So Bad It's Good/Live-Action TV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Some TV shows can be "laugh-out-loud funny", if only for a lot of the wrong reasons.


  • The Adam West Batman built its run on being So Bad It's Good. Specifically, it was So Cheesy It's Awesome. It even featured Batman surfing with the Joker. See it for yourself.
  • The early seasons of Undressed, an MTV serial show from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Initially, MTV tried to market it as a serious drama about romantic relationships. However, because of horrendous acting, production values better suited to a community access program than a serious cable show, and dialogue that sounded as if it was written by an eighth-grader, the show developed quite an audience for all the wrong reasons. MTV apparently figured out the real reason people were watching it—later seasons were deliberately comedic.
    • The show itself was however surprisingly progressive (for MTV, anyway) about sexuality. It frequently featured various non-stereotypical gay couples, frank story lines about high schoolers having sex without being morally punished, and a fairly tolerant attitude towards fetishes (including the Furry Fandom). Still a pretty lousy show, but it did have its good points.
  • The Chicago-based show Svengoolie prides itself on being So Bad Its Good.
  • Used intentionally in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, which was offered as a supposed horror series from the early 1980s that was considered so groundbreaking and terrifying that it was promptly sat on by the company that commissioned it. In the airing, the scriptwriter (supposedly a horror writer) reveals that he wrote, directed and starred in it along with a few friends. It results in howlingly bad continuity; the appearance of the camera and cameraman in mirrors; blatant Writer on Board - the main character is played by Garth Marenghi; and the main character euthanising a man who was only a head, having earlier exploded.

I'll get a mop!

    • it also features numerous pointless monologues, which include adverts for Marenghi's own books; racist tirades against the Scottish; rants about buying non-brand name batteries; and, bizarrely, a possible war against the Dutch. Disguised as a war against wasps.
  • Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad. Yes, with an "S".
  • Most Irish children's TV since the 1990s. The best puppet characters jumped ship and moved to adult-themed chat shows.
    • Like Quizzone. This show embodies So Bad it's Good in every way. They seem to pick Ireland's dumbest children for the show. And instead of using their brains, they can look the answers up on a computer. It's a snazzy Apple Macintosh, but from the looks on their faces, you'd swear none of these children had used a search engine in their lives... The search engine in the show can deliver the answers in about five seconds, but the children seem to rip the answers from anything - they have quoted eBay listings...
    • The first series consisted of the children spending three minutes (the time limit to get the answers) while one member of their team sits with headphones on, unable to get into the Quizzone. Lather, rinse and repeat for every round! Also, the children all seem to have hearing problems. One thought that the team had informed them that the capital of South Africa was 'Cappa'! Another believes that dodos once lived on the island of Mexico...
      • I thought I was the only one who watched Quizzone because of how bad it was! The children on it were incredibly stupid, one team answered 'What type of animal is a Beagle?' with 'A squirrelly-bird'. Another boy got lost in the maze and repeatedly walked within feet of the finishing line but completely failed to see it. And don't get me started on the narmy "referee".
    • "Physiquiz" presented by Kevo.
    • Or ICE. They axed Dustin the Turkey for this?! Schoolyard Jungle is the best - how to tell your friends that they smell and how not to be influenced by ebil Peer Pressure * lighteningclap* Well, should you be influenced to your friends or not?! The cardboard acting doesn't help—and who knew you needed a face ID to get into 15-rated movies? (You don't. You could just buy tickets for a U and them walk into a 15—not that the producers want you to know that or do that! It doesn't require a whole show to talk about it.)
    • Or Star Search—featuring people who make X Factor rejects sound like Elvis Presley. The perfect example of So Bad it's Good.
  • From Star Trek:
    • "Spock's Brain" is so awesomely bad that, when you approach it the right way, it becomes one of the funniest Trek episodes ever made. C'mon, say it, people:

"Brain and brain! What is BRAIN?!"

    • Rumor has it that the script originated as a prank at the expense of Gene Roddenberry.
    • "Night Terrors". C'mon, the flying Troi scenes are unbeatable.
