Periphery Hatedom / Live-Action TV

• Barney & Friends, to the point where this trope used to be called "The Barney". The show was an edutainment program which aired from 1992 to 2010, marketed for and explicitly aimed at very young American children (ages 2-6). And yet, both the character and his show received a surprising level of vitriol from the public at large.
  • Barney himself is notable for the amount of sheer vitriol leveled against him for his crime of being big, cloying, purple, doofy, and not a carnivore, among many other reasons. A surprisingly large number of the most extreme Barney-haters are not parents and don't have toddler-age siblings, and therefore could avoid him simply by not watching the show. The Other Wiki even has its own page dedicated to all of the Barney hate, which is roughly as long as the same site's page on just the show itself. However, the hate against Barney has died down over the years, mainly due to the TV series fading from relevance and ultimately being cancelled in 2010 (in October 2015, it was announced that the series would be relaunched in 2017, but it didn't come to pass; an animated reboot is planned for 2024). In addition, the show's original viewers, who generally view the series in a more positive light, have grown up.
  • Barney hate is referenced in Jurassic Park III: one character manages to get a phone call in to an old friend's house to call for help, but unfortunately her infant son picks up the phone and forgets all about it as a Barney video plays on TV.
  • When Harry Hill was on Room 101, he chose Barney as one of his things to put in Room 101, not just because he finds him annoying, but because he's anatomically incorrect. He'd rather his kids were entertained by a real dinosaur.
    Harry: It's not even realistic...
  • The music video for "Jurassic Park" featured a scene with Barney getting his head bitten off by an even larger dinosaur. It later gets coughed back up. When this video is played during his concerts, that particular scene is met with roaring applause and cheer by the audience. Weird Al has taken jabs at the purple dinosaur in several other of his music videos, too. For example, the animated music video "I'll Sue Ya!" featured a familiarly colored toy dinosaur chewing on someone's mutilated arm in one scene.
  • The song "Barney's on Fire" by Tony Mason is all about this, to the point that even the audience delight in the gristly spectacle and actively refuse to help, even though they're aware there's a perfectly normal actor in that suit who is dying horribly. Comedic Sociopathy taken to a horrifying level.
  • Dilbert's Pointy-Haired Boss and Homer Simpson both unironically enjoyed Barney, the joke being that they were stupid enough to like the show.
  • Dinosaurs took a shot at Barney twice. The first time with a TV show call "Blarney", which Baby Sinclair hated so much he destroyed the TV. The second instance was a character called "Georgie", who was so reviled by in-universe parents that they formed a resistance movement dedicated to taking him down. Earl eventually punches him out saying "This is for all you parents at home!" directly to the camera, and is awarded the key to the city by a grateful Mayor.
  • The special Hey, Hey, Hey, It's The Monkees, also referenced Barney hate. During one part of the special, one of the band members pulls out a Barney puppet for some kids. When another member asks him about it, he puts the Barney puppet away and pulls out a Monkees puppet instead.
  • Lunar: Eternal Blue has a book in the library about killing Barney, to which Ruby says "Hallelujah it's about time somebody wrote this book".
  • Averted in Heaven Is for Real, where a firefighter says that a flight attendant he used to work with says she once thought she was talking to Barney.
  • The old Fighting Game Xenophage Alien Bloodsport had Dummied Out files for a familiar-looking dinosaur character named "Blarney". Using hacks, you could play as (or against) him, but his only attack is shooting hearts and he tends to glitch a lot.
  • Jane Austen's Mafia! ends with, as part of a series of murders to avenge the lead character's family, an eskimo assassin harpooning Barney (just because), before dancing to "We Are Family". The closing credits state a shrine was built in the assassin's honor, visited by millions of grateful parents for doing "the one deed to benefit all mankind."
  • The Critic's show-within-a-show Humphrey the Hippo is a blatant Barney expy who is hated by everyone, even the children in the audience. There's also a gag about Marlon Brando starring in a Barney movie and openly complaining about it while in-character.
  • Comet Busters!, a Windows 3.1 Asteroids clone that got popular for its multiplayer, uses Barney heads for the rocks in level 8.
  • The DOS indie game Purple Dinosaur Massacre is a Barney shooting gallery.
  • Then there's Martin Pistorius, who has an admittedly better reason to hate the purple dinosaur than most people, having been forced to watch Barney reruns for over a decade while being unable to do anything else due to his locked-in syndrome. He hated it so much that he used the time he was forced to watch reruns of the show to regain partial movement of his limbs out of sheer spite.
