The Worst TV Shows of 2024

There are only so many hours of the day to watch TV, and sometimes, you end up spending those hours watching bad TV. But when we end up compiling these lists, the “worst” TV we’ve seen usually isn’t stuff that knows its bad, reality dreck or network genre stuff that doesn’t try too hard. Those shows tend to end up feeling like guilty pleasures or background noise. The truly bad TV are shows that want to be high-quality entertainment. They think they’re good, or aspire to be good, and just fail for reasons that they, and we, never saw coming. That’s why “Worst” lists always feel so main. We’re like disappointed parents. We had such high expectations.

Now, from three of our critics, comes the tough love.

Matthew Ehrlich

The Perfect Couple–I love a show about a family of rich assholes who think they’re above the law. Who doesn’t? But The Perfect Couple is unclear what kind of rich assholes the Winburys are supposed to be. Unlike Succession, which captures the nuances of dysfunctional wealth, the Winburys are just generically rich—“perfect” in a People Magazine way. Speaking of People Magazine—which, in the PerfectCouple-verse, is still a culturally significant publication—it can’t stop fawning over the Winburys. They’re endlessly referred to as “the perfect couple,” so everyone is shocked when someone is murdered on their property. But would anybody really have been surprised? Haven’t we all read an issue of Vanity Fair?

Nicole Kidman’s character is a bestselling mystery novelist—which doesn’t exactly scream Brahmin elite. At one point, she randomly blurts out—in a previously unheard cockney accent—that she used to be a prostitute. It’s meant to be a shocking twist, but I found myself thinking, “Sure, that tracks.” Meanwhile, Eve Hewson plays a “poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks,” but as Bono’s real-life daughter, she exudes wealth more convincingly than anyone else in the cast.

Nobody Wants This–In this rom-com misfire, Adam Brody plays a cool LA rabbi who needs to marry a Jewish woman to keep his job. Kristen Bell plays a sexually liberated shiksa with a cringey podcast. However, Adam seems perfectly happy with his progressive, attractive Jewish community. So why would he jeopardize everything to date someone who has no interest in spirituality and whose big achievement is producing a shitty podcast? Kristen Bell is cute, but she’s no Ali McGraw circa 1969. The shows tries to justify this with cartoonishly villainous Jewish women, who it portrays as conniving harpies. I guess the writers were hoping that by comparison, Kristen Bell’s character seems like the lesser of two evils.

The Procedural Is Back: Matlock, High Potential and Elsbeth–There are all these crime or legal procedurals on network television centered around a main character who everyone underestimates because of some flaw that turns out to be their greatest asset. In the Matlock reboot, Kathy Bates plays a brilliant lawyer who people dismiss because she’s old and carries hard candies in her purse. But when she turns on her pre-internet folksy charm and tells stories about stealing ketchup packets from restaurants, witnesses open up to her and recall key details! In High Potential, Kaitlin Olson plays a quirky cleaning lady with an unconventional mind that the LAPD uses to solve complicated murders.

And, finally, autistic, astute, and unconventional attorney Elspeth Tascioni—so brilliantly used as a recurring guest star on The Good Wife and The Good Fight. You wanted more of her, right? So did I. Be careful what you wish for. All three shows signal a major regression in television. There’s a new crime every week. They solve it,  every week. The wackiness of the characters add texture, but no depth.

Hacks, Season 3–The show misunderstands what made Joan Rivers, the clear inspiration for Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance, into an icon. Joan thrived by staying relevant, mentoring younger writers, and refusing to apologize. Deborah, by contrast, is dragged into “wokeness” to stay afloat. Cancellation isn’t the death sentence people think it is—Louis CK, Dave Chappelle, and even Ellen are proof. A cancelled Joan Rivers would’ve been polarizing, sure, but she’d still be raking in money on any streaming service smart enough to hire her. Now that’s a show I’d watch.

The Sex Lives of College Girls–This show feels like someone who hasn’t set foot on a college campus in a long time wrote it. Even the title, The Sex Lives of College Girls, sounds like a drugstore novel you’d find at a yard sale. I’m not claiming to know how college girls talk, but I’m pretty sure they don’t sound like Zooey Deschanel circa 2009. The saucy banter between the characters tries hard to crackle with wit, but it rarely lands.

