The 50 Worst Decisions in TV History

If a beloved sitcom comes back after a 20-year absence and nobody watches it, did it really come back at all? That’s the question Mad About You faced in 2019 when the popular Nineties show briefly returned as a Spectrum Original. If those last two words don’t make sense to you in tandem like that, you’re not alone. Very few people are aware that the cable company Spectrum entered the original-content game in 2019 as part of a desperate attempt to stop viewers from getting rid of cable. They relentlessly pushed the new Mad About You on their onscreen guide so anyone flipping through the channels would be aware of it, but it was of little use. Most television viewers don’t have Spectrum, and the whole concept of original programing was confusing for those that do, since the shows existed in some sort of weird ether, unbound to any channel. Twelve new episodes of Mad About You were uploaded to Spectrum between November and December 2019, the total viewership for all of them was about 16 people, and the show was quietly canceled. This all took place in a near total vacuum. Paul Reiser, Helen Hunt, and the whole Mad About You family deserved better.

HBO spent more than 50 years building up the value of its name. As the home of The Sopranos, Games of Thrones, Sex and the City, The Larry Sanders Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Leftovers, Six Feet Under, The White Lotus, The Wire, Succession, and Deadwood, it is the ultimate home of prestige television. In 2020, the network joined forces with Cinemax to launch the streaming platform HBO Max so cord cutters could still have access to their programming. But in 2023, they made the baffling decision to shorten the name to Max. “We all love HBO,” explained JB Perrette, president and CEO of HBO Max parent company Warner Bros. Discovery. “And it’s a brand that has been built over five decades to be the edgy, groundbreaking trendsetter in entertainment for adults. But it’s not exactly where parents would most eagerly drop off their kids.” Perrette was referring to adult content like Real Sex and Sex and the City. But the decision to change the service’s name to Max was even worse for the exact same reason. Had this guy never heard the term Skinemax before? Cinemax spent decades showing softcore porn late at night to boost ratings. Their name is far more associated with adult entertainment than HBO. The decision is just bonkers-level crazy.

The future of cable news is quite murky. Cable itself is dying a slow death as more and more users cut the cord in favor of streaming, and the average age of a regular CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News viewer is somewhere around 117. Fox News responded to this threat by creating the streaming platform Fox Nation in 2018. For a mere $5.99 a month, subscribers could get the network’s unique brand of right-wing propaganda without having to pay for cable. Very few people signed up, possibly because Fox’s most loyal viewers aren’t exactly the kind of people who run to adapt to new technologies. Tucker Carlson began trashing Fox Nation behind the scenes. “Nobody’s going to watch it on Fox Nation,” he said on a leaked video from 2018 that surfaced earlier this year, in which he is heard discussing the possibility of putting an upcoming special on the streaming service. “Nobody watches Fox Nation because the site sucks. So I’d really like to just dump the whole thing on YouTube.” But at least Fox Nation is still a thing. CNN spent more than $300 million to launch CNN+ in March this year, and pulled the plug just four weeks later when virtually nobody signed up. 

Throughout the first few years of the George W. Bush administration, rumors swirled that the president didn’t fulfill his duties to the Texas National Guard back in the early Seventies. If proven, this would be an explosive story, since W was responsible for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Any political opponent could simply say that Bush didn’t serve his own country during Vietnam, even in a limited capacity, making him unfit to serve as commander in chief. The only problem was, there was no way to prove he actually went AWOL from the Texas National Guard, and he strongly denied it. At the height of the 2004 campaign, however, documents surfaced that seemingly proved the charge. Dan Rather put them on 60 Minutes. Within hours, conservative bloggers began examining the papers and raising significant red flags. They eventually proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the memos were forgeries created on a modern computer. CBS could have found this out prior to the broadcast and saved a lot of humiliation. The blunder cost Rather his job and essentially eliminated the National Guard conversation as an issue during the election. Some left-wing conspiracy theorists think the Bush campaign created the documents and passed them along to the media, knowing they’d eventually be shown to be forgeries. But that’s a sort of 4D chess that rarely happens in real life. In all probability, Rather and his team were simply duped. 

