Over the past couple of weeks, we've focused on the best TV had to offer in 2012: the funniest episodes, the greatest news bloopers, the most useful GIFs, the most quotable characters, the celebrities you were most likely to see naked, your biggest Internet crushes, etc. What we haven't talked about much, though, are the worst things to happen on TV this year. Spoiler alert: there was a lot.
As a sort-of companion piece to Film Drunk's Worst Films of 2012 feature, here are 10 TV shows and personalities from 2012 we loved to hate (watch). There's nothing fun about despising, say, Gossip Girl or Glee, two shows that were very easy to ignore, but we were endlessly fascinated by The Newsroom or The Killing, partially because their ambitions were too big for what their creators hoped to achieve. As for Girls, well, we're not including it because we've been there and back enough times already. Tell us your "favorites," too.
2012 should have been a great year for reality shows. The genre reached its apex with Killer Karaoke, after all, and yet all anyone could talk about was TLC's Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, starring pig-in-a-pageant dress Alana Thompson. It's not that the Boo Boos are bad people exactly; it's that they're utterly disgusting. I watched eight episodes for a post earlier this year, and the only thing I learned after spending four hours with Mama & Co. is that they're proud of their toilet paper stash and obesity, so we're left with stills like this:
TLC is brilliant for taking advantage of America's previously unknown fascination for Alabama Walmarts. If only the rest of the country was as equally intelligent, and didn't watch.
(From guest contributor Burnsy)
Love It or List It, in a nutshell, is a show about awful people who run their homes into the ground before designer Hilary and realtor David “come to their rescue” and both fixes their home and finds them a new one, respectively. I cannot emphasize the word “awful” enough in that description. Basically, these are people – usually in Canada or Chicago, for whatever reasons – who have a ton of money at their disposal, but do nothing to maintain their large homes, resulting in them bitching and moaning that they’ll need to move from one $700,000 house to another.
The thing that I hate most about this show, and therefore the reason why I watch it so much, is that Hilary always ALWAYS does a great job with the $50,000 to $60,000 budget that these horrible people give her, but they still complain and give her sh*t every time because they’re too stupid to realize that “renovate” means breaking stuff. Then they give David sh*t because they forget to tell him their “must haves” and then they complain about every little thing in the nice homes he shows them.
And then at the end of each episode, they decide to Love It (stay) or List It (move), and by that point you just want their house to explode.
It's not as if we want to hate NBC — they air three of our favorites shows, Community, 30 Rock, and Parks and Recreation; it's just that they make it so hard for anyone to defend them. The Olympics was a gigantic clusterf*ck, they canceled Best Friends Forever, Mockingbird Lane, and Bent before they even had a chance, there was that whole monkey hospital show which we will never speak of again (Justin Kirk, you deserve better), and they continue to allow Donald Trump and Jay Leno to spew their derpy venom and derpier bad jokes.
Considering The Office and 30 Rock are ending soon, I'm not against Community and Parks concluding in the spring, too, so that we, the non-New Normal viewers of the world, can break away from the Peacock once and for all, at least until the Kenan Thompson sitcom airs next season. That'll cure what ails them.
If we ever decide to build a Warming Glow Hall of Lame (Ball of Shame? Eh, we'll figure it out later), Guy Fieri would be our Bob Dylan/Babe Ruth. We've been making fun of the obese starfish for so long that our mockery occasionally borders on love — we even gave him props this year for his solid Bourdain burn. But when we read about his $100,000 appearance fee and cookbook with Smash Mouth and review his new Times Square restaurant, which Bobby Big Wheel called a "culinary abortion," we're once again reminded that Fieri is the bro you knew in college who reeked of magazine sample cologne, unironically cranked Bowling for Soup at 4 a.m., and took massive dumps but never flushed. Except this bro is worth millions, which, no.
This all could have been prevented. If creator Veena Sud had just planned a one-and-done season, and showed us who killed Rosie Larsen in the series finale, The Killing might have been regarded as one of the best single season shows in recent memory. Instead, Sud (and AMC) pissed off viewers by not revealing Rosie's murderer in season one and then proceeded to drag their feet through the mud for another 13 tedious episodes, before finally, and disappointingly, showing us...she did it. And now AMC is (allegedly) bringing the show back for another rain-soaked, tensionless-drenched season, the second worst decision the network made this year.