    • "Threshold". Paris travels at infinite speed, becomes a catfish, and impregnates catfish Janeway. And he's cured by injections of antimatter.
    • The original series episode "The Omega Glory". There's something about that American flag. The Pledge and the Spock-like Satan illustration did not help. Shatner's trademark delivery worked well when he said, "Look at these words...written bigger...than the rest...tall words ....proudly saying .... 'We....the Pe...ople...'"
    • The Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Storm Front" is mostly just dull. But... the last 10 minutes have the Enterprise Old School Dogfighting Stukas armed with Frickin' Laser Beams over Manhattan. Yeah.
  • Sci Fi (now SYFY) Original Movies are notorious for this. Often, the special effects are sub-par at best, the acting tends to be from people at the very beginning or very end of their careers (creating either desperation from the former, or "just makes sure the check clears" apathy from the latter, and many of the situations are downright ridiculous If you can accept them for what they are, they make for a very interesting Saturday movie marathon.
  • Big Bad Beetleborgs. Its attempts at comic relief often fell flat, especially if you compare it to the two series it was adapted from, B-Fighter and B-Fighter Kabuto. Apart from the costumes, BBB is a different show and it was awesome for it. B-Fighter and B-Fighter Kabuto were far more serious, being closer to the tone that VR Troopers would adapt. It is good that, in an age where every Tokusatsu adaptation was trying to ride on the waves of Power Rangers, BBB tried to do something different by wholeheartedly embracing the absurdity of the concept.
  • The Secret Life of the American Teenager. Anvilicious morality lessons, atrocious acting, and ridiculous Soap Opera plots make this show hilariously awful.
  • Touched By an Angel, particularly the time when one of the angels goes to a nightclub and spends the rest of the episode high on ecstasy. The time one of them randomly went blind comes a distant yet respectable second.
  • Cleopatra 2525 and Jack of All Trades. The latter does have an excellent theme song, though.
  • The live-action Goosebumps series. An ad for a Halloween marathon-which portrayed it as if it was a gritty 1980s Slasher Flick showed a baseball with fangs flying towards someone. And yes, all of it is that cheesy.
    • And that's not even scratching the surface! Just watch "Don't go to sleep" without laughing. i dare you.
  • John Sergeant on Strictly Come Dancing. He gets half or a third as many points from the judges but the public vote keeps on saving him.
    • Dancing with the Stars, the U.S. version, had Cloris Leachman, who was saved by the public for being hilarious.
  • PAX once ran a show called Young Blades about the children of The Three Musketeers. It was terrible. It is also one of the most laugh-out-loud hilarious things televised. The show is chock-full of anachronisms, poor writing, shoddy effects, inexplicable plotlines and rampant history fail. The premise was ridiculous and the acting was utterly absurd, the cast's performances ranging from painfully tedious to foaming-at-the-mouth hamtastic. Almost every element of the show was mind-numbingly silly and handled exceptionally poorly, and yet it's so epically awful that it deserves a watch on that basis alone. Funny, funny show.
  • CSI: Miami. With acting so bad...(takes off sunglasses dramatically)...it's hilarious. Yeaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! The season eight premiere was a Flashback which included the origin of Horatio's sunglasses.
  • The N (now TeenNick) promos for Saved by the Bell tell viewers to "Embrace the cheese." Adult Swim temporarily aired the show with the same philosophy, with bumps featuring the show's silliest moments in psychedelic slow-motion.
  • The original Knight Rider undeniably qualifies. Remember, kids, half the genes in the body are expressed in the brain... unless you're David Hasselhoff, in which case they'll be expressed in the hair.
  • The Christian kids show Bibleman. It concerns an overweight middle-aged businessman who was sick of "wealth, status [and] success", so he finds a muddy Bible in the rain and decides to don a terrible costume that vaguely resembles a Power Ranger and fight some of the flattest enemies this side of Captain Planet with a light sabre along side his two sidekicks while shouting Bible quotes. Oh yes. It seems to always be aware of how goodly-bad it is. And the deliberately over-the-top Lex Luthor-esque villain they had for a while was hilarious!