Throughout the five-season run of Quantum Leap, Scott Bakula’s character, Dr. Samuel Beckett, leaped into the bodies of different people throughout history, “putting right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home.” He put right a lot of wrong, but the show ended with Beckett still trapped in the past. Rumors of a reboot swirled for years, and the cult audience grew to the point where they even held fan conventions. NBC finally brought the show back in 2022, with Raymond Lee playing the new time traveler. Initial reports said that Bakula might be involved in some capacity, but the show ultimately went forward without him. “In January, the pilot was sold and a script was sent to me because the character of Sam Beckett was in it, which makes sense, right?” Bakula wrote to fans. “As so many of you have been asking me the last several months, ‘How could you do QL without Sam?'(or Al, for that matter). Well, I guess we’re about to find out. That’s the story. As the show has always been near and dear to my heart, it was a very difficult decision to pass on the project.” In other words, they weren’t willing to pay him enough or give him a significant role. Booooo. NBC, come on. You just renewed the show for a second season. Cough up the money and bring back Bakula. Doing this show without him is just insane.

Hosting the Academy Awards is a notoriously thankless task. If you pull off a great show, like Billy Crystal did throughout the Nineties, you get maybe a day or two of positive press before everyone forgets about it. But if you bomb like David Letterman in 1994, people talk about it for decades. If you doubt us here, please quote a single Billy Crystal joke from any of his telecasts. Now, do you remember Letterman’s Uma-Oprah bit? We bet you do. But Letterman owes the Oscars a bouquet of flowers for asking James Franco to host alongside Anne Hathaway in 2010. The pairing was so painfully awkward and unfunny that few critics now point to Letterman as the worst host in history. From the minute Franco walked onstage, he looked embarrassed to be there. The more that Hathaway tried to make up for his droopy demeanor with relentless perkiness, the worse it all got. “It was like the world’s most uncomfortable blind date,” Oscars writer David Wild told The Ringer, “between the cool rocker-stoner kid and the adorable theater-camp cheerleader.” 

When your show is called Laverne & Shirley, it basically goes without saying that you need both Laverne and Shirley to make it work. But when Cindy Williams, who played Shirley on the hugely successful Seventies sitcom, became pregnant during the eighth season, the producers insisted that she work straight through her pregnancy, even on her actual due date. She filed a $20 million lawsuit that was eventually settled out of court, and the vast majority of the show’s last season was shot without her. This was a good time to start a new show called Laverne, but they stubbornly stuck to the original name. This would be like Art Garfunkel releasing solo albums under the name Simon and Garfunkel. The whole thing was just ridiculous on its face. 

Hardcore Simpsons fans have now spent decades arguing over the precise moment when the show’s golden age ended and its long descent into mediocrity began. Many of them point to the Season Nine episode “The Principal and the Pauper,” where we learn that Principal Seymour Skinner is actually an imposter named Armin Tamzarian. The real Skinner (voiced by Martin Sheen) spent two decades in a Chinese sweatshop after the Vietnam War, though he was presumed dead. The town ultimately decides that they prefer the fake Skinner to the real one, who they send out of Springfield tied to a train car. A judge decrees that nobody will be allowed to acknowledge what happened under “penalty of torture.” This allowed Springfieldians to carry on like nothing happened, but fans were horrified by the reveal. It felt like the very fabric of the Simpsons universe was being ripped apart. They complained bitterly on Simpsons Usenet groups that the show was now terrible, and they’ve basically been screaming that ever since.

