These aspiring mega-stars were really going places — before one flip comment, brash action,
or untimely revelation stopped their careers in their tracks. Maybe it's just a little mistake,
but add live TV to the mix, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
German R&B and dance pop duo Milli Vanilli rose to prominence at the end of the eighties with
crossover hits such as "Girl You Know It's True" and "Blame it on the Rain," selling
millions of records, and earning the duo the trophy for best new artist at the 1990 Grammys.
But to anyone paying close attention, the group's musical chops didn't hold up. First,
the guys' voices didn't quite sound like their recordings, prompting questions from
the press. But the moment that destroyed their careers happened live, well, live on tape. The
duo performed "Girl You Know It's True" when the backing track began to skip — revealing
Milli Vanilli wasn't actually singing at all. MTV recorded the entire concert live with the
intention of playing it back at a later date, but the record skipping altered that plan slightly.
"Girl you know it’s, Girl you know it’s, Girl you know it’s…"
In a media blitz, the duo were labeled as frauds, lawsuits were filed, and fans
demanded refunds for albums. Their Grammy was revoked, and they never performed again.
With an untested cast under the guidance of new producer Jean Doumanian, the 1980 to 81 season of
SNL started badly and got worse. The show dragged on throughout the winter as a national joke — its
own sketches displaying a sharp awareness of its declining quality. A historic low was reached in
the 11th episode of the season, when cast member Charles Rocket dropped the F-bomb.
"It's the first time I've ever been shot in my life. I'd like to know who the f–k did it."
It was the last straw for the studio, which began cleaning house promptly after the episode aired.
But Rocket actually came dangerously close to sinking the entire show. NBC also fired Doumanian,
and SNL went off the air for a month. By the time it returned, the show had replaced most
of its writing staff and was in the process of purging every single one of its cast members,
except Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy — the sole survivors of a disastrous era.
On New Zealand's version of The X Factor, one singer-turned-judge definitely crossed
the line. British singer Natalia Kills lit into contestant Joe Irvine in 2015.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I’m just gonna state the obvious. We have a doppelgänger in our midst"
Kills essentially accused him of copying his act and persona from her own husband,
singer Willy Moon, who was also sitting on the panel as a judge.
The intensity of Kills' disgust turned off viewers in droves,
and both Kills and Moon were soon removed from the judging panel. For his troubles,
Irvine reportedly received consolations and cupcakes from fellow singer Lorde,
but he told the New Zealand Herald in 2016 that he's still traumatized.
Comic Doug Williams found himself in the hot seat
at Shaq's All Star Comedy Roast of football player Emmitt Smith.
Following an introduction by host Jamie Foxx, Williams' set started slowly,
but about three jokes in, Foxx began sniping at the comic,
mocking Williams' punchlines and all but telling him to get off of the stage.
"Where is he right now. We're here for Emmitt Smith. Do you have any jokes for him tonight?"
Foxx later defended his actions, calling his barrage, quote, "very dark liquor-induced."
While the production wasn't broadcast live,
there were no second takes for Williams. His bomb of a set lives forever online.
The first day on a new job is always stressful, especially if your job subjects you to the
scrutiny of everyone who might be tuned into the Bismarck local news. Aspiring young broadcaster,
AJ Clemente, let his anxiety get the best of him, right off the bat.
"F–king s–t"
Clemente was promptly fired from the station and supposedly hasn't helmed a broadcast since.
During the 2004 presidential election, Democratic contenders lined up for the
chance to contest Republican incumbent George W. Bush for the White House. Vermont governor
Howard Dean had an impressive lead over opponents Dennis Kucinich and John Kerry in early polls. But
as the race went on and Kerry closed the gap, the margin for error got smaller and smaller.
Chastened by a rough showing at the Iowa caucuses, Dean addressed a crowd with
a rousing speech, making big promises to supporters. And then this happened:
*scream*
The media destroyed him. Any chances his campaign even had of coming back, were terminally derailed.
*scream*
But at least it gave us this classic Dave Chappelle moment:
"And then I'm coming to all the way to Washington DC to take back the White House, BYEOOAAAHWWWW"
Ashlee Simpson, the punk rock little sister of singer Jessica Simpson,
was on her way up when she booked a spot on Saturday Night Live in October
2004. Her first album, Autobiography, had recently debuted to commercial success,
with significant radio play for her singles "Shadow" and "Pieces of Me."
But when the performance experienced a technical hiccup, it exposed a fatal flaw in Ashlee's
act — she wasn't actually singing live. When the vocal track being pumped into the studio was for
a different song than what her band had started playing, she danced an awkward jig before leaving
the rest of her band stranded on stage. She later blamed the rest of her team for the snafu.
"I feel so bad my band started playing the wrong song."
Eventually, she took responsibility for the lip-syncing debacle. However,
she blamed her decision against singing live on a variety of health
issues ranging from severe acid reflux to exhaustion, depending on the interview.
