocative content (including instances of nudity) on premium cable, and more liberal views towards sexual matters in general. As a result, shows that once expected to coast solely on the beauty of their female players were increasingly forced to budge to vulgarity. This was best demonstrated in 2011, when The Playboy Club and a revival of Charlie's Angels both got quickly canned after only a few poorly-rated episodes and scathing reviews.
The 2010s would see the genre further shunned for what some considered sexism, amid changing views on sexuality and the #MeToo movement during the latter years of the decade. Most network dramas began featuring sex scenes on a regular basis at the same time, even outside the 10 p.m. Eastern "watershed". But these are not squarely aimed at a male audience, being more often than not made with female audiences in mind instead, or a unisex audience at least. And these sex scenes are more stylized than raunchy and thus are rarely promoted as a show's main selling point. Today, the era of "jiggle television" is remembered as fairly quaint and embarrassing, a relic of the days when television had just learned it could start pushing boundaries, not yet realizing what to do with its newfound freedom. - A descendant of Vaudeville, the Variety Show was one of the most successful TV genres from the 1950s to the early 1970s. With shows like The Carol Burnett Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Muppet Show, and Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, many viewers flocked to see these performances of comedy, music, drama, and more.
Unfortunately, by the mid-to-late 1970s and going into the 1980s, the format began to fall out of favor, with younger audiences, jaded by Vietnam and Watergate, finding it obnoxious and corny, not helped by the fact the format became increasingly associated with cheap summer filler as the decade wore on. Meanwhile, the rise of edgier Sketch Comedy series such as Saturday Night Live and cable networks such as MTV and HBO provided alternatives to see stand-up comedy, music, and other acts. At the same time, more American households had more than one TV set, and alternative programming options abounded on independent stations, cable, and home video. These developments made the premise of "something for everybody" in one show obsolete.
This all culminated in the failure of Pink Lady and Jeff in 1980, which effectively killed off the variety show format. Nowadays, while variety shows still persist in Europe and East Asia, in the Americas, the format is firmly dead in the water, with the closest to a variety show to exist now being Saturday Night Live and other late-night Sketch Comedy shows. Meanwhile, most other variety shows that exist are either one-offs or failed revivals.
Creators
- Within his lifetime, British television personality Jimmy Savile was one of the most beloved figures in the United Kingdom thanks to his charismatically quirky personality, his constant charity work, and his altruism towards children. When he died in 2011, he was given a funeral fit for royalty, complete with a burial in a prominent scenic spot ("Savile's View") renamed for him. However, many people suspected for decades that beneath the surface, he was not as wholesome as everyone believed; and a year later in 2012, ITV aired a documentary which exposed how Savile used his positions to sexually abuse hundreds of minors — as well as the disabled and the dead during his work at hospitals — over the course of half a century. The documentary caused a rapid turnaround in Savile's reputation, with accusations of constantly keeping Savile's most heinous actions under the rug forcing the UK to quickly take extreme measures to Unperson him as a part of damage control; right down to pulling or recutting TV series segments where he appeared or was referenced in, and demolishing his massive granite headstone. Today, Savile is known near-exclusively for his widespread child predation, and any mention of him is bound to elicit pained responses from the British public; with almost everyone looking back on his career in terms of how he used it and his connections to target his victims in plain sight without repercussion.
Series
- ITV's 3-2-1 was a game show, quiz, and variety show all in one which was immensely popular during The '80s, with no season ever dipping below 12 million viewers (which is a huge number in the UK, especially for the time). Nowadays, it's been consigned to the Dusty Bin of history as modern viewers lambast it for relatively ropey production values (especially during the physical game section), runtime overly padded by the variety acts that were supposed to provide hints, and the ludicrously cryptic and circular final round clues. (There's even suggestions these days that the puzzles were deliberately obscure so as to have multiple "correct" solutions, so the producers could avoid giving out prizes even if the contestants chose the "right" one.) By 2006, both the Radio Times and the Penguin TV Companion had retrospectively named it as one of the worst shows in British TV history.