When Friends ended in 2004 after a ludicrously successful 10-year run, NBC was not in a great place. Seinfeld was done, ER was on its last legs, and Will and Grace was winding down. The impulse to create a Friends spinoff under these circumstances is very easy to understand. NBC pulled that same maneuver a little more than a decade earlier when it spun-off Fraser from Cheers, giving the network another 11 years of success from that franchise. And if Joey Tribbiani was paired with characters as memorable as Niles, Daphne, and Roz, maybe it could have worked. But he was paired up with his older sister, a nephew, and a ditzy neighbor. The chemistry simply wasn’t there, the laughs weren’t either, and the show did little but make viewers miss the old Friends gang. Joey was canceled after two seasons. It cost NBC a fortune, and the only real winner was Matt LeBlanc. “I made $30 million,” he said years later. “I’d like another one of those failures.”

Fox News turned Megyn Kelly into a superstar, but behind the scenes she was was forced to endure sexual harassment from CEO Roger Ailes and the wrath of Donald Trump and his supporters when she refused to go 100 percent MAGA early in the 2016 GOP primary. She’d simply had enough of the place by January 2017, and jumped ship for NBC days before Trump took the oath of office. NBC had big plans for her, including a daytime talk show and Sunday-evening newsmagazine. It was also going to add her into the mix during major news events. The arrangement was a fiasco almost from day one. Her softball interview with right-wing conspiracy grifter Alex Jones drew shock and outrage, ratings were anemic, and many critics felt she simply didn’t jell with the other anchors. And then she walked into a buzz saw in October 2018, when she seemingly defended the use of blackface on Halloween. “When I was a kid, that was OK as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character,” she said. “I don’t know how that got racist on Halloween.” The show was canceled and NBC terminated her contract a couple of months later, but it had to pay out the remainder of her $69 million deal. 

Like every high school-centric show before it, Glee faced a major dilemma when its characters reached graduation age. Taking a page from the Archie comics and keeping them forever 17 would have made no sense, but it would have been ridiculous to send them all to the same college Boy Meets World-style. Since you can’t have Glee without a glee club, the show ultimately decided to follow the OG Glee crew as they navigated college and bring in a new group of high school singers for Mr. Schuster to teach. The result was an enormous cast of characters and an absurd number of overlapping storylines spanning across the entire country. Ratings plummeted the second Glee kicked off this incarnation of the show, and it wisely put the focus back solely on the original cast.

Sports is one of the few unifying institutions in America where people from all backgrounds come together and political divisions largely vanish. That’s why it was so baffling in 2003 when ESPN felt that Rush Limbaugh would make a good football commentator. When the news first hit, he promised that he’d leave his political views to his radio show and focus entirely on the sport. Just weeks into the job, however, he shared his views on Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb. “I think what we’ve had here is a little social concern in the NFL,” he said. “The media has been very desirous that a Black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn’t deserve. The defense carried this team.” In other words, McNabb was being allowed to coast because of his race and receiving praise and credit he didn’t deserve. The uproar was immediate, and Limbaugh resigned within three days. “The great people at ESPN did not want to deal with this kind of reaction,” Limbaugh said. “The path of least resistance became for me to resign.”

Chris Licht made a lot of bad decisions during his one-year tenure as CEO of CNN, including the infamous Trump town hall, but perhaps none were more disastrous than his decision to move anchor Don Lemon from his evening slot to co-host CNN This Morning alongside Kaitlin Collins and Poppy Harlow. Morning shows are all about chemistry, and it was instantly clear that Lemon wasn’t popping with Collins and Harlow. Things came to a head on Valentine’s Day of 2023, when Nikki Haley’s presidential run came up. “Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime, sorry,” Lemon said. “When a woman is considered to be in her prime — in her twenties, thirties, and maybe her forties.” The “maybe” in that sentence is pretty amazing, since the Constitution requires that the president be at least 35. By the Lemon standard, women have a mere five-year window to secure the presidency in their “prime.” “Don’t shoot the messenger,” Lemon said when his co-anchors pushed back. “I’m just saying what the facts are. Google it.” The misogyny of the statement is hard to fathom, and no apology was going to undo it. He was fired two months later. Licht himself was pushed out three months after that. There were many reasons Licht lost his job, but the whole “let’s try Lemon in the mornings” thing was certainly one of them. 