"I had a vocal problem. I had two nodes beating against each other,
and I woke up and I had no voice."
Regardless, the backlash hit hard. During her performance at the 2005 Orange Bowl,
her live vocals were drowned out by a thunderous roar of boos. Her follow-up album, I Am Me,
sold roughly a third of the copies in the United States that her debut did.
Immediately after the lip-sync incident, which garnered national news coverage, the spell of
her success was broken. Her fans turned on her, and her music career never recovered.
As far as Saturday Night Live screw-ups go, it's hard to mess up more than Jenny Slate. She's a
successful actor and comedian now, but in 2009 she was still an up-and-comer — one who managed
to land a coveted role as a writer-performer on Saturday Night Live. In her very first appearance
as a cast member on the show, performing in a sketch she wrote called Biker Chick Chat,
Slate flubbed her line fantastically, accidentally dropping the F bomb on live TV.
"You stood up for yourself, and I f–king love you for that."
The star wasn't immediately let go but departed at the end of her
first season. In a feature she wrote for Glamour titled "How to Survive
a Screwup at Work," Slate revealed that the experience was hard on her, writing,
"It took me a few years to get back to myself. I developed stage fright."
Slate added that she's never watched a clip of the incident, and frankly, we don't blame her.
Her time at Saturday Night Live may have ended in flames, but the actor certainly bounced back.
Slate has since appeared in scene-stealing roles in Parks and Recreation and more.
Not all publicity is good publicity, as Fergie discovered when her rendition of the national
anthem quickly went viral for all the wrong reasons in 2018. She had been invited to
perform at the NBA All-Star Game in Los Angeles' Staples Center and decided to sing a slowed-down
version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" with seemingly improvised riffs and rhythms.
"Let's play some basketball!"
Footage of the controversial vocal performance quickly went viral,
showing basketball players and audience members trying not to laugh. An observer told People,
"Everyone was just trying to figure out what was going on. Like, was she about to break out
into a different song? Then she started doing all those ranges and it just went downhill."
Shaquille O'Neal defended her performance during
the game's halftime report, praising the singer for taking a different approach,
while Charles Barkley quipped that he wanted a cigarette afterward.
The backlash was so severe that Fergie had to issue a formal apology so that nobody
thought she had deliberately committed an act of treason.
"She sounded like a drunk girl doing karaoke."
In a statement published by People magazine, she said,
"I've always been honored and proud to perform the national anthem and last night I wanted to
try something special for the NBA. I'm a risk taker artistically, but clearly this
rendition didn't strike the intended tone. I love this country and honestly tried my best."
As electric as the Saturday Night Live stage can be in the hands of a seasoned performer,
Studio 8H has proven to be a brutal testing ground for new artists. For proof, look no
further than the one-two punch of Lana Del Rey and Karmin performing on the show in 2012. At
the time of their respective performances, both artists were up-and-comers, with Del Rey in the
process of launching her first major album, and Karmin coming off of a successful string of viral
song covers on YouTube. After their performances, both were throttled in the media for bombing as
musical guests, but their careers proceeded in very different ways. Del Rey honed her persona
and stage presence and found continued success, while Karmin soldiered on down a road to nowhere.
What was the difference? While Del Rey was knocked for looking lost on stage,
the duo of Karmin faced criticism for their entire act. While The
AV Club described their performance as unpleasant, Uproxx simply sniped,
"Awful. [...] Every time the singer rapped, a little part of me died."
Today, the Karmin project is apparently dead, since they rebranded in 2017 to
form an R&B hip-hop project called Qveen Herby. Under this new persona,
vocalist Amy Heidemann released a debut album in 2021 and is still putting out EPs.
In 2013, Robin Thicke might have taken over the charts with his breakout hit "Blurred Lines,"
but he quickly faced backlash over the song's creepy lyrics. Following the singer's infamous
VMAs performance with Miley Cyrus, Thicke's name became more associated with controversy than his
music career. While the 20-year-old former Disney star was accused of cultural appropriation and of
being a bad role model, the man who had been grinding on her was labeled a chauvinist.
"People ask me, you know, 'do you twerk?' I go, 'Listen, I'm the twerkee, I'm twerked upon.'"
Thicke's downfall as a singer was pretty swift. The UK's End Violence Against Women Coalition
labeled him their Sexist of the Year for 2013, the sales for his follow-up album Paula — an
attempt to win back his recently estranged wife, Paula Patton — were so abysmal that it quickly
dropped off the radar. Additionally, he also lost a lawsuit over whether "Blurred Lines"
had ripped off an old Marvin Gaye song, costing him and his co-writer Pharrell Williams millions.
In a 2021 Apple Music interview with Zane Lowe, Thicke insisted that the
public love for the controversial song still outweighed the criticism, saying,
"You just kind of take it with a grain of salt."