- Father Knows Best was hugely popular in The '50s, running for six seasons and reran for years afterwards. In the 1960s and 1970s, when the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Women's Liberation movement came to re-define the American landscape, Father Knows Best and its idealized middle-class nuclear family, came off as antiquated. Today, it has become infamous as a symbol of '50s conservatism at its most cornball. Similar shows from its era, such as Leave It to Beaver, The Donna Reed Show, and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis have similar "rose-tinted" reputations, but they do not attract the same level of disdain (even if the latter has fallen into relative obscurity), probably because they don't have associations with rigid, outdated conservatism right there in the title.
- Jurassic Fight Club was moderately popular when it debuted in 2008, as far as dinosaur documentaries go. But following the growing number of paleontology enthusiasts voicing their opinions online, resulting in increased awareness of paleontological media such as this series and Monsters Resurrectednote misusing the genre for the sake of sensationalist content with an emphasis on gratuitous violence (known as "Awesomebro" in the community) instead of actually educating people about prehistoric wildlife and further perpetuating the Prehistoric Monster stereotype, as well as its lax attitude towards scientific accuracy (such as being a major offender of many Raptor Attack cliches), Jurassic Fight Club became scorned, with many people who watched it and enjoyed it as kids being very critical of it once they grew older.
- Little Britain was a hit in the Turn of the Millennium for its topical satire of British everyday life, colorful catchphrase-driven characters, lowbrow shock humor and narration by Tom Baker. It was so popular that a live tour combining new bits with re-enacted sketches was a success as well.
However, keeping up its momentum was tough: by Series 3, the established characters and running gags had worn themselves to the ground, the new characters only had shock value going for them, and the show was extremely overexposed. As a result, audiences became sick of it just in time for the success of The Office (UK), and Series 4 (co-produced with HBO) was the last before its cancellation. Ever since then, the series has aged poorly: its humor included constant uses of ethnically and sexually offensive stereotypes, which were already controversial back then and are now considered embarrassing. The BBC removed it from circulation over its persistent use of blackface after the death of George Floyd; while it was re-released with heavy edits later that year, it's hard to imagine anyone was happy to see it back.
The series' creators, David Walliams and Matt Lucas, clearly regret the series and have since found success in different mediums (Walliams as a comedian and children's author, and Lucas as an actor in films like Bridesmaids and Paddington (2014)). Walliams' 2016 series Walliams and Friend included a scathing parody which implies Little Britain was made by stealing unused Harry Enfield and Chums sketches; Lucas outright called it "rather insensitive"
and apologized for the content. - In The '90s, older Christian viewers made Touched by an Angel a Top 10 show at the height of its run. Despite never being a critical favorite and regarded as glurge at its worst, it often outdrew The Simpsons in its Sunday night time slot, it launched a Spin-Off in Promised Land that lasted three seasons, it earned eleven Emmy Award nominations, and reruns of the show were central to the fledgling PAX network's lineup. However, when its time slot was switched to Saturday nights for its final two seasons, ratings plunged, and the show's fandom evaporated. The show remains in circulation, but it is mostly seen as an overly sentimental, glurge-friendly joke, too sugary for non-devout audiences but too liberal for politically hard-right, evangelical Christians who now have plenty of entertainment aimed specifically at them. The participation of Bill Cosby (who guest-starred in two episodes) didn't help its long-term legacy either.
- Throughout the Turn of the Millennium, X-Play with Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb was a Cult Classic with a devoted fanbase. Starting as the most popular show on Tech TV and being one of few shows to survive the channel's merger with G4TV, the combination video game review show and Sketch Comedy program mixed insightful commentary on the latest games with snarky, nerdy humor. When the program was cancelled in 2013 as G4 was winding down operations, many missed it, and when Comcast briefly brought the channel back they made a brand new version of the show one of their selling points.