The fourth season of Arrested Development, which was created for Netflix in 2013, seven years after Fox canceled the show, brings to mind Jeff Goldblum’s famous line from the original Jurassic Park: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” The scientists in this case were executives at a streaming platform desperate to satiate hordes of Arrested Development fans who wanted to see their beloved Bluths again. But the stars of Arrested Development were all busy with other projects by this point, meaning they wouldn’t be able to appear on set together for more than a couple of days. To get around this, Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz put together a convoluted story arc where individual episodes focus largely on single characters. The whole thing takes place during just a few days, and key moments are seen from several different perspectives, with a heavy reliance on green-screen technology. This was the only way to make the season possible, but it was confusing and simply not very funny. The joy of the show is watching these brilliant comedic actors work together. It falls almost completely apart when they are separated. Hurwitz realized this in 2018 and completely recut it as Season 4 Remix: Fateful Consequences, but there was no salvaging this mess.

It’s easy to understand why the 11-person sketch comedy troupe the State decided to leave MTV for CBS in late 1995. The cable network paid them ludicrously low salaries that forced them to file for unemployment between seasons. And after spitting out four seasons in less than two years, they were drained and ready for a new challenge. But MTV gave them enough free rein to create deranged characters like the Inbred Brothers, Blueberry Johnson, and the Bearded Men of Space Station 11. This is back when MTV was willing to broadcast trippy content like Æon Flux, The Head, and Liquid Television. CBS, meanwhile, was the home of Murphy Brown, Chicago Hope, and Murder, She Wrote. CBS may have briefly felt like it needed to get into the sketch-comedy game, but The State was a very odd fit. The network canceled the show after airing a single Halloween special on a Friday night. “The CBS special was, ultimately, the beginning of the end of the State as far as us getting paid and working on a show together,” State member Ken Marino said in the book The Union of the State. “It was the beginning of us starting to either vocally realize or in the back of our head realize that we’re probably all going to have to get other jobs because there was no place to go.”

Imagine you’re running a TV network in 1998. You get pitched a goofy show about a Black British nobleman in the 1860s that comes to America and works for Abraham Lincoln in a bizarre horny version of the White House, where the president has “telegraph sex” and dresses in drag to escape the Confederate army. You’d probably throw them out of your office and ban them from the studio lot for life. But the fine people at UPN saw this as a clever way to parody the Bill Clinton administration at the peak of Monica-gate. Nine episodes were shot. Five were aired. UPN President Dan Valentine lost his job. It is remembered today only as an example of just how shitty television got before The Sopranos arrived and changed everything.

As Larry David has said many times over the years, the unofficial mantra in the Seinfeld writers room was “no hugging, no learning.” In other words, there was nothing sentimental about the show. The characters never showed any genuine affection toward one another, and they never learned a damn thing. As the series finale argued, they were actually four complete sociopaths who belonged in prison. But this took this a little too far in the Season Seven finale, when George’s fiancée Susan — a character that had been in their world since the third season — dies after licking cheap wedding invitations. The news of this tragedy is greeted by little more than a shrug by the main characters, and George uses it as an opportunity to try to score a date with Marisa Tomei before Susan is even buried. For many fans of Seinfeld, this was too much. There was such a fierce backlash that the writers placed George on a charitable-foundation board in Susan’s honor the next season, so he’d be forced to reckon with the aftermath of her death in at least some fashion.

When you start writing a story, it’s good to have at least some idea where it’s going to end. That’s especially true when your story involves a group of people trapped on a remote island with polar bears, a “smoke monster,” another band of lost people, and the ability to travel through time. We’re talking, of course, about Lost. The ABC show kept its obsessed followers on their toes by introducing one fantastical plot device after another. They gathered on Reddit and other online forums to analyze every second of the show like it was the Zapruder film, convinced the convoluted story arc would eventually build to a finale where everything would be tied together. When that finale finally came in 2010, it ended with nearly all of the characters in a church that appears to be somewhere in the afterlife. Many of the central mysteries were left unresolved. To put it mildly, fans felt cheated. Their anger only grew when the writers admitted they were essentially making up the show as it went along, and had no clue how all their plotlines fit together. The blowback has managed to taint the legacy of the entire show. TV writers, take note: If you’re going to introduce a bunch of mysteries, be sure to solve them at some point down the line. Don’t leave everyone in purgatory like the people on Lost.