#ifisaynerdenoughdoesthatmakemeanerd
Aaron Sorkin is like a substitute teacher who's pompously reading from chapter two and saying things like, "Now, I know this might be too complicated for you to understand, but let me explain..." when his students are already in chapter four. It wasn't always this way (The West Wing and The Social Network are great, and even Studio 60 had its moments of brilliance), but The Newsroom was everything Sorkin had successfully skirted around before, but now totally failed at: it spoke down to viewers, created enough straw men to make a handbag, portrayed all women as either shrill little girls or idiots, distrusted technology, and preached like a minister raised on Mitch Albom columns. And it's only going to get worse in season two, when Sorkin tackles Obama vs. Romney. Did I say "worse"? I meant "better." There's no show as much fun to hate watch as The Newsroom...YA THINK.
I finally got around to reading Rolling Stone's cover story about T-Swift a few days ago, and one passage in particular caught my attention, like a circle of butterflies and fairy dust emanating from Taylor Swift's magical fingers full of magic and puppy dog tails:
As showtime approaches, Swift keeps her mind off the song, doing her extensive vocal warm-ups (which, at one point, involve actual meows) and discussing food options for tonight's plane back to Nashville. She's sprawled sideways in a director's chair; her flats have cartoon-cat heads by the toes. "Buffalo tenders? OK! And rigatoni with truffle meat sauce – can I get it with spaghetti, though? Rigatoni makes me feel weird. It's like a wheel, and what's it trying to do? It's like an unfinished ravioli." (Via)
Emphasis mine, though I imagine most of the things Taylor says are uttered in bold, with hearts dotting the I's. It's not so much her music that bugs people (I'd wager half of you reading this know the lyrics to "22" and have sung it in at least one shower this month); it's her penchant for always playing the victim and her personality, which is best described as a doe-eyed cat that's shocked and excited by its own reflection. Like so, via Kristen Wiig:
Cute when a kitten does it, not so much when an adult does the same. Because she's surprised by everything, it seems so disingenuous; Taylor's a movie critic who loves everything and hates nothing, except for haters themselves. Here's a recent tweet of hers: "Walked into my AMA dressing room and there was this little bowl of candy in there. Literally shrieked with excitement. Need to tone it down." Girl's head is gonna f*cking explode when she finds out about birthday cake ice cream.
(As for why Swift's included on this TV list, see here.)
Just in case the reasons to hate Nancy Grace aren't already self-evident:
Yup, she's a monster, in a gas station .99 store wig.
Work It aired for two glorious episodes on ABC less than a year ago, but it feels like the series happened a lifetime (or, like, 14 periods ago, in Work It terms) ago. Time flies when you can't believe a sitcom about two MANLY MEN NO LITE BEER FOR THIS RUGGED GUY'S GUY who pretend to be women to keep their jobs made it to air. The economy, y'know. FYI: 6.1 million people watched the pilot, then 4.9 for episode #2. Community's "Remedial Chaos Theory," one of the best episodes of any TV show in the past decade, brought in 3.78 viewers, proving that everything is terrible and that the nearly FIVE MILLION PEOPLE who watched the second episode of Work It (I get checking out the pilot out of curiosity, but I'd rather lick Ben Koldyke's pantyhoses than see another one) hate good TV, women, and America, in that order.
OK, obviously not Game of Thrones as a whole, but a certain character on Game of Thrones.
Forever the answer to, "If you could punch and/or throw cow crap at anyone in the world, who would it be?"
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No “Girls”? C’mon, Kurp…everyone who reads this site hate-watched the shit out of that show!
yup
Considering I’d already wasted an hour and a half of my life that I will never get back watching “Tiny Furniture” before “Girls” premiered, I avoided the latter like the plague.
Barely made it through one episode. As far as I know, that’s all that aired.
That is a shitty show. Even my girlfriend who liked sex and the city said it sucked.
Hall of Lame, Ball of Shame, close but no.
Fieri is a Ball of Lame.
You’re spot on about Joffrey, but when I finished Dance With Dragons, it was George RR Martin I wanted to punch and throw cow shit at. Fucking asshole. JUST MOVE THE FUCKING STORY FORWARD ONE LITTLE FUCKING BIT!!
You have spoken the preacher’s truth on that one. That book is fucking tedious.
The problem with ASOIAF is everyone still thinks the story is about Dany & Jon, even though it’s not. They are diversionary characters. The main story actually revolves around Jaime & Bran. So, if you read ADwD with that in mind, the story actually moves along quite nicely.
I’ll give you a hint: the good guys & the bad guys aren’t who you think they are. The story is all related to Norse mythology, and Ragnarok specifically. To give you an idea, the Norse God of fertility, Freyr, is a good guy. Yet, Walder Frey, the guy with 1,000 kids, is a “bad guy”. And, Bran, who is a “good guy”, represents Fenrir, the Bound Wolf, who will destroy the Gods during Ragnarok. Etc.