The show doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp on what kind of college Essex is supposed to be. At first, it feels like a traditional Ivy League school—possibly a fictional Dartmouth, since that’s where creator Mindy Kaling went. But then it sometimes resembles a Big Ten university in the South. (Yes, Dartmouth has significant Greek life, but the sororities depicted here feel like something that gets parodied on TikTok.) Other times, Essex seems like a granola, ultra-woke artsy campus like Bard or Sarah Lawrence. It gives the impression that the writers’ room was a mishmash of people reminiscing about wildly different college experiences.

Omar Gallaga

Baby Reindeer – Some people found this show fascinating, dark, and important, I still think it’s absolute shite. Netflix’s adaptation of Richard Gadd’s stage production is icky and soul crushing, even in its shifty portrayal of lead actor and creator Gadd himself. 

Time Bandits – The pieces should have fit better but Taika Waititi’s remake of Terry Gilliam’s messy ‘80s film felt too tied to the current era with a political correcting of past historical events. That probably sounded great on paper. Unfortunately the end product wasn’t funny enough to sustain more than the first few episodes before the charm wore off. This was despite some great work by an unfortunately miscast Lisa Kudrow in the lead.  

House of the Dragon – This show isn’t bad-bad, it’s just frustrating for such a big-budget HBO production. For a show about dragons, incest, and war, it shouldn’t feel so leaden and self-important, even as a smaller-scale follow-up to Game of Thrones. Season Two ended with an anticlimactic To Be Continued… that left fans (and even George R. R. Martin) wanting much, much more. 

Parish – A ghastly waste of Giancarlo Esposito, who plays a high-end taxi driver with a past in the mob. AMC’s boring drama vanished before you probably even heard about it.

The Man with 1000 Kids – A reminder to myself to stop trying Netflix true-crime shows because they are almost always garbage. A Dutch man donates far too much sperm across the world (where does he find the time?) to a variety of banks. Before authorities catch him, he’s the father of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of babies. It’s as messy and sticky as you might imagine. The situation, not the sperm. All right, maybe both.

Neal Pollack

The Acolyte–The Star Wars universe served up an all-time turkey with this ludicrous saga of evil Jedi murdering a coven of virtuous space witches, before running into their most vile archenemy, played by Manny from The Good Place. You heard it here first, or possibly last. Other cast members included Amandla Stenberg, woodenly playing both of a set of twins, the lead from Squid Game, who memorized his lines in English phonetically, Carrie Anne Moss, who dies in the opening scene, and a Jedi Wookie with a ponytail. This is Star Wars as written by writers who found post-Musk Twitter too triggering and workshopped the whole thing on BlueSky. The franchise will never fully recover.

Doctor Who–I have some leftover affection for The Doctor for all the pleasures the Tom Baker years brought to my childhood. The David Tennant and Matt Smith years revived the franchise and made it fun candy viewing for whatever shred of my young self remained. But the franchise has clearly passed me by. I bailed on the female Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, after the first episode, and could only tolerate Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor for three. After an initial David Tennant return that was kind of fun, if excessively woke, the Gatwa episodes were some of the most gratingly horrible in sci-fi TV history, containing mawkish musical numbers and creepy Look Who’s Talking-style “space babies” that were perhaps the lowest point in a franchise full of them.

Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans–Ryan Murphy produces so much TV that you can’t call this a “rare misfire.” But this true-life tale of Truman Capote’s literary betrayal of the rich society ladies he befriended in middle age quickly slides into dull irrelevance. What should have been lurid, fun, and bitchy instead degenerates into something trivial and sordid. The endless time jumps don’t serve the viewer and the narrative. A ghost Jessica Lange as Truman’s mother really distracts. And most ludicrous is a fake Maysles Brothers documentary episode about Capote’s Black and White Ball, which takes a legendary U.S. cultural moment and turns it into something fake-seeming and pointless.

Last Bite Hotel–The Food Network has been cannibalizing itself for years, but this ludicrous show is a real barrel-scraper. Titus Burgess hosts as the owner of a semi-creepy haunted hotel that for some reason is hosting a cooking competition. The competitors are all people we’ve seen on other cooking competitions, and the judges are all people who are contractually obligated to appear on as many Food Network shows as possible. Burgess, doing his best Alan Cumming impression, is actually quite funny, but I’m tired of the Food Network song and dance and would rather eat salmon out of a can while watching old episodes of Julia Child or Jacques Pepin. They were entertaining and personable and actually taught us how to cook.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2–Instead of correcting the narrative mistakes it made in its first season, LOTR doubled and tripled down on them. More backstory, more quests that go nowhere, and more “not explaining who this guy really is.” The narrative is non-linear, the fun is non-existent, the acting is bland, and all the magic and mystery, unlike the elves, have vanished from Middle Earth.