The Brady Bunch was canceled in 1974 after five seasons, but it went into syndication the following year and enjoyed a Star Trek-like renaissance for a generation of fans who weren’t around for the original run. This led to many attempts to bring the show back over the past 50 years, including the 1981 sitcom The Brady Brides, the 1988 TV movie A Very Brady Christmas, the 1990 dramatic series The Bradys, and the 2019 HDTV reality show A Very Brady Renovation. The first one came in 1976 when ABC unleashed The Brady Bunch Hour on the world. This was the peak of the variety-show boom, when Donny and Marie Osmond were minting money for the network, and even one-hit wonders like the Starland Vocal Band were given shows. The problem is that Donny and Marie and the Starland Vocal Band could sing. This was not the case for many members of the Brady family, especially Robert Reed and Christopher Knight. Eve Plumb had a decent voice, but she didn’t sign on for this ill-fated project and was replaced by a ringer, Geri Reischl. The show lasted a mere nine episodes, and you truly need to go on YouTube to revisit the horror of this thing. They sing songs by the Beatles, the Who, and Billy Joel, break out their best disco moves, and invite guest stars like Rick Dees, Elton John, Rip Taylor, and Milton Berle to join in on the madness. If anyone ever argues that television was better in the Seventies, show them any random 90 seconds of this show. They’ll change their mind fast.

Many of the most successful sitcoms of the Seventies were spinoffs, including The Jeffersons, Maude, Good Times, Rhoda, and Laverne & Shirley. And when Three’s Company became an enormous hit for ABC, the producers floated the idea of creating a new show around the nosy landlords the Ropers. This meant removing actors Norman Fell and Audra Lindley from a guaranteed hit (and payday) for a show that might fail and leave them unemployed. To quell those concerns, Fell and Lindley were promised they could return to Three’s Company if their new show, The Ropers, was canceled in less than a year. In the meantime, Don Knotts was brought on as the new landlord on Three’s Company. The Ropers hung around for a season and a half despite dismal ratings. By the time the network yanked it, the one-year mark had passed and Fell and Lindley weren’t invited back to Three’s Company. Fell later said he felt ABC purposely kept The Ropers on the air just long enough to make sure it didn’t need to bring them back. Whatever the truth is, it’s a good life lesson: If you have a great thing going, don’t risk it by looking for something even better.

As the latest season of Star Trek: Picard proved, Dr. Beverly Crusher is a key part of the Star Trek: The Next Generation family. But back in 1988, after just one season of the original show, the producers fired her. Viewers were simply told that she’d been promoted to the head of Starfleet Medical, even though her teenage son, Wesley, was going to stay aboard the Enterprise. Actress Diana Muldaur was brought in as Dr. Katherine Pulaski to replace her, but there wasn’t a Trekkie on Earth happy with the switch. With a little help from Patrick Stewart, the producers brought McFadden back for Season Three. And it’s not a coincidence that’s also the precise moment the show became truly great. Her will they/won’t they dynamic with Picard fueled many of the show’s best episodes. Let’s just not talk about the one where she was seduced by a haunted candle. Even the best shows can still misfire every once in a while.