So, in other words, GRRM is pwning everyone right now.
“If you could punch and/or throw cow crap at anyone in the world, who would it be?”
Lane Pryce (Spoiler Alert) (RIP) would disagree. Brilliantly.
By the way, I’ve never seen a better description of Sorkin.
Can’t think of anyone whose output has declined as precipitously as the devolution from “Sports Night” to “Newsroom,” except maybe Rob Reiner from “Spinal Tap” to “Unwatchable Trite Piece of Shit Starring My Friends, Vol. 12.” Or was that Sandler, for everything since “Happy Gilmore?”
See Weezer’s career.
What’s the accepted cutoff on Weezer being a good band? “Pinkerton”? I personally enjoy the 80s vibe that “The Green Album” gives off.
I was past Weezer age when the pretty good “Buddy Holly” came out, but I do have an excellent cover they did of “Unbreak My Heart” in my phone. Let’s just call it there.
OOPS: “Princess Bride” was after “Tap” and is clearly a high-water mark. But everything after that is so smug, annoying, and full of hypocritical left-wing pompousness that I can’t believe Reiner doesn’t direct “The Daily Show Movie.”
I hate Sorkin’s holier than thou preachiness so much that I can’t even hate watch The Newsroom.
I’d hate T. Swift, too, if I didn’t want to own like 90% of her wardrobe. I don’t know what that says about me, but it’s probably not good.
You’re probably a lot hotter than T. Swift, though. It’s not the wardrobe, it’s the bag of adolescent hangers they sit on.
Nancy Grace’s hashtags are why Twitter was invented. She’s definitely one of the best random people I follow.
Also reason to hate Love it or List it: the fakey fakey “banter” btw Hilary and David.
UGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH, that too. Oh god that’s the worst.
Every scene in Homeland that didn’t feature Saul, Quinn, or the two Rosencranz and Guildenstern knobs Carrie somehow keeps talking in to helping her do illegal surveillance. And Brody’s goon son who, God love him, just wants to watch the Wizards.
This might be a little contraversial but I hate Dana more than Joffrey
Controversial*
A bold choice and though I can’t agree with you, I can’t really disagree with you, either. I also feel like Homeland’s writers are a bunch of r/mensrights trolls that keep having the female characters actively make the worst decisions possible purely out of spite.
The “two Rosencranz and Guildenstern knobs” you’re referring to sound like Virigil and his brother. Virgil is probably my personal favorite character and I wish he was in more of it.
Dana is a real rollercoaster of a character. I went from disliking her, to liking her when she called her mother out on sleeping with Brody’s best friend, to hating her for essentially being a pouty little git.
I wish it was Dana that got hit with that kids Beemer
Yes a 1000 times yes! Let me get in on this delicious fountain of hate for Dana!
I just want her to be strangled in her frizzy hair at this point.
I never really cared much for Dana, but she wasn’t really much worse than any of the other characters. They just had to move her around to get her in the right place to talk her father out of blowing up a room full of American dignitaries (!!). That was one of the finest scenes of television this decade, and Dana was necessary for it.
That said, she really makes me dread having daughters (as if I didn’t already).
I very much enjoyed the Talking Dead shot
Here here. Chris Hardwick’s standup special on Comedy Central this year was the most smug, self-satisfied piece of TV I’ve ever seen that didn’t air on Fox News.
Apparently you don’t get the Daily Show where you watch.
/Release the hounds I’m bored today
i agree with nearly everything Jon Stewart says so his smugness doesn’t bother me. if anything it makes me feel righteous for a half hour a night with him.
chris hardwick is just a spazzy goober who’s general personality and “i love EVERYTHING” attitude drives me insane.
I hope GOT changes *******”s death. Dude has it coming. And the book’s way is not satisfying enough.
That’s like…the least clear spoiler ever. I mean, everyone dies in GOT.
Appropriate that it comes from Stinger Bell, no?
yeah…. he/her death left me wanting more….. I know who you mean and I feel ya…
Taylor Swift looks like an elf from Rivendell, and I want to give her a reason to write a song about me.
My favorite show to hate watch, and I don’t understand how it didn’t make this list, is True Blood. The show couldn’t happen if just one character at one point didn’t make the dumbest available decision. The vampires bother me the most because they’re old. 99.9% of the dumb shit I did when I was 20 I would never do at 40 (lookin’ at you St. Ides). I would hope that if I was 175 years old I wouldn’t be stupid.
