The Game may seem a little out of place on this list, considering it enjoyed enough popularity to run for a full nine seasons. It earns its place here, though, due to the extreme hatred directed at it by critics. The 2006 show was a spin-off from Girlfriends, and centered on a medical student who put her needs, wants and career goals on the back burner to support her boyfriend and his dreams of being a pro-footballer. Sounds as progressive and forward thinking as you can get, right?
We have enough faith in your intelligence to know you picked up on the sarcasm in that last line. But to bring it home, here’s what the Boston Globe had to say: “This new CW series cranks out brash jokes that evaporate upon hitting the air, winds them into situations where women submit to their men, and leaves no aftertaste when it’s gone.” While it did have a decent fan-base, The CW caved to pressure from disgruntled female viewers and canceled the show after three seasons. Seeing its potential, BET picked it up and ran with it for another six seasons before finally calling it quits.
2005: Love, Inc.
Here’s one that had viewers and critics divided. Love Inc. was a 2005 sitcom that centered around matchmakers in charge of a dating service who was having no luck in finding love themselves. It’s the kind of ironic premise that’s perfect for a successful comedy show and, with an ensemble cast that included the talented Busy Philipps, Love Inc. seemed to have all the right stuff. With a multi-ethnic cast, the show was designed to have broad appeal, with all demographics having at least one character they could relate to.
While the sitcom did enjoy a strong fan-base of young Latina women, these Love Inc. lovers weren’t strong enough to hold up the ratings. After just one season, the show was canceled. Critics claimed the stereotypical way in which some ethnicities were presented was at the heart of this failure. The African American characters were reduced to a cliched representation of their culture, and this alienated many viewers.
2005: The War at Home
The War at Home attempted to break into an already saturated market: sitcoms about dysfunctional families. We’ve all seen so many of them that the tropes are tired, and the jokes have been rehashed so many times we can see them coming long before the laugh track tells us we should be reacting to them. To actually make an impression on viewers in this genre, a show would need to do something surprising. Fox’s 2005 attempt at this wasn’t successful. Yet it didn’t even do itself the justice of being an epic failure. Rather, The War at Home dragged on in its mediocrity, not horrendous enough to be desperately pulled from the air in embarrassment, but not good enough for anyone to actually like it. Any ratings it got were probably from people who left the show’s boring but inoffensive noise on in the background while they did other things.
The War at Home was slashed to pieces by critics who hated it for its banality. As a critic for the San Francisco Chronicle explained, “If The War at Home spent more time on good jokes instead of recycling every gimmick ever seen on TV, it might merely be mediocre, but it’s worse.” Entertainment Weekly got in on the attack: “It’s one limp comedy that pretends to be frank and daring about race, gender, and sexual orientation–and instead is glib, tired, and slippery.”
2006: Pepper Dennis
With Rebecca Romijn in the starring role, Pepper Dennis had a lot going for it. The romantic sitcom featured the stunning model and actress as a Chicago news reporter. Pepper Dennis got its start in 2006 on The WB. It was dropped, but then quickly picked up by The CW that same year. While Pepper Dennis did manage to eke out a full season, it was eventually shut down for good.
With a killer actress in the lead role, critics chalked the show’s failure up to poor writing. According to New York Daily News, “Romijn certainly tackles her character with the abandon and conviction necessary to anchor a comedy-drama series. Were the show better written, these actors probably could deliver the goods with no problem.”
2007: Flash Gordon
Considering how much Americans love superhero sagas, and considering Flash Gordon is retro gold, it’s surprising this Sci-Fi channel offering failed so dismally, Inspired by the 1930’s comic strip of the same name, Flash Gordon starred an actor who had already tested the superhero waters: Eric Johnson. Fresh from the super successful hit, Smallville, Johnson was primed to step up from a supporting role into the shoes of the superhero himself. Somehow though, the Flash Gordon creators managed to get everything weirdly wrong.
USA Today was scathing in their appraisal, calling the show “[badly] written, badly cast and done on the cheap in the Canadian woods, Flash is the kind of fantasy toss-off that gives sci-fi, and Sci Fi, a bad name.” Superhero fodder is so hit and miss! There really is no in between.