The first season of HBO’s Westworld in 2016 was a fun adaptation of Michael Crichton’s 1973 science-fiction Western of the same name. Wealthy tourists in the future visited a Western-themed amusement park filled with hyper-realistic robots. The visitors abused the machines in every way possible and a rebellion quietly brewed. Tiny Easter eggs were planted throughout the season that pointed to a major plot development down the line, like the fact that the two storylines take place decades apart. Still, fans on Reddit flagged all of them. For the second season, the writers put together a plot so convoluted and confusing that the combined mental power of every nerd on the internet couldn’t possibly crack it. The only problem was that virtually nobody else understood what was happening either. The ratings plummeted, online recaps grew to absurd lengths, and most fans simply gave up. HBO limped forward with two more seasons, but it was hopeless. The original viewers never came back. You shouldn’t have to read seven different articles to understand the show you just watched.

Many great shows have thrived after the defection of a major cast member, including Cheers, NYPD Blue, Two and a Half Men, and A Different World. The Office is not one of these shows. After Steve Carrell left near the end of the seventh season, the show tried to soldier on by promoting Ed Helms’ character and bringing in James Spader as the new owner of Dunder Mifflin. This led to two dismal, laugh-free seasons of the show that many fans simply skip whenever they engage in a rewatch. In the words of one Office writer, Michael Scott was a “load-bearing character” and The Office simply couldn’t stand without him. 

It’s impossible to pinpoint exactly how much money Baywatch generated throughout its 11-season run, but it’s definitely in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s quite possibly north of a billion dollars when you factor in merch and broadcasts all across the planet. A great deal of that money could have gone to NBC, but it canceled the show in 1989 after just a single season due to low ratings and horrific reviews. David Hasselhoff knew the show had a winning formula and managed to secure a syndication deal for the it. Pamela Anderson joined in the third season, ratings skyrocketed, and it was soon broadcast in more than 140 countries. NBC came within an inch of canceling Seinfeld the same year, even though it took the network nearly a year after the pilot to air the last episode. But at least NBC held onto it. It wasn’t as smart when it came to Baywatch.

The internet has decimated attention spans to the point where many people don’t have the patience for videos longer than the quick hits you see on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. That’s why Jeffrey Katzenberg felt a subscription streaming platform built around short-form videos roughly 10-minutes in length would be a big hit. He managed to raise an astounding $1.75  billion for Quibi, which launched in April 2020 with a massive library featuring 175 different shows. It’s very hard to imagine worse timing. This was the first full month of Covid lockdowns. People had endless time on their hands and they were hungry for long-form content they could watch on TV, not short-form content built for their phones. Quibi sputtered along until December before it pulled the plug and sold off its catalog to Roku for less than $100 million. Quibi might as well have taken a billion dollars and thrown it into a bonfire.

David Caruso had been knocking around Hollywood for 15 years, taking bit roles on shows like CHiPS, T.J. Hooker, and Hill Street Blues, before he landed the role of Detective John Kelly on the first season of NYPD Blue. The gritty show was an enormous hit from day one, and it ran for 12 seasons. Had Caruso stuck around for the full run of the show, he’d be an obscenely wealthy man right now. But he quit when the second season had barely started because ABC balked at his request for a big raise. He also thought he would become a big movie star, but his decision to kick things off with Kiss of Death and Jade — two obscenely awful movies that earned him dual Golden Raspberry Award nominations — forever ended that dream. He eventually crawled back to TV and had a 10-season run on CSI: Miami, but his story serves as the ultimate Hollywood cautionary tale: When you finally get your big break, be grateful.

More than 100 million votes were cast for president in 2000, but it all came down to the state of Florida. And after weeks of vicious battles, George W. Bush was declared the winner by a mere 537 votes. That’s a margin of just .009 percent. There was no possible way for the networks to have any idea who won the state on election night using mathematical projections. That didn’t stop them from initially naming Al Gore the victor, and then reversing the call and handing it to Bush. That gave W a huge advantage heading into the recounts, since it seemed like Gore was trying to deny him his rightful win when it was truly a tie. Liberals will forever feel cheated by the outcome of the 2000 election, and conservatives will forever feel that the right man won. What’s certain is that the networks had no business calling Florida on election night. It was the definition of “too close to call.”