    • The Transformation Sequence based on Ephesians 6:14-17: "Breastplate of Righteousness! Helmet of Salvation! Waistbelt of Truth! Shoes of Peace! Shield of Faith! And the Sword of the Spirit. I'll take the turbo bike." For the curious, blow-by-blow reviews of the series can be found here. Nothing is more awesome than this scene from one of the episodes, here. "Ooh Bibleman, You're just too easy no doubt!"
  • The third season of Heroes is like watching multiple train wrecks in superspeed. While on acid.
  • American Gladiators is, and always has been, the best comedy show on television.
    • Other versions, like the Australian version ,too, just because of how much fun they are.
  • The Immortal, an early 2000s clone of Highlander starring Lorenzo Lamas as a demon hunter that appeared and vanished without trace. One episode mainly featured characters standing out talking in rooms and a computer programed by demons.
  • Would the Japanese Spider-Man show count? Just watch this.
  • Hip Hop Harry. A kids' show about a giant rapping, break-dancing teddy bear.
  • The A&E series Paranormal State. It tried to be a legitimate ghost hunting show, but with such heavy editing in of sound and visual effects that it loses all sense of atmosphere or spookiness. Still, the overacting of the people on the show, combined with the increasingly over-the-top editing, and the host claiming early in the show to having been stalked by a demon and involved in exorcisms, make it at least laugh-worthy.
  • Spike TV's gloriously stupid trivia show MANswers, where the MANswer to every question is invariably boobies, or explosions. Bonus points for the Large Ham narrator who sounds like he's drunk on his own testosterone and never speaks below a full-bodied shout. The show is actually based on a Japanese series that presents the same fact in a serious and no-nonsense fashion. Spike just made the show more AWESOME!
  • American Idol: "Pants on the ground! Pants on the ground! Lookin' like a FOO wit yo pants on the ground!"
  • Animal Planet's relatively new series Lost Tapes is so obviously staged that it's more fun to spot all the poor production values than to actually try to understand the story being presented. Their so-called "actual footage" of attacks by mythical creatures always features acting ranging from emotionally dead to some of the weirdest Large Hams you will ever see, in addition to very high-definition imagery barely even attainable by the best camcorders on the normal market today, let alone what people would carry out into the wilderness with them, and camera work that always catches the action suspiciously well - even if the camera operator was supposedly an 8-year-old girl. This page provides a more thorough list of blatant giveaways.
    • A man in a gorilla suit without the mask attacks a hunter from behind in a "Sasquatch attack" sequence, clearly exposing his face (and very distinctive mustache, removing any doubt that he was a fake) to the camera for a full second.
  • Eurovision Song Contest: "WELCAHM TO ZA EUROVEESHUN SAWNG CAWNTEST IN (Insert city here)!"
  • The Muppet Show ran on this. As John Seavey said:

"But looking at the Muppets, you see a group of people united by a) their passion for entertainment and their dream of making people happy through art, and b) their lack of talent at their chosen field. The gap between their desires and their actual abilities provides fertile ground for chaos, confusion, and comic misunderstandings as events slowly (and sometimes quickly) spin out of their control."

This is in-universe. As a TV show in itself, it's genuinely awesome.
    • Statler and Waldorf hung a lampshade on how bad the show knew its entertainment was.
  • The unsold NBC pilot Poochinski, starring Peter Boyle as a slovenly detective who comes back to life as a fake-looking bulldog.
  • Mysteries from Beyond the Other Dominion with Dr. Franklin Ruehl PHD
  • In-universe example: The Robin Sparkles videos from How I Met Your Mother.
  • Mike Rowe's time selling drivel on late night TV. He's so obviously pissed off with his job that he goes out of his way to ruin it.
  • In December 2009, the United Kingdom saw a short-lived game show titled Heads or Tails. It was Exactly What It Says on the Tin: A million-pound game show centered around calling coin flips. The show itself was just plain bad, but it made for some excellent Snark Bait on a couple sites.
  • Smallville is often at its best when it stops trying to make people treat the tragic intertwined destinies of Clark and Lex seriously and just embraces a live action DC universe and all the insanity that entails.
