8 Worst HBO Shows, Ranked

Turns out, no one needed or wanted Sex and the City from a male perspective, which tells us the mind of the married (cisgender, heterosexual) man is focused entirely on sex and when next he can have it. That’s the thinking of hormonal teenagers, and it’s too bad the men at the center of this show have gotten older but haven’t grown up.

Arliss, a comedy about a motor-mouthed sports agent, had the misfortune to debut on HBO after The Larry Sanders Show, a superior series about behind-the-scenes dealings with cameos by real-life shows. The former is middling at best; the latter is TV legend. On the plus side, Arliss does boast the talent of Sandra Oh, even if she doesn’t get the best material here.

HBO had a star as bankable as Dwayne Johnson on its payroll for almost five years, and this is the best it could do? The wrestler-turned-movie star plays an NFL-star-turned-financial manager in Ballers. But this show seems to be less about post-fame reinvention and more about cars, partying, women, and hustle culture, and that Entourage-level lifestyle porn seemed retrograde even in 2015.

Chris Lilley may have been trying to call out societal ills like racism and homophobia with this Australian import and its spinoffs, Ja’mie: Private School Girl and Jonah From Tonga. But using brownface and dropping anti-gay slurs, as Lilley does in Summer Heights High, isn’t the way to do it. This High was a low for HBO.

There can probably be a good adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s novel The Time Traveler’s Wife, but neither the film version nor this HBO version succeeded. And the latter was especially bad, with bizarre twists, jarring tonal shifts, and questionable chemistry between the leads (that was undone entirely by scenes of Theo James’ character interacting with his future lover when she was just a child.)

Ordinarily, we’d be happy to watch a TV show about the inner workings of Hollywood and the power brokers, stars, and hangers-on who populate the town. But this show’s fantastic premise is undercut by its brotastic sensibilities. For eight seasons and a movie, viewers watched a group of boorish white men try to hit it big, while the women of Entourage struggled to get respect on screen and behind the scenes.

Before Louis C.K.’s sexual misconduct came to light, he and Pamela Adlon had well-received creative collaborations on Louie and Better Things. Less so on this show, which looked and felt like a multi-camera sitcom — right down to the studio audience and laugh track — but subverted that format with ribald and often offensive dialogue. Consider us unlucky to have seen it.

During a protracted Euphoria hiatus, creator Sam Levinson focused on this follow-up, starring Lily-Rose Depp as a struggling pop star and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye as a nightclub impresario and cult leader under whose influence she falls. The result is a drama that seems to think being degrading is being daring, and HBO quickly dispatched with the embarrassment. Talk about false idols!