Bad Reception

"Since I've only been at this for a little over a year, I met my worst pilot a few months ago: Center of the Universe, set to premiere Wednesday, September 29, on CBS. Despite some talented folks like the bloated John Goodman (who takes beats between lines not for comic effect but to catch his breath), Ed Asner, and Diedrich Bader, it's archetypically formulaic—the Platonic ideal of a setup-joke-setup-joke, laff-tracked offering from the Broadcast Network Joint Committee on Situation Comedy. I have no idea how it will do, but I do know this: It scored better with test audiences than any CBS show in recent memory, including CSI. Which goes a long way toward explaining Two and a Half Men, King of Queens, et al."
—John Cook, Chicago Tribune

"You know how when you ask novelists or movie directors or composers which is their favorite of their own work and they always tediously say, "The one I'm working on"? I always feel that way about bad pilots—the bad pilot I'm watching is absolutely the worst one I've ever seen. But I try not to remember the specifics unless I'm forced to (e.g., I had to pull Daddio up from my mental tar pits when I wrote about Michael Chiklis in The Shield; that hurt), and, luckily, the particular combination of disbelief, boredom, annoyance, and amusement that comes from watching a bad show fades pretty quickly, leaving you a fresh, clean, blank slate for the next bad pilot that comes along."
—Nancy Franklin, The New Yorker

"There are, of course, so many shows that are terrible because they're instantly forgettable. (Mercy Point, anyone?) But the most painful may have been Third Watch, because I was yawningly bored yet I also knew this series wasn't going to go away soon: Some of my colleagues would be fooled into thinking it was Quality TV, and I sensed it would attract that kind of middling, loyal audience that keeps crap on the air for years."
—Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

"The worst pilot I ever saw was Bette Midler's CBS sitcom, Bette. Four years later, I still can't get her awful boogie-woogie rendition of Kid Rock's "Bawitaba" out of my head (and believe me, I've tried). America apparently shared my opinion: The show lasted less than a season."
—Bruce Fretts, TV Guide

"The only way I've survived 10 years in this job is to block out some of the most traumatic memories, though I think I have scars named Meego, girls club, and Inside Schwartz. One of the worst pilots was probably CBS's Bram and Alice, which starred Alfred Molina as a famous writer unexpectedly reunited with a grown daughter (Traylor Howard). The first episode had jokes about incest, mental retardation, and abortion. It was canceled after four weeks."
—Ellen Gray, The Philadelphia Inquirer

"There are so many, it's hard to choose. I really, really hated a Fox show from a couple of years ago called The Grubbs, starring Randy Quaid. The show featured him and the rest of the family basically sitting around burping and farting. The worst part, for me, was that the son was played by Michael Cera, now of Arrested Development, and just after I saw the pilot, I met the entire Cera family at a taping of American Idol. Of course, Mrs. Cera wanted to know what I thought about the show, and I couldn't bring myself to tell her. The show never aired, thank God."
—Marc Peyser, Newsweek

"The worst pilot yet? Probably The Graham Norton Show, which, in spite of my earnest efforts at sabotage, is now doing reasonably well on Comedy Central. But some of the most painful things to slog through have wound up being a blast to write about. The upside of reviewing excruciating shows is that they can serve as, well, good fertilizer for a broader cultural critique."
—Dana Stevens, Slate

"To me, the worst shows are those that have pretensions of being Quality TV, that are not just bad but fundamentally bogus—the Education of Max Bickfords of the world. Top honors go to David E. Kelley's girls club, the 2002 women lawyers' drama he coughed up for Fox after Ally McBeal went off the air. ("Let's see... young woman lawyer... no, three young women lawyers... dealing with gender issues in Boston... no, let's make it San Francisco this time....") It was canceled after something like two episodes. I think it may have had a negative rating, which is what happens when most of your viewers not only turn the show off but actually destroy their TV sets to erase the memory of it."
—James Poniewozik, Time

"A lot of critics will tell you that the worst pilot seen over the last decade was The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer," a UPN comedy in which Chi McBride played a black English butler working for Mary Todd Lincoln in the White House. But drawing on fuzzy, self-protective memory, I would choose another UPN sitcom—Hitz, which starred hate-spewing funny man Andrew Dice Clay as a record producer and asked audiences to believe that women couldn't help falling for him. Even cutting UPN slack for being UPN, Hitz was in really bad taste. The show debuted in 1997 and was canceled in 1997—in the same month. Andrew Dice Clay was never heard from again."
—Kay McFadden, The Seattle Times

"The very worst pilot I ever saw was for an unbelievably tasteless 1998 UPN show called Reunited, which starred Julie Hagerty as a birth mother getting reacqainted with grown daughter Renee Olmstead. This was a sitcom so bad that people got rid of their TVs rather than risk stumbling across it. It was gone in a few weeks. I believe the EPA still considers it a Superfund site."
—Phil Rosenthal, Chicago Sun-Times

"Until this season, almost everything UPN sent out was unbearable and horrendous and life-shortening. They blur together in their cumulative awfulness. Those are hours—days—I'll never get back."
—Tim Goodman, San Francisco Chronicle

Jesse Oxfeld is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com.