  • Hair Battle Spectacular: A downright hilarious competition!
  • Many American soaps can qualify but the one that takes the cake is Sunset Beach. We're talking wobbling sets, terrible writing, overdramatic music and pantomime style acting... which may explain it being shortlived (by American soap standards), running for only three years before it was cancelled.
  • Britannia High. A largely forgotten, British--as the name would suggest—musical drama set in a performing arts school that lasted nine episodes before being axed, after regularly being beaten in the ratings by Antiques Roadshow, which has perhaps the unique distinction of being a substandard rip-off of Glee aired a year before Glee even started - in actuality, it was probably intended to be a copy of the High School Musical films. (Although the producers swore on a stack of Bibles that it wasn't anything like High School Musical, ohhhhh no. Perhaps ITV shouldn't have begun screening the series a few days after High School Musical 3: Senior Year was released in Britain if they didn't want comparisons made.) With lines like 'Don't be a wannabe; be who you want to be' played completely straight; every other episode featuring increasingly bizarre cameos from various 'celebrities', where the plot comes to a complete standstill to allow the characters to squee over the fact they've just met, say, Nicola from Girls Aloud, and a cast so cliched and two-dimensional their relevant tropes feel like a full character description, you're already in for more cheese than a fondue party before you even get to the musical numbers. The songs themselves rarely get any better than So Okay It's Average, but the choreography - featuring such delights as table tennis and what Charlie Brooker described as a psychodramatic landscape conveying the dyselxic agony of being unable to spell words like 'was' or doing schoolwork in the shadow of a giant projected clock - is this trope to a tee.
  • The 1980s series The Borgias, which to this day is still regarded as the worst costume drama ever made by The BBC. What should have been a compelling tale of one of the most notorious political families in European history ended up being reduced to an absolute mess thanks to, among other things, incompetent direction, the two writers that were responsible for the series (writing alternating episodes) clearly not having communicated with each other at all during the writing process (one of the writers wrote Lucrezia as a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, the other wrote her as a misunderstood nice girl), and perhaps most of all, Adolfo Celi's over-the-top performance as Rodrigo Borgia, which turned what should have been the most important bits of dialogue in the series into hilarity, thanks to his thick Italian accent (the producer apparently didn't learn that Celi's voice was dubbed over by Robert Rietti in Thunderball until it was too late).
    • Then there was The Cleopatras, which was broadcast a year after The Borgias and might as well be its Spiritual Successor. It opens with an extreme close-up of Richard Griffiths plastered with more make-up than any of the actresses that appear in the series, and only gets more and more ridiculous from there. Add in direction and editing from a Queen music video, and you can see why most people considered the BBC's costume dramas to be Deader Than Disco for most of the early Eighties.
  • Certain Lifetime original movies can be watched as unintentional comedy, the forerunning example would be Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life.
  • This "Jump" music video [dead link] from Sesame Street is quite laughable, well it was the 1990s....
  • Trouty Mouth. Just....Trouty Mouth.
  • Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee on the Food Network. The food itself consists mostly of seasoning packets and canned food thrown together (and her cookbooks are one big Product Placement), and she seems to care more about making it look pretty than making it edible. Her decorations are not only horribly tacky but would probably be very inconvenient. She seems to care more about getting drunk and making elaborate tablescapes than cooking. There's a reason why she's amassed a fanbase full of people who watch her solely for the Snark Bait. Here's her infamous "Kwanzaa cake".
  • The cheesealicious, chock-full-o'-synthesizer soundtrack of late-1980s Doctor Who, especially in "Remembrance of the Daleks".
  • Former WWE superstar Shawn Michaels has a hunting show called MacMillan River Adventures. According to wrestling radio show hosts Bryan Alvarez and Vinny Verhei, it should be So Cool Its Awesome, but instead it's simply So Bad It's Good, for, among other things, a minutes-long speech in favor of the Second Amendment by Charlton Heston with no connection to the rest of the show, "hunting" that consists of three men shooting down a single deer in an enclosed area, and a promo that involved Shawn beating down his co-host who was pretending to be various WWE wrestlers.