  • In the Institute for Mercenary Profiling quiz for creating a character in Jagged Alliance 2, one of the questions is "A certain, annoying, pathetic, furry, purple dinosaur should be: ". The answers to this question include "Held up as a loving role model for children's morals and values", "Hung from a tree", "Hung from a tree and shot", and "Hung from a tree, shot, gutted, and run over by a Buick".
  • Beavis and Butt-Head got in on the Barney-bashing with its ambulatory stuffed dinosaur whose gloves get set on fire while taking a cake out of the oven.
  • There was an obscure comic book miniseries called Kill Barny from the nineties, where obvious expies of Beavis and Butt-Head brutally murder Barney.
  • In the video game Generic Man, the Master of Evil, the main villain and Final Boss who wants to Take Over the World is revealed to be Barney.
  • While reviewing Barney's Great Adventure, The Nostalgia Critic sincerely tries to figure out just why Barney inspired such virulent hatred, and it ultimately boils down to a simple Armor-Piercing Question: can you imagine Barney playing any emotion other than happy? He further details out how tons of other children's media like Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and Sesame Street have covered sad topics like death, murder, and loss, or had its protagonists experience emotions like anger, trauma, and grief, while still holding onto the essence of those characters and teaching something profound. Barney's Perpetual Smiler design and personality prevents him from doing that, however, hence why he doesn't hold up as well as other media for young children.
  • The SCP Foundation has SCP-6690, an entire SCP based on anti-Barney hatred where Sesame Street Muppets use the usual Barney-killing playground songs to brainwash young children into viciously attacking suit actors who play Barney, their competition.
  • There was even "Barney Carnage," a video game developed for Macintosh computers in the mid-90s dedicated to killing as many Barney clones as possible. Playthrough can be found here.
  • I Love You, You Hate Me is a docu-series examining the Barney hatedom, and tells about how they did things such as send death threats to the crew and bully the cast members in school, just for being associated with Barney.
  • Hell, look at the Fan Works page. It's full of Take Thats and Hate Fics towards the show.
• El Chavo del ocho and other series by Chespirito have gained some detractors that consider that the series glorifies violence, contains trite and repetitive humor, and paints Mexico in a bad light.
• Here's Humphrey: Humphrey B. Bear can be viewed as the Australian Barney, due to the way he is hated by many pre-teens in his homeland for his goofy antics, as well as having a human co-host that talks down to the viewers. Like pre-teens from other developed countries, Australian pre-teens don't like being talked down to either, and like pre-teens from other developed countries, the pre-teen boys naturally dislike being around girls. However, Humphrey invokes the Nostalgia Filter sooner — most Australians tend to remember him more favorably by the time they reach their late teens. Barney Hatedom usually doesn't fade and get replaced by Nostalgia Filter until the former viewer-cum-hater has started a family, which by time he/she will be in the late 20s or early 30s (and sometimes, it doesn't even leave). The fact that Humphrey's co-host is usually a hot chick (albeit one that talks down to kids) probably helps.
• Play School: Like Barney, "Play School" of Australia is hated by many pre-teens in its homeland, the UK, and New Zealand for the presenters having no emotion other than happy and talking down to the viewers. The show also taught Australian kids to cheat, steal, only eat junk food, and catch stinging insects (with no punishment or scolding).
• Teletubbies: If Barney is the king of this trope, then the Teletubbies are worthy company for him. While it has the usual Periphery Hatedom, some concerned parents made waves when it was thought that the nonsense speech of the main characters might be hurting the verbal development of its target audience at a time when their babbling starts to cohere into words and basic sentences. There's also the argument that any television program is bad for a target audience at a developmental period where they're mainly learning how to move. It's possible to believe that the people actually making the show did their best with the content and still think the primary intent and effect of the show's existence was to increase the exposure of infants to TV commercials and brand logos (a frankly bizarre claim given that it was first made by and shown on The BBC and got exposure in America on PBS, both of which have no adverts).
  • There was also a backlash from Moral Guardians, particularly in the United States and Poland, that Teletubbies were trying to promote a homosexual agenda because Tinky-Winky had a purple triangle on his head and carried a handbag (which the creators referred to as a "magic bag").
