Worst TV Variety Shows Ever

Danny Bonaduce said, "How bad was television in the 1970's? We had a variety show hosted by mimes."

 

Fernwood Tonight was purposely bad and a great parody of talk/variety shows. So rather than dwelling on inexplicably horrible, how about the hilariously horrible....

 

This was really bad.

 

The whole TV variety show business went off a cliff around 1977. I don't think it ever really recovered, unless you count America's Got Talent or something like that.

 

Ho boy! I always forget about Shields & Yarnell until I'm reminded of them and go "oh yeah!" Gotta admit my sister and I were very amused by them, but I was like 7 at the time. According to this article, their show only lasted one season, but they made lots of appearances on other variety and talk shows. They seem like an act that could've had a longer run on Saturday morning TV.
Do you remember Shields and Yarnell?

dan c

 

Newton Minnow warned us. But did we listen?

 

The Black and White Minstrel Show (UK)

 

I remember when they were on the Tonight Show for the first time and Johnny Carson was drooling over whichever one was the woman. He made a comment about how good looking she was and I recall thinking "dude, her husband is sitting right there"!

 

It’s like the western. They were all over TV during its first 20 years. Then we got to the 70s and the genre pretty much died, never to return.

 

Yeah, I've said before that four huge TV genres kind of vanished (or at least went down nearly to zero) from the 1960s and early 1970s:

1) daytime game shows
2) daytime soap operas
3) prime-time Westerns
4) prime-time Musical/Comedy Variety shows

There was a time when there were dozens and dozens of hours of these every day. Hell, there were daily or weekly religious shows and wrestling shows on network in the 1950s. Those still exist today on niche specialty channels, but not on mass-market networks and stations.

 

The TubiTV streaming service has episodes of The Tim Conway Comedy Hour and The Tim Conway Show, which is essentially the same, but sorta different. They are pretty dismal. Neither one lasted more than a handful of episodes, so they were never good, and they probably also haven’t aged well. Same with Pat Paulsen’s Half a Comedy Hour, also on Tubi. And I thought Paulsen was about as funny as funny can get when I originally saw his routines on the Smothers Brothers shows.

 

Movies of the week were once very popular in the 1960s and 1970s; both theatrical and made for television. Reading Marc Cushman’s “These are the Voyages Volume III” it is interesting how CBS friday night movie with titles I vaguely remember was getting 50% of the audience while the third season of ‘Star Trek” on NBC and a law show “Judd for the defense” on ABC were splitting the rest.

 

The Dewey Cox variety show was pretty weak, check out this clip of his cover of Bowie's Starman:

 

Note that their past successes were in co-starring roles. Many of the bits on the Smothers Brothers Variety Hour,in fact,in many a variety show,a few good minutes does not make the entire show. Just around the corner,Laugh-In where jokes happened so quickly that,as they promised in the beginning,if you miss on,just wait for the next one. You didn't see Jackie Gleason order a Joe the Bartender/ Crazy Guggenheim spin-off-a shaggy dog story and an Irish ballad ,Gleason as straight man and go to commercial. In radio days, Jack Benny had his crew of characters keeping the audience wanting more. Fibber McGee & Molly and Duffy's Tavern and many more had success in small moments.
And the host rarely is the person getting the big laughs. Donald Duck drew folks into the theatres but it was Mickey Mouse,originally a plucky adventurer,to be the icon for all things Disney by just being there,letting Goofy & Pluto go nuts.

 

The Finns have a word for it: myötähäpeä

 

you know how some of U.S. embassies are under attack by microwave beams? Why don't we retaliate by broadcasting some of those Brady Bunch variety show clips into the h.q.'s of offending counties?

 

I think that everyone across the political spectrum could agree that these shows are one of the worst forms of psychological torture known to humankind and we should totally use them on our enemies. Especially for interrogations. “tell us what we want to know or we’ll make you watch the montage of the worst Bruce Villanche jokes again!!”

 

Gleason was an interesting example, since he did in fact spin off one of his recurring skits (The Honeymooners, of course) to lasting acclaim. First as the sitcom, and then eventually as a modified variety show. I agree that Gleason’s other characters couldn’t have pulled off the trick. And even so, Gleason was at the center of every version of The Honeymooners.

 

There was a period in the mid 70s to early 80s where some variety shows were taped in Vancouver. These would use Canadian artists and others who were in the b-list. They were all terrible and generic. Although some were done in Toronto most were done here because we are in the same time zone as Hollywood.

You could always tell when a variety show was done in Canada/Vancouver - so many mid shots trying to hide a really small set, Canadian actors taking second banana roles, lots of round lights in the back and inevitably some kind of sports star.

 

WWE Wrestling is carried on Fox on Friday nights. Not everyone's cup of tea, but there is currently a nationally broadcast weekly network wrestling show.

 

OK, that's one. Go check out a 1950s TV Guide and check out the number of wrestling shows that used to be on. I'm just saying.

 

Add to that, Comcast's USA Network has WWE Raw,WWE NXT,American Ninja(an offshoot of similar faux sports) and a Steve Austin reality show.
Rasslin'(sic) did indeed flourish from the beginning of TV. Steve Allen told stories of having to cover pro rasslin' 70+ years ago(it was already a thing),adlibbing names for various maneuvers(Wiki's example has Steve riffing off a whole nelson,to a half-nelson and eventually an Ozzie Nelson).

 

The great writer/TV historian Mark Evanier just submitted this one on his Newsfromme.com website: Peter Lawford trying to be hip and happening by singing "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In"...



Haaaaaaaaaarible. I defy you to even last 20 seconds with this piece of dreck.

 

Also gone are network daytime reruns of prime time shows.

 

Wow. That might just top my previous favorite "Aging Celebrity desperately flailing at relevance" moment, Jerry and son Garry Lewis' "Help" duet from a 1965 Hullabaloo episode.

'60s music/comedy variety shows are a treasure trove of cringe moments like these due to the relatively sudden seismic shifts in popular culture, changes that led to a lot of established entertainers abruptly finding themselves out of step with the times.