  • A bizarre, false 15-minute infomercial from Adult Swim about a product called "Icelandic Ultra Blue" whose definition and use keeps changing. It then shifts to a music video for a possible new jingle, an appearance by the singer's producer, an ad for an air purifier that uses the Holocaust as a comparison, a store that buys Nazi Gold, a splinter removal center called "Fatfuck's" (the owner's last name), another Icelandic Ultra Blue product for embalming, the new product jingle written by the announcer's nephew, an ad for a dance club, and then another ad for an Ultra Blue product that takes place AT the dance club which borders on the homoerotic. The short ends back the beginning, with the main developer mentioning "stage one is complete" as sinister music plays in the background.
  • Jersey Shore. A bunch of unlikeable assholes fighting. Hugely entertaining and hilarious. Mob Wives is the same.
  • iCarly: The in-universe So Bad Its Horrible parody "Kelly Cooper: Terrible Movie" falls into this category.
    • In "iFix a Pop Star", a pop star's comeback appears to be disastrous, since she looks extremely slipshod and does a terrible lipsync job. Everyone loves it anyway.
  • The Star Wars Holiday Special. Despite the poorly animated cartoon segments, annoying Wookie sounds, excessive amount of pointless filler, and the fact that George Lucas wanted every copy to be destroyed, we enjoy how the special is narm.
  • In-Universe in Community; Troy, Abed and friends watch bad movies and make fun of them.
  • Some of the guest hosts of the British panel show Have I Got News for You are this, especially Boris Johnson and Brian Blessed.
  • Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura, for many reasons. It's filled with Logical Fallacies, critical research failures, and lots of Narm throughout. It's also hosted by Jesse Ventura (as you can tell from the title), who seems to think he's at the center of every government conspiracy out there and takes advice from Alex Jones of all people! Clearly, the show is intended to be some sort of documentary on conspiracy theories, but it comes off more as just some dumb fun that you watch when there's nothing else on TV. A bad show, but makes for some great YouTube Poop videos.
  • The British press treated Bonekickers with, at first, Bile Fascination, but later decided it was a So Bad It's Good Guilty Pleasure. The show was immensely popular with real archaeologists for its Did Not Do the Research details like cleaning ancient bones with metal tools and standing on the edges of trenches, ludicrous ignorance of history (such as treating it as a history-book rewriting mystery when hearing the skeleton of an English Crusader was found carrying a Saracen coin, which is easily explicable based on knowing anything about The Crusades at all) and for Dr Magwilde, the leader of the team who knows nothing about history, appreciates it mainly based on who was creating the biggest buildings (calling Stonehenge a 'rockery'), and routinely throws away and breaks historical artefacts.
  • Direct from Televisa, the infamous anthology series La Rosa de Guadalupe. Running since 2008, it is the Spiritual Sequel of Mujer, Casos de la Vida Real (another Lifetime-seque anthology show about people in distress), but with a religious premise: a person with a problem prays to the Virgin of Guadalupe for a solution, and a rose appears to signify that the Holy Mother has listen to the pray and will intervene. The actual show, however, is full of hackneyed plots, hilariously awful acting of the hammy variety, and constantly trying to cover current day problems and scandals with a ham-fisted approach at best. There are so many legendarily unintentionally hilarious episodes, Watchmojo en Español compiled three Top Ten of most ridiculous episodes.
  • An episode of NBC's New Amsterdam features a no-dialog montage with sad music over two minutes long full of random people reacting to what only the very end reveals is first contact with extraterrestrial life World War III the US Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (which occurred over four months before the episode premiered, something the reveal even reminds viewers of by helpfully including the date). The reactions shown are universally over the top, to the point of including a slow motion example of Drop What You Are Doing. It also contains serious chronological issues since some scenes take place at sunrise in US East timezone (the decision didn't release till ~10 am in that timezone), and everyone is totally and completely shocked by something subject to a leak (which the Supreme Court confirmed was real) weeks prior, and known to be on the court's docket for months. The result is so laughable as to be hilarious.
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