• The Lawrence Welk Show, in the 1970s and since. It was enormously popular when it was new, in the '50s, but by the time it had lasted 20 years, the number of people in the periphery demographics far outnumbered the people for whom it was originally intended. Even in The '50s, comedians like Sid Caesar and Allan Sherman mocked it as a sickeningly sweet reactionary fantasy. The show fervently denied anything remotely dark or risqué^note Making even more Hilarious in Hindsight this! even if it fit with the standards of the time. The over-done art direction and eerily persistent grins even seemed eerily inhuman to some people. It also featured many regional acts tailored to please Vaudeville and State Fair audiences. Broad, diverse TV audiences probably felt some stylistic Values Dissonance. If you want an idea of how behind-the-times The Lawrence Welk Show was even in its day, consider the episode that had a tribute to America's ethnic diversity. The most exotic ethnic group featured were...the Italians. Even by the 1970s, Welk was still shown to be out of touch with the times, an infamous example being introducing Brewer and Shipley's 1971 hit "One Toke Over the Line" as a "modern spiritual" (when in fact it was a mock spiritual, and then vice-president Spiro Agnew claimed it was subversive). Although some contemporary songs slowly found their way onto the show – for instance, one 1975 episode had cast members singing covers of Captain & Tennille's "Love Will Keep Us Together" and Morris Albert's "Feelings," while another featured Three Dog Night's "An Old-Fashioned Love Song" – the show still relied heavily on pre-1955 (namely, big band, patriotic, sacred and pop standards) for its songs. Even as late as the mid-1970s, there were many households that had one television set, meaning if the parents liked it, the children – especially teenagers, who winced at the mere mention of music they considered "square," "unlistenable" and outdated – had little choice but to either watch, go to a friend's house or do something else. Ironically for a show derided almost from the outset as hopelessly dated and old-fashioned, episodes and reruns have continued to appear more-or-less nonstop on television for over sixty years now, somehow managing to outlast countless hipper programs with much younger audiences.
• Sesame Street:
  • Elmo became less than popular to a large number of the show's longtime fans, mainly because the show's focus somehow shifted onto him and less on the rest of the Muppets and characters, and because of his immense popularity from the mid-1990s to the 2000s. Made worse by Sesame Workshop deciding to assign a fifteen-minute segment of Sesame Street to the segment Elmo's World, and giving the segment an ending song set to a traditional song ("Jingle Bells"), like fellow children's show Barney & Friends.^note Half an hour in certain markets, made possible by airing two episodes back to back. Said network also tend to butcher Sesame Street so that it runs for only a half hour to allow the two episodes of Elmo's World to run back to back, leading the less-informed to think that Sesame Workshop did shorten the show to allow more time for Elmo's World. Much of the intended demographic loved it, however.
  • Averted with Elmo: The Musical due to it actually being entertaining and having cameos by Muppet puppets that haven't appeared on the show since the '90s. The 30th anniversary special Elmopalooza is also an aversion due to having plenty of adult appeal and musical artists and celebrities as guest stars.
  • Children who have just outgrown Sesame Street have been known to hate the show and equate it to Barney, due to their being too young to understand the show's honest efforts to educate children and keep their parents amused — and Sesame Street predates Barney and Friends by about a quarter of a century.
  • A few adults also feel this way towards Sesame Street — not because of any lack of quality, but because it has an active, loving adult/teen fanbase that rarely has anything bad to say about the show, and viral segments from the show tend to be universally praised. This can baffle people who don't really see the appeal in a show that is (and always will be) an educational program for very young children.
  • Showing that history can indeed repeat itself, Abby is currently getting the same treatment as Elmo, mainly from the generation of young adults and teens that grew up watching and fell in love with Elmo. Abby's popularity with the older fanbase is a Broken Base—some find her a refreshing change from the two decades of Elmo (although how long this will last before they start getting annoyed by her remains a question), while others still don't care and still want the focus to be back on Big Bird and the Muppets (and human characters) of their time. The root cause of the hatedom here is The Generation Gap combined with a Nostalgia Filter, combined with a heaping dose of They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.
  • During the mid-2000s, there was a Lighter and Softer spinoff called Play With Me Sesame with a minimal cast of just Bert, Ernie, Grover, and Prairie Dawn, that took the educational and Fake Interactivity elements and ran with them, featuring absolutely no appeal to older audiences. This series, unlike Elmo's World, didn't attract the usual 3 - 6 demographic, and instead had a fanbase of infants and toddlers aged 0 to 2 years.
• Sex and the City: Many men, and women outside the target demographic, see the characters as shallow and overly consumerist and far too prone to inane chatter, or as horrifyingly whiny, self-obsessed, and irresponsible. When the series left the scene, most of its old hatedom started being focused on Girls. Creator Lena Dunham gets most of the flack.