Plus, Shiva’s boobs.
Shiva’s boobs are quite said, imho. Huge disappointment there.
I can’t say I hate watch “True Blood” since I count it as my guilty pleasure TV viewing.
I thoroughly enjoyed Shiva’s boobs. I think Deborah Ann Woll is a little bit selfish, and I think I have to question her dedication to the craft. What would Anne Hathaway do, Deb, what would Anne Hathaway do?
Waiting to see Deborah Ann Woll get naked is probably the primary reason that I continue watching “True Blood”.
I really enjoyed the first two seasons of True Blood, but it started going off the rails in season 3 and went full-on crazy this past season. My fiancee and I made it through this season but we despised the show for nearly every minute. I don’t think we’ll be back.
I did enjoy Shiva’s boobs, though.
I watched most of the first season while once pulling 24 hour CQ duty in the Army, then stopped following the show, then got back into it a few episodes into the most recent season. The full-on crazy is what attracts me so much.
I guess I’m in the minority on Janina Gavankar’s breasts. I personally find her to be better looking in “The League”, but to each their own.
She does look better on The League. But still. Boobs.
My roommate watches True Blood, and I won’t allow it on the TV so I just glance over occasionally over her shoulder when I see nudity on the computer, every so often I’ll Google Image Search Deborah Ann Woll to see if she’s gotten naked yet
“Basically, these are people – usually in Canada or Chicago, for whatever reasons”
Apparently a lot of the shows on HGTV are produced up in Canada. The only reason I know this is because my folks are huge fans of that channel and my father dropped that bit of knowledge on me the other day.
Yeah, I notice that with most HGTV shows. It takes about two seconds to get the first “aboot”.
Also, Guy Fieri is the worst (I believe it was Amelie Gillette who once called him “The living embodiment of chili-cheese fries”), but I have learned of two legit great restaurants in Houston thanks to his show.
There are some good places on that show. However, I also blame him for the surge in restaurants going through with the idea of adding a shitton of unnecessary ingredients to otherwise basic dishes. I hate it when he says something has a mouthful of flavor because, newsflash asshole, anything good should be “a mouthful of flavor.” Adding thirty spice into your inside-out bacon triple cheeseburger doesn’t necessarily make a better burger than a patty between two buns that’s actually just made of good meat.
I also partly blame it for the rise of food carts. Fuck those guys.
I don’t mind him talking about a mouthful of flavor as much as I mind seeing the damn mouthful of food while he’s jabbering on. Even my dog knows better than to bark with his mouth full. Chew, swallow, then talk.
Correction for OFBCM: For Guy Fieri the order of operations should be Chew, Swallow, Choke on your one way trip to Flavortown, Die in a mass of vomit,hair bleach, and sunglasses
Cafe pita + and what was the second? Red Lion?
Gut Fieri is the subject of the greatest Tweet I read this year,
“If you deep fried a chain wallet and attached it to a bleached anus, you’d have Guy Fieri.”
@elizabayne
Newsroom and Girls are the top two for me. I’m going to have to convince my wife that they suck.
Is anyone else hate-watching How I Met Your Mother at this point? I can’t stand the show’s direction the past few years but I hold out hope that the creative team will find a way to reveal the mother and make the show consistently funny again.
I still love the show and the characters but, yes, the writing has gotten more sitcom-y and the characters are just caricatures of their original selves. I think as the material gets worse, the actors feels the need to “spruce up” things with a more over-the-top performance (see also: later seasons of The Simpsons)
Also, me and my friends have a drinking game for HIMYM, so even if it’s a shitty episode, that’s another one for the game
I can’t even hate watch it anymore. Mrs. JfJ has a vested interest in the ending, but I just can’t bring myself to pay attention anymore.
I watch the Newsroom because I keep thinking, “it can’t be THIS shitty forever, right?”… A high school teacher raved about the West Wing and I loved The Social Network, so it’s a great trainwreck to watch as I wait for it to improve.
And I agree with all your points on it except the straw men because I either think the show is trying to say, “hey delusional assholes, your way-out there opinions (example: birther movement) are preventing the chance for an actual civilized discussion, so just stop” or asking, “how do we tell the news when so many people want to hear the soundbite from Donald Trump instead of a respected politician?” The problem with The Newsroom is what South Park concludes most of the time: yeah, you’re right, but you don’t have to be a preachy dick about it
Yep. And here’s what would solve that problem: maybe just once Sorkin’s “delusional assholes” could be on the other side–you know, the “all gun owners are evil” people who also prevent civilized discussion. But that won’t happen, because Sorkin is, to put it mildly, a preachy dick.
