Come to Papa is another one to add to our growing pile of shows that never made it past the first month. Viewers hated the NBC show right from the start, and the ratings reflected it. While the name alone is cringe-worthy enough, Come to Papa only gets worse from there. It centers around newspaper employee, Tom Papa, who doesn’t seem to be able to make any friends. In a strange casting decision, NBA star, John Salley, appeared as the mailman; a role in which he proved that all his talent definitely lies in sports. The acting was awkward and uncomfortable to watch, not just from Salley, but from the so-called professionals, too.
Here’s the real kicker: Steve Carell was one of the stars of the failed 2004 show. By now, we bet he’s glad the woeful attempt at comedy was pulled from the air so quickly. At least it means most people won’t remember this embarrassing episode in his career! Come to Papa didn’t even see out a full month, airing from June 3rd to June 24th, 2004.
2002: Hidden Hills
This TV series came from the popular book, Surviving Suburbia. While the day-to-day angst of suburban life was relatable for fans of the book, the TV show failed to carry it off. This was thanks, in large part, to the fact that the producers were too focused on the idea that “sex sells.” They forced sexiness onto all the characters and into all the storylines, in a way that just felt weird against a backdrop of bake sales and softball games. Viewers felt alienated and just didn’t vibe with the show’s attempts at comedy.
With no one buying what Surviving Suburbia was offering, the show ended up on the official fail pile after just a single season. The sitcom started with low ratings and it only went downhill from there, causing NBC to pull out before they’d even aired all the episodes. There are five still stowed away somewhere that no one ever got to see.
2003: Luis
This one copped one of the simplest and most devastating reviews we’ve ever seen. USA Today wasted only a single word in describing the premiere of Luis back in 2003: “Horrific.” Wow. Apparently it was so bad they couldn’t even be bothered explaining why. Well, let us pick up where USA Today left off. While the show’s star, Luis Guzmán is a successful and much-loved comedic actor, somehow his charm just failed to carry across in the show. Headed up by a Puerto Rican actor, the Fox comedy was supposed to play with ethnic stereotypes in a way that was still relatable and heartwarming. However, critics complained that it just made everyone feel awkward, flogging the corpses of failed jokes and rehashing tired stereotypes that just didn’t have any humor in them.
For all its hype, the show was canceled after only managing to squeeze out five episodes. According to New York Daily News, “the pilot script manages to poke fun at more ethnic groups than the average episode of All in the Family, but without any of the wit. Most of the jokes, like most of the characters, just sit there.”
2005: Love, Inc.
Here’s one that had viewers and critics divided. Love Inc. was a 2005 sitcom that centered around matchmakers in charge of a dating service who was having no luck in finding love themselves. It’s the kind of ironic premise that’s perfect for a successful comedy show and, with an ensemble cast that included the talented Busy Philipps, Love Inc. seemed to have all the right stuff. With a multi-ethnic cast, the show was designed to have broad appeal, with all demographics having at least one character they could relate to.
While the sitcom did enjoy a strong fan-base of young Latina women, these Love Inc. lovers weren’t strong enough to hold up the ratings. After just one season, the show was canceled. Critics claimed the stereotypical way in which some ethnicities were presented was at the heart of this failure. The African American characters were reduced to a cliched representation of their culture, and this alienated many viewers.
2005: The War at Home
The War at Home attempted to break into an already saturated market: sitcoms about dysfunctional families. We’ve all seen so many of them that the tropes are tired, and the jokes have been rehashed so many times we can see them coming long before the laugh track tells us we should be reacting to them. To actually make an impression on viewers in this genre, a show would need to do something surprising. Fox’s 2005 attempt at this wasn’t successful. Yet it didn’t even do itself the justice of being an epic failure. Rather, The War at Home dragged on in its mediocrity, not horrendous enough to be desperately pulled from the air in embarrassment, but not good enough for anyone to actually like it. Any ratings it got were probably from people who left the show’s boring but inoffensive noise on in the background while they did other things.
The War at Home was slashed to pieces by critics who hated it for its banality. As a critic for the San Francisco Chronicle explained, “If The War at Home spent more time on good jokes instead of recycling every gimmick ever seen on TV, it might merely be mediocre, but it’s worse.” Entertainment Weekly got in on the attack: “It’s one limp comedy that pretends to be frank and daring about race, gender, and sexual orientation–and instead is glib, tired, and slippery.”