• The Spear Counterpart to Sex and the City, Entourage, gets many similar complaints, still mostly from those outside the target demographic.
• Dino Dan, mostly from the school of thought of "that kid needs help" (a hearty serving of Ham and Cheese sandwiches doesn't help, either). It also doesn't help that it's an alleged educational show about dinosaurs that still takes frequent liberties.
• Curb Your Enthusiasm was billed from the start as being very Jewish, and as a consequence, did not get nearly as many fans as Seinfeld.
• In Mexico, telenovelas are still hugely popular among their target audiences (although certainly they are not the only ones who watch them), but other demographics such as intellectuals and working women tend not only to hate the shows, but also to be condescending with the fans, mainly because they find the telenovelas as dull, lowbrow and unoriginal entertainment (most novelas these days are either adaptations of works from other countries such as Argentina, Venezuela or Brazil, or remakes — known in Mexico as refritos — of novelas from past decades, some that are not even 10 years old). It also doesn't help that watching telenovelas has become a stereotype of Mexicans. Interestingly, only Mexican telenovelas seem to elicit this reaction, works produced in other countries such as Brazil, Colombia, the United States (those produced by Telemundo) or Europe are either ignored or actually enjoyed and praised by some people in the aforementioned demographics. This attitude is also present in other Latin American countries, with local output being bashed while foreign output is lauded, and has actually made impact ratings-wise, with foreign novelas sometimes getting better ratings than local ones.
  • The Soap Opera genre gets much of the same treatment in the United States, though it's decidedly less popular (there are only four daytime soaps left on American TV). In general, the perception is that they're an ancient relic, only watched by your aunt or grandma, who are obsessed with their favorite soap to an unhealthy degree, and the shows have a Kudzu Plot heavy on contrived plot twists like Easy Amnesia.
• Kid President: Declaration of Awesome; if you went on The Hub's Facebook page you'd see that half of the comments on posts about it were viewers who genuinely liked the main character. The other half were people decrying it as a rip-off of Cory in the House (though that show simply had the main character living with the president rather than being the president) and people betting that it would be a Short Runner...which, after The Hub was changed to Discovery Family, became true.
• Two of the biggest, longest running sitcoms ever on Belgian television, which are called Thuis and Familie, suffer heavily from this. There is a die-hard and big fan base for both series, but plenty of people have heard of both series because of how long they have aired on their respective channels and absolutely loath both shows, decrying that the series ruin Belgian television. The fact that ''Thuis'' and ''Familie'' both have very low ratings on IMDb (the latter having an even lower score than some shows in the Live-Action TV entry in So Bad, It's Horrible ) despite having very active forums full of fans speaking about the new things that are happening in the show is a testament to this.
• Anything from syndicator Litton Entertainment will inevitably get this, regardless of what they put out (Jack Hanna being an occasional exception due to nostalgia), mainly for holding what's seen as a monopoly on Saturday morning kids' fare, replacing the once-popular Saturday-Morning Cartoon with unscripted nature documentaries, cooking shows, and lifestyle shows, all genres by and large considered boring and uninteresting by most younger people, including the intended target audience of teenagers. Not helping matters is that many of the shows have the same blatant commercialization that led to the rise of the E/I rules they play to in the first place, except for teenage audiences, making the blatant sponsorships and longer commercial breaks perfectly acceptable by the FCC's standards. It was especially painful for fans of the late Vortexx^note The last traditional Saturday morning cartoon block and NBC Kids^note Beside being the last of the Big Five's blocks to air cartoons, it also carried programming from a network mostly exclusive to digital cable, and thus one that benefited from the extra exposure, whose time spaces were among those taken over by Litton, alongside ABC's Disney Channel reruns and CBS's Cookie Jar TV. Occasionally Steve Rotfeld Productions' Xploration Station block mostly seen of Fox stations gets lumped in, but isn't hated as much due to its STEM focus being seen as more interesting (plus it killed off a two-hour block of Infomercials so it was a much worthier replacement to both viewers and Fox affiliates).
• Okaasan to Issho gets this due to it being aimed towards preschoolers and infants. It, however, does have some viewers who fondly grew up with one of its past incarnations.
• The Noddy Shop was the bane of parents back when it premiered because of the puppets falling into Unintentional Uncanny Valley territory and due to the lack of merchandise based on the toys in the shop, who were the most popular characters among children. It also got this from fans of Noddy's Toyland Adventures because the segments used were split in half and most of the show focused on the new live action characters.