I’ve said this before, but I suffered through the entire bin Laden episode out of morbid curiousity. I will kill myself before I watch another episode.
Yep. Problem is, for whatever reason, conservative bullshit gets the media attention. After the recent school shooting we’re talking about the NRA’s comments, not some pussy hippie group that wants to ban all guns. So being balanced for the sake of being balanced doesn’t make sense if media attention is creating a platform for one group over the other.
The Newsroom required a incredible amount of finesse that I’m not sure even the greatest writer could pull off.
Too be fair about the mass shootings; the NRA put their crazy on display in a press conference. Reporters had the wherewithal to avoid the pussy hippy group’s pleas for attention.
The little bastard from Line of Duty makes Joffrey look like the kid (Charlie I guess) from Charlie and the Choclate Factory. He was a perfect storm of loathsome, feral adolescent ferocity. I think he’s now being held in one of those boxes from The Cabin in the Woods. I miss him.
I tried hate-watching The Big Bang Theory, but I hated it TOO much. My wife watches CSI and CSI NY, which I background hate-watch, but I usually get too engrossed in whatever game I’m playing.
Also, NBC can eat a dick. Although Go On is growing on me.
I don’t think I’ll ever not want to see Edie Izzard chew scenery as a thousand year old vampire w/ a warewolf grandson. Fuck NBC for cancelling that.
I see no mention of Honey Boo Boo in the comments. I think that means we didn’t hate watch it and it’d be awesome if WG would do what it said it was going to do a long time ago and not acknowledge its existence anymore.
Just like those F***heads who slow down when the wreck is on the other side of the road and … OH MY GOD DID YOU SEE THAT BLOOD I’VE GOT TO SLOW DOWN!
\can’t help it
Maybe the reason everyone on Love It Or List It hates Hillary is because she says “for $50,000, I can do this, this and this” then five minutes later she says “well, the first this took up all of your budget, so I can’t do this and this” and she says it like she’s mad at them for not planning for it.
I was gonna say that. Every episode of that show she promises the moon on a string budget and then goes “oh, remember that thing you said you really wanted? well, without consulting you I dropped it from the plan”
And then I scream at the TV and Mrs. JfJ rolls her eyes at me.
I can’t wait to hate-watch King of the Nerds. Oh my god that looks like the apocalypse.
We nerds already have our kings, they got there by creating everything we’re nerdy about (Joss Whedon, Gene Roddenberry, Stan Lee, etc) we don’t need new ones.
Exactly. These douchebags just… argh. I cringe when the commercial comes on.
I mean, it’s not like kings are chosen based on who knows the most about the kingdom. They were chosen based on who’s ancestors had more sex with their family members.
I was hoping we would go with the Futurama Planet Trisol rules, where I just have to kill the Emperor to become the emperor. Although drinking a nerd sounds TERRIBLE.
Well nerds probably taste like Mountain Dew, Doritos, and failure, so if you can deal with the taste of failure, probably not too bad.
I work on one of the shows on this list, and seeing it here, I experienced a level of glee that I had previously thought impossible.
Thanks Josh, you’re good people.
Honey Boo Boo, right?
Gallery Girls should be on the list just for the fact that nobody on that show is likable and makes me hate art.
Girls should be on the list for the same reasons.
I can not approve of wishing for Parks and Community to be cancelled, just so we have no reason to watch NBC.
I don’t watch “Honey Boo Boo”, but every time I see her mother, I’m reminded of Ajax on “Duckman”. I can’t be the only one, can I?
I liked Work It when it was called Bosom Buddies and starred Tom Hanks.
one GLARING omission , DEXTER. At this point, who ISNT hate watching this show? I cant quit it since I wanna see where it goes, the possiblity of hannah getting naked would have made me feel better about wasting this season( but to be honest, chuck had her in underwear every episode standard, so they actually MISmanaged her too) and yet I still found myself watching despite being annoyed the entire time. Shit, just replace dexters dad with the trinity killer as his conscience and lets see where this series could go…..
Does Swift do something with her mouth? Why do they keep gettin’ back on top?
My mom loves Love It or List It. I have to leave the room everytime it comes on or I throw full cups of coffee at the television.
I’ve been hate watching the Office for 3 or 4 years now. Its been better this season, but still, just put a fucking bullet in it already. I personally would love to see an Office/Office Space crossover where Andy hires Milton Waddams, and then Milton burns down Dunder Mifflin because Jim put his red swingline stapler in Jello. That would be great.