However, as time went on, the show began to pale in comparison to the newer crop of video game reviewers on the Internet who also mixed comedy with game reviews, making X-Play and its style of reviewing seem like it was overly-nitpicky and too focused on trying to piss off people who liked certain types of game than actually telling people if a game is good or not. Not only that, but a lot of the jokes aged extremely poorly. Aside from the typical jokes that sexualized women and mocked the disabled, when reviewing games made in Japan (especially RPGs and games based off anime and manga), Sessler and Webb would make extremely racist jokes about Japanese people, with Webb at one point saying "I fear for the day that the zany bean curd loving race finally rules over us" and saying that the Hiroshima bombings was "when they finally became civilized". One sketch even had an intern in Yellowface to play a Japanese person: something that was considered wrong even then. In early 2023, after Square Enix producer Naoki Yoshida commented that he felt uncomfortable with the term "JRPG" and the way Western critics treated the genre, Twitter users pointed to these moments as examples of what Yoshida was talking about...and Sessler's attempt at deflection (where he called Japanese games "consumer boner simulators" and blamed the backlash on gamer culture and the alt-right) only tarnished his reputation even further, with other gaming journalists condemning him. Sessler blaming his fall from grace on "gamer culture" has been noted as ironic, because it seems that most people bring up X-Play as an example of everything that was wrong with gamer culture in the 2000's: at best, it tried too hard to come off as cool, and at worst it was downright racist.
Episodes
- Doctor Who:
- "The Celestial Toymaker" (from 1966) was once regarded as one of the lost greats of the William Hartnell era, largely because the 1983 book Doctor Who: A Celebration gave it a positive review. After the sole surviving episode and the audio from the first three episodes became more widely available, fans were able to see it was actually a rather dull story with tons of long, boring Padding and featured Michael Gough done up like a Chinese Mandarin (presumably to make the villain more exotic and inscrutable). It's now often considered to be one of Hartnell's worst stories, and is also infamous for being the story where a side character, played by a white actor, casually dropped the n-word.
- "The Tomb of the Cybermen" (1967) was widely regarded as a classic when it was only survived by its audio and a few telesnaps. Its rediscovery in 1991 disillusioned fans at large when it revealed the story's poor pacing, troubling plot logic, inconsistent props, cheap sets, and writing of Toberman, a black man stereotyped as a brutish, mostly mute slave.
- When "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" first aired in 1977, the story became a fan favorite due to Tom Baker's outstanding performance, memorable antagonist, Leela's development under the Doctor's tutelage, well-layered plotline, and engaging supporting cast, all written by Robert Holmes. Nowadays, although "Talons" is still lauded for those qualities, it's just as acknowledged for its highly racially insensitive content: when fans aren't cringing over the Yellow Peril plot, yellowface casting, and casual racial slurs in the dialogue, they're avoiding flame wars over all of that. Even outside fandom, the story's objectionable content daunted it from the beginning, with some international broadcasters refusing to air it even at the peak of the Fourth Doctor's extreme popularity.
- Part One of "Time-Flight" was the most-watched episode of John Nathan-Turner's entire tenure, and the last time the series would have more than ten million viewers until "Rose". In the Doctor Who Magazine end-of-year poll this story ranked fourth, ahead of both "Castrovalva" and "Kinda", both now considered all-time classics. But by the 90s and into the 00s, it was regularly voted as one of the five worst serials in the series. In more recent years, critical opinion has softened somewhat, appreciating it for the sort of mad premise only Doctor Who could do - Concorde getting stuck in the Jurassic because of aliens - while criticizing the flat direction, dodgy effects and the Master's "Kalid" disguise, which is both racist and utterly pointless.
- Star Trek: The Original Series: The episode "The Paradise Syndrome" was seen as a rare bright spot in the mostly disappointing Season 3 for a couple of decades after it aired, due in large part to Kirk, Spock and McCoy having interesting character beats and Miramanee's strong chemistry with Kirk. Unfortunately, time has not been kind to it, and as societal mores shifted, the inhabitants of Amerind being a gaggle of on-the-nose Native American stereotypes played painfully straight was viewed in an increasingly negative light, especially since Miramanee was played by a white actress in brownface. Other aspects of the episode have come under increasing criticism, such as Miramanee's intelligence and personality fluctuating depending on the needs of the plot, a clumsily-handled two-month Time Skip, and the episode's slow pace undermining the intended tension of Spock needing to make the right command decisions quickly. While it's generally not seen as particularly bad by third season standards, it's nevertheless now considered yet another bad episode in a season full of them, and an embarrassing relic of a less enlightened era to boot. These days, perhaps the only aspect of this episode that remains popular are the mysterious Preservers.