When Vince Gilligan wrote the pilot for Breaking Bad, he initially pitched it to TNT. “They say, ‘If we bought this, we’d be fired,’” Gilligan recalled. “‘We cannot put this on TNT, it’s meth, it can’t be meth, it’s reprehensible.’” He then went over to HBO. “The woman we [were] pitching to [at HBO] could not have been less interested,” he said. “Not even in my story, but about whether I actually lived or died.” Showtime turned it down because the premise felt too similar to Weeds, but FX actually did agree to buy it. The deal didn’t last long since it felt it had too many other dark shows about antiheroes. “Look, it was a wonderful script,” FX President John Landgraf said several years later. “If I had known Vince Gilligan was going to be one of the best showrunners in television, and Breaking Bad was going to be literally one of the very best shows in television, I would have picked it up despite the concept. But the truth of the matter is, anybody who does what I do for a living, who’s honest, will tell you that you’re making decisions based on too-little information all the time, and you make good ones and you make bad ones.”

When TV historians look back at the late-night talk scene of 1993, much attention is paid to the kickoff of Late Night with Conan O’Brien and the start of the bitter war between Jay Leno and David Letterman in the 11:30 p.m. slot. In the middle of all that, however, one of the great belly-flops in talk-show history took place when Fox gave Chevy Chase his own late show. Chase was one of the biggest comedy stars of the Eighties, but his last couple of movies (Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Nothing But Trouble) were epic bombs that forced him to recalibrate. As anyone who remembers the original Weekend Update on SNL can attest, Chase can be hilarious as a mock newscaster. But as a real-life talk-show host, he reeked of desperation and flop sweat. The Chevy Chase Show booked great guests like Martin Short, Dennis Hopper, Dan Aykroyd, and Robert De Niro, but Chase was a hapless interviewer and nothing about the show worked. “His Tuesday-night debut was the sort of disaster TV fans will recall for their grandchildren,” Time wrote in a brutal takedown. “Nervous and totally at sea, Chase tried everything, succeeded at nothing.” Fox mercifully pulled the plug after just six weeks.

Conan O’Brien’s 12:30 a.m. NBC show got off to a very rocky start in 1993, and he teetered on the verge of cancellation for several months. But once the show found its footing and ratings surged, the network faced a pretty serious long-term problem. Much like David Letterman before him, it was inevitable that O’Brien would ultimately want to take over The Tonight Show at some point. In 2002, he signed a contract extension that promised him the 11:35 p.m. slot once Jay Leno stepped down. That was amended in 2004 to say he’d get it by 2009. “Conan, it’s yours!” Leno told his audience after the news became public. “See you in five years, buddy!” Once those five years passed, Leno had no interest in giving up his gig. After Leno threatened to battle O’Brien on another network at 11:30 p.m., NBC gave Leno a nightly 10 p.m. slot. For all intents and purposes, he was moving The Tonight Show 90 minutes earlier. O’Brien would have the job in name only. This setup was doomed from the very beginning, and NBC wound up booting O’Brien after 7 months and moving Leno back to his old time slot. NBC had a rough situation on its hands from the very beginning, but it handled it in the most ham-fisted manner imaginable.

Most attempts to reboot old sitcoms in recent years haven’t worked out too well. The revivals of Mad About You and Murphy Brown were so brief that many fans didn’t even realize they existed in the first place. The 2018 reboot of Roseanne was a huge exception. A stunning 17.7 million people watched the premiere episode of the new season, and viewership remained near those astronomical numbers for the next few weeks, making it the single-most-watched show of the year. After years in the wilderness, Roseanne Barr was back on top. All she had to do was keep churning out new episodes and not say anything in public that would force ABC to fire her. Well, guess what happened? Two months into the run of the show, she Tweeted that Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett looked like the “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby.” The appallingly racist tweet gave ABC no choice but to let her go from her own show. It carried on as The Connors and is still running to this day, defying all expectations that Roseanne Minus Roseanne could never work. But it would be Roseanne With Roseanne if only she’d kept off Twitter. 