He went on to claim that "Blurred Lines" still got audiences up on their feet and dancing — his only
true intention with the track. Although his time as a chart-topping artist may have come to an end,
Thicke is still a familiar face thanks to his role as a judge on the show The Masked Singer.
Despite all his years as the anchor of NBC Nightly News,
Brian Williams was suspended and demoted after military veterans spotted holes in
a story he told about his time reporting in Iraq. During a 2015 broadcast, he claimed,
"The helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by
an RPG. Our traveling NBC News team was rescued, surrounded,
and kept alive by an armor mechanized platoon from the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry."
"Two of our four helicopters were hit by ground fire, including the one I was in."
However, members of the 159th Aviation Regiment who had been present in 2003
wrote to the newspaper Stars and Stripes, contending that a different helicopter
had been hit by enemy fire. They claimed that Williams had actually
been traveling in one of the helicopters that had arrived later, and which were unharmed.
During the ensuing backlash, the NBC anchor was accused of lying and stealing glory
from the soldiers who had really been in the helicopter that got hit. Williams told Stars
and Stripes that he had misremembered the event due to his fear, saying,
"I would not have chosen to make this mistake. I don't know what
screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another."
"I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago."
NBC decided to hand their news anchor a suspension of six months after his
public apology failed to quell the outrage and later reassigned him to
MSNBC. He eventually retired from the news channel in December 2021.
If you haven't heard the name Belle Gibson, it's likely for the best. The disgraced health
blogger made a name for herself in the world of wellness with a clean-eating app and subsequent
cookbook called The Whole Pantry. However, she was stopped in her tracks during her media ascendancy
after being caught in a massive, immoral lie. After basing her entire career on the premise
that she was managing her brain cancer and a myriad of other maladies through nutrition,
it was revealed that Gibson had deceived the world about her illness — she was never sick at all.
The accusations against Gibson came to a head during an interview on the Australian version
of 60 Minutes during which Gibson was called to task for her many alleged manipulations.
These included befriending a family with a young boy suffering from cancer in order
to gain first-hand information about what the disease entailed,
taking money meant for charitable purposes and keeping it, and even misrepresenting her age.
The interview was not broadcast live, but there are no second takes when
you're in the hot seat of a news program under studio lights. Gibson's real-time
reactions and deflections were fascinating to behold — she seemingly just couldn't
stop lying — and her interviewer, Tara Brown, let her off the hook for nothing.
"How can we believe anything you say now?"
"Tara, I have lost everything."
In 2004, the nation came together to absolutely crucify Janet Jackson for the heinous crime
of … exposing her nipple to the nation for a fraction of a second during a live halftime
performance with Justin Timberlake at the 38th Super Bowl in Houston. The "wardrobe
malfunction" and ensuing controversy — immortalized in a characteristically
classy fashion by the media as "Nipplegate" — sent Jackson's career into a nosedive.
But several people were allegedly involved in the exposure. Her choreographer had reportedly
promised the performance would be "shocking," and let's not forget it was Timberlake who
actually did the exposing by peeling away a portion of her top. Timberlake's career
flourished after the incident, but Janet's more or less been MIA. It's
a shame — most people on this list ended their careers with self-inflicted wounds,
but in this case, Jackson was just the unlucky entertainer who fell on the sword.
There should be no reason to remember the live New Year's Eve broadcast that aired on Los
Angeles-based KDOC during the final moments of 2012. But people have kept coming back
to this broadcast over the years to relive the memories from that night, because First
Night 2013 was so awful, poorly-done, and off-the-rails that it quickly went viral.
Many scenes find the host, actor Jamie Kennedy, looking lost on stage,
not knowing when the show is live or when the camera is on him. Many of Kennedy's
jokes and skits were criticized as racist and insensitive — further damaging the reputation
of a performer whose career had already been in a downward spiral for more than a decade.
On the technical side, the show was full of dead air,
with cameras on people who weren't ready and hard cuts to commercial.
"Oh, I'm so excited 2013 is here —"
"The jalapeno turkey burger! New at Carl's Jr.!"
The show concluded by screwing up the countdown clock, officially ringing in the New Year later
than everyone else — at which point a small fist fight broke out on-stage.
"There's a fight. It's ending with a fight. It's ending with a fight."
It's a solid gold classic of live TV failure, and has to be seen to be believed.
Nothing short of the End of Days could really end the career of Mariah Carey,
but Queen Mimi has been a punchline since New Year's Eve 2016. The diva closed out the New
Year's Rockin' Eve show in Times Square with a cringe-inducing, non-starter of a performance.
As the music played and her dancers twirled around her, Carey prowled the stage and ran
out the clock, unable to hear and unwilling to sing. All the while, her blaring backing
track called into question how much of a live Mariah performance is the real deal.
"You just don't get any better."
Carey's team and the show's production staff would later blame each other for the audio mishap,
but all of the headlines focused on Carey and her "disastrous performance."