• Out of Jimmy's Head was on the receiving end of this, even before it released. The complaints were that it was extremely cheap, based on an already panned TV movie and to be Cartoon Network's shameful attempt at cashing in on Nickelodeon and Disney Channel's Kid Coms.
• Supergirl (2015) is hated by most detractors of feminism. They accuse the series of having "Social Justice Warrior" ideology and privileging female characters over male characters. Ironically the show has also gotten hate from "Social Justice Warrior"-types too, due to the questionable treatment of the non-white cast (African-American James Olsen being demoted from Love Interest in the first season to barely an Advertised Extra by the second, and casting a tanned-but-actually-white actress as someone coded Latina), the casting of far-right fundamentalist Kevin Sorbo, for whether it's actually good at its intended feminist messages (due to the main character being overshadowed by her Spotlight-Stealing Squad boyfriend in the second season, and its stance on certain topics that cause a Broken Base among different feminist groups), and ultimately the feeling the show is more performative than anything, merely trying to earn 'points' for being progressive without really doing anything progressive. A similar complaint is held towards its sister shows Arrow, The Flash (2014), and Legends of Tomorrow, which have similarly earned praise for diversity, but came under scrutiny for how they actually treat their 'diverse' audience.
• Shows like Duck Dynasty that have/had a high appeal to the white rural demographic are/were predictably hated by the cool urban hipster audiences that rarely deign to watch them much.
• The Vampire Diaries and The Originals spinoff Legacies is hated by fans of Supernatural for getting picked up over potential spin-off Wayward Sisters and taking its timeslot.
• Preschool series Boohbah has a sizable hatedom of teens and adults, likely due to it being considered surreal to the point of it making almost no sense at all, with some going so far as to say that children can't learn anything from it (its intended purpose is to get children to exercise, but we don't know how many children in the target audience knew this and actually bothered to do the exercises with the Boohbahs). That, and some consider it Nightmare Fuel, particularly in regards to the Boohbahs themselves, which are five odd-looking brightly-colored creatures that do nothing of note but exercise and make farting sounds.
• Jersey Shore was hated by all Italians, blacks, Cubans, anti-racist groups, Latinos, people living in the state of Jersey and feminists. The reason? The whole show (including possibly its creators from MTV) is racist towards the first three listed!
• The Bold Type has a massive hatedom among evangelicals because it airs on Freeform (formerly Pat Robertson's Family Network), it is easily one of the network's most overtly liberal and feminist shows, and the evangelicals see it as emblematic of the network's betrayal of Robertson's ideals.
• The 700 Club is universally despised by fans of almost every other show on Freeform, which are considered the antithesis to everything Pat Robertson stands for. The idea is that the continuing platforming of Robertson undercuts every progressive message their other shows are trying to promote. Fans do tend to take pride in the fact that network executives hate Robertson just as much as they do and have been trying to get rid of him for years.
• Many older fans of animated programming on Nickelodeon and Disney Channel have nothing but unbridled hatred for those networks' live-action content, at least starting in The New '10s. They are widely seen as generic, commercialized, and cringeworthy shows that promote bad life lessons to kids. Furthermore, fans of both networks feel that the mass production of these live action shows take away resources that could be used to produce more animated shows. Cartoon Network had a similar problem when the CN Real block was on; however, the network seems to have realized their mistakes and CN Real died a quick death shortly afterwards.
• Donkey Hodie is hated by fans of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood for being too rapid-paced compared to that series, because some people don't feel that it is educational enough and because some find the character of Duck Duck to be annoying because of her voice and because she repeats words. There's also a sizeable hatedom among GoAnimate users as well, who tend to make grounded videos out of the titular character.
• Barnas superjul got backlash from older viewers for lacking the Multiple Demographic Appeal of most kid-friendly julekalenders. Each episode consisted of several disjointed segments, most of which had little to do with Christmas (in contrast to how julekalenders usually tell one cohesive Christmas story or are Christmas-themed Slice of Life shows), and the show was infused with a childish energy that older viewers are prone to find taxing instead of fun. The fact that it took up NRK's julekalender time slot, which was previously occupied by old classics they had nostalgia for, only added fuel to the fire. This contributed to Barnas superjul being one of the few julekalenders NRK never reran after its initial airing (though it did see reruns on the kid-oriented sister channel NRK Super, and NRK's later attempts to create new julekalenders went over better).

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