2014 was both a very good year for TV and a very bad year for TV. While some shows were smash hits others made you wonder how they even made it on the airwaves. Here is a look at the worst TV shows of the year.
Though Cristela, a new ABC comedy, stars the hilariously funny Cristela in the title role and Gabriel Iglesias as her sidekick, it just hasn’t made a splash with viewers. The fact that it airs on Friday nights may be part of the reason it hasn’t seen more success. Yet viewers have to also take into consideration that many of the show’s jokes are stale, stereotypical, dull or just plain unfunny. The dreaded laugh track does nothing to help the perception that this show is worth watching
The Mysteries of Laura has been one of the year’s biggest disappointments in TV despite the fact that it stars the hugely popular and talented Debra Messing, who many viewers fell in love with during her years as Grace on Will & Grace. While the show is parts comedy and parts drama both parts are too weak to come together to make a quality product. As the title character, Laura struggles through the trials and tribulations of being both a single mother and a detective. While the show was adapted from a Spanish program it just doesn’t seem to translate well to American viewers.
The McCarthy’s is a show that you can’t help wanting to love, in large part because it stars the late John Ritter’s incredibly talented son Tyler.In the role of a gay male that is considering distancing himself from his Irish-Catholic family who are very strict, he should be making his dearly departed father proud, but this show just doesn’t seem to be the right vehicle for it. This star studded show also featured Joey McIntyre (though not the one who had just “The Right Stuff”) and Roseanne’s Laurie Metcalf in the role of Tyler’s character’s mother. This show had a limited audience because a lot of it was centered on professional sports in Boston, which not too many viewers outside of Boston seem to care about. Though the show’s characters were meant to come across as endearing they actually just came off as being an obnoxious family no one wanted to turn on their TV to see.
Scorpion never made a splash with audiences as its pilot airing in the fall of 2014 was not very well received. With the star power of Game of Thrones actor Elyes Gabel this show should have had a built in audience from the beginning. However, that never seemed to be the case. Gabel’s character was a genius with eccentric tendencies who became friends with a single mom/waitress he felt he could relate to. Unfortunately, audiences just couldn’t and TV show quickly went down the tubes.
Based on the popularity of Katherine Heigl (but many within the industry that have worked with her would strongly disagree) you would think that State of Affairs would have resonated with viewers like it perhaps should have. This political drama saw Heigl playing the part of an official with the CIA mourning the death of her fiancé who she watched die. With such an “uplifting” premise it’s no wonder this show never took off. It didn’t help that pretty much no one could identify with the character Katherine Heigl played in this show.
Red Band Society was a 2014 TV show that, in all honesty, probably would have worked better as a movie. The lack of details to explain why the characters were in the position they were in was one of the major drawbacks to this show. The show followed a group of children living in a hospital and wanting to stick together rather than finding separate homes. While it was supposed to tug at the heartstrings of viewers it seemed to just leave most of them bored and uninterested. This lackluster show never achieved the ratings the network hoped it would.
Mulaney was a Fox series that viewers just couldn’t be bothered to get into. The scripts were not written very well and the acting was less than stellar. This supposed comedy just didn’t make viewers laugh, making it one of the worst TV shows of 2014.
Gracepoint was a show based on a UK TV show that starred Doctor Who’s David Tennant. Though Tenant also played the lead role in the U.S. version of the show it just never caught on with viewers. The rest of the cast was weak at best and surprisingly Tennant couldn’t quite carry the show on his own. The show’s plot was never strong enough to get audiences hooked as it had done in the U.K. Though the premise and major details of the U.S. version were the same as the U.K. version the ending was slated to be completely different. However, this still wasn’t enough to get people to watch.
NBC was hoping for a hit with Believe, but unfortunately viewers just didn’t. Either because of, or despite, the fact that Believe was very similar to Firestarter viewers never embraced it. Though the show had an interesting premise and star quality it always lacked something that audiences were looking for.
Manhattan Love Story was a 2014 TV show that couldn’t find itself an audience. Though the premise of the show was the relationship of a newly established couple, viewers never seemed to care. The show featured voice overs that made the whole thing seem like an awkward adult version of The Wonder Years, set in the city that never sleeps. The characters weren’t likeable and the plot wasn’t interesting.
Mystery Girls faced a shaky future right off the bat because the episodes were aired out of sequence, making it nearly impossible to follow the plot. Cursed with bad acting and unknown stars Mystery Girls ended up being a mystery no one cared enough to solve.