There have been a lot of talented Weekend Update anchors over the five-decade history of Saturday Night Live — including Chevy Chase, Dennis Miller, Kevin Nealon, Seth Meyers, and the teams of Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, and Colin Jost and Michael Che — but none of them brought the funny like Norm Macdonald. If you need proof, check out YouTube montages of his O.J. Simpson quips. He pounded Simpson throughout the entire murder trial, and it somehow never grew stale. “Well, it is finally official,” he said after the former football star was acquitted. “Murder is legal in the state of California.” The bit worked for nearly every viewer of the show besides the one that truly mattered: NBC West Coast division President Don Ohlmeyer, who happened to be an extremely close friend of Simpson. He begrudgingly put up with Macdonald’s O.J. jokes during the trial, but he lost his mind when Macdonald kept making references to Simpson in the months that followed. Midway through the 1997-98 season, he fired Macdonald from Weekend Update. “Lorne’s point at the time was, just do it for the rest of the season and we’ll make a change in the summer,” Ohlmeyer recalled in the SNL oral history Live From New York. “And he probably was right.” Neither of them were right. They should have kept Macdonald in that chair for the remainder of his natural life. Kicking him out was an absolute travesty.

Here’s a list of television shows that Fox decided to bring onto its airwaves in 1999: the Jay Mohr Hollywood satire Action (canceled after eight episodes), the shameless Who Wants to Be a Millionaire knockoff Greed (canceled before it could even give out the grand prize), and the Chris Carter-produced science fiction show Harsh Realm, about humans trapped in a virtual simulation (canceled after nine episodes). Here’s the name of a show they rejected after reading a script for the pilot: The Sopranos. This gave HBO the opportunity to pick up the show, creating an entirely new era of television where networks like Fox became hopelessly passé. The shift of quality programming from broadcast TV to cable and eventually streaming would have likely happened anyway, and The Sopranos probably wouldn’t have worked on Fox, but it was still an enormous mistake for the network to turn down arguably the greatest show in the history of television. (CBS was willing to take a chance on David Chase’s ambitious project, but it wanted to ditch the psychiatry angle.)

Before NBC put The Apprentice on the air in 2004, Donald Trump was little more than a punchline. His real-estate ventures were hemorrhaging cash and his attempt at starting an Atlantic City casino empire had ended in bankruptcy. If he’d simply placed the massive inheritance he received from his father in the bank and let the interest grow over the years, he would likely have been much better off financially. But thanks to NBC and the work of Australian reality-TV kingpin Mark Burnett, The Apprentice transformed Trump into a genius-level titan of big business in the minds of countless TV viewers. The fact that the whole thing was a charade mattered not one tiny iota. The Apprentice was NBC’s biggest hit for several years. It played a huge role in setting the stage for his successful 2016 run for the presidency. Along the way, NBC let him host Saturday Night Live and appear on Jimmy Fallon’s couch, where he received a playful hair tussle from the host. MSNBC has spent the past eight years pounding Trump every single night. If it wants to look for the root cause of his political career, however, it just need to peek down the hall to the entertainment division of its parent company. This is on them.

Few shows in TV history captured the agony of adolescence better than Freaks and Geeks. Series creator Paul Feig drew inspiration from his own childhood in suburban Michigan, and in one of the greatest casting moves in Hollywood history, thanks to industry legend Allison Jones, brought together Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jason Segel, Martin Starr, Busy Phillips, Linda Cardellini, Samm Levine, and John Francis Daley when they were all completely unknown. But despite incredible reviews and an average weekly viewership that hovered around 6 million, NBC pulled the plug before they could even air all the episodes they shot for the first season. If a show wasn’t pulling in Friends-like numbers, the network simply wasn’t interested. A huge cult has grown around Freaks and Geeks over the past two decades, along with questions about where the show could have gone in Seasons Two, Three, and beyond that we’ll never be able to answer.