10 Worst Sitcom Ideas Ever

Disney Channel is where we go for mildly amusing family-friendly comedies, not top-tier comedy. But we had to lower our expectations after Dog With a Blog came out in 2012. Stan, the canine protagonist, spends his days chatting with his human family and his nights posting his musings online. When it comes to talking animals, we’ll stick with Babe, thank you very much.

We don’t have an issue with the profanity this sitcom’s title suggests, aside from the tedium of typing it out. (M*A*S*H, at least, stuck to one symbol.) But we do find fault with $#*! My Dad Says’ creators for basing an entire sitcom on a Twitter feed about one cantankerous dad’s crass commentary. Viral fame is fleeting, but CBS apparently thought this $#*! could last longer than one season.

ABC somehow found it a good idea to give the modern-day cavemen of a GEICO ad campaign their own show. The network billed it as “a unique buddy comedy that offers a clever twist on stereotypes and turns race relations on their head.” But the pilot reportedly capitalized on racial stereotypes instead of deconstructing them, so ABC had to go back to retool the entire show, per The AV Club.

One anecdote from Friends lore is that Matthew Perry almost missed the chance to play Chandler Bing because he was attached to this ABC pilot, which followed baggage handlers at Los Angeles International Airport in the year 2194. “I was wearing a futuristic shirt,” the actor explained on Late Night With Seth Meyers in 2015. “And little people played the aliens, [and] I had to sort out the aliens’ luggage, and that was basically the show.”

Deemed the second-worst TV show of all time by TV Guide Magazine in 2002, this short-lived 1965 NBC comedy starred Jerry Van Dyke as a man who is surprised to find out his late mother has been reincarnated as a used car, and she speaks to him through the radio. Yes, the 1960s were a time of far-fetched sitcoms — Mister Ed had a talking horse, after all — but creativity was clearly idling here.

Give credit to Hogan’s Heroes’ writers and to actors like Bob Crane, Werner Klemperer, and John Banner for turning the 1965 CBS sitcom into a successful, award-winning production. Because on paper, a TV comedy centering on prisoners at a prisoner of war camp in Nazi Germany has one of the worst premises we can imagine. (Unfortunately, it’s not the only Nazi-related TV show on this lineup.)

It’s a big wonder that this syndicated 1985 sitcom lasted for four seasons. The small wonder of the title is Vicki (Tiffany Brissette), or V.I.C.I., as in Voice Input Child Identicant. She’s a robot that a robotics engineer (played by Dick Christie) passes off as his daughter in public. At home, however, he keeps her as a domestic servant and stows her in a cabinet while she’s offline. How much cringe can one sitcom premise hold?

ABC might have thought it could follow in the high-heeled footsteps of Bosom Buddies and Tootsie with this sitcom about two straight cisgender men (Ben Koldyke and Amaury Nolasco) who dress as women to get jobs. But the premise came off as both misogynistic — “Women are taking over the workforce!” one character laments — and insensitive to transgender individuals and their ongoing fight for equality in the workplace and the world at large.

UPN execs missed the memo that there’s nothing funny about race relations in the slavery-era United States — because they gave the green light to this sitcom about a fictional Black valet (played by Chi McBride) chronicling the antics of his boss, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln (played by Dann Florek). The Los Angeles City Council even passed a motion declaring the idea as racist, according to The Washington Post.

Our pick for the worst sitcom idea of all time is undoubtedly this British comedy, a spoof of classic American TV sitcoms, in which Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun live next door to a Jewish couple in Berlin. Critics, understandably, blasted the show as tasteless and offensive. And in a 2013 Curious British Telly interview, creator Geoff Atkinson fell back on the defense that the show’s mostly-Jewish cast “had no problem” with the concept. If you say so, Geoff.