While it brought us classics like Seinfeld and Friends, the 90’s brought us a number
of less-than-spectacular sitcoms. If you’re old enough, perhaps you saw some of them when
they aired. From quickly canceled mistakes to regrettably long-running disasterpieces,
here are the '90s sitcoms that just didn't age well.
My Two Dads barely made the cutoff for the '90s, with a third and final season that aired
in the first spring of the decade. And back then, the premise probably seemed like enough
of a novelty to sell the entire show. You know how a lot of kids are raised by their
dad and their mom? Well, how hard would it blow your mind if you saw a young woman who
was raised by a dad and...a second dad?! Whaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!
“It’s official. We’re parents.”
Unless you're a time traveler from the late '80s, the idea of someone being raised by
two men probably has you wondering if you missed the twist that would make this setup
interesting. There were, after all, plenty of reasons for that to happen even back then,
let alone today. These days, most media has gotten better at depicting the reality of
families that don't fit into that allegedly "traditional" mold that we've seen on everything
from Leave It to Beaver to The Simpsons. That's the wacky twist on display here, though. Two
guys raise a kid: Hijinks ensue.
To be fair, the actual details of the premise are a whole lot weirder. For one thing, both
of these dudes hate each other, as they once dated the same woman. Neither of them even
know they even have a daughter until a judge shows up with a court order that forces them
into co-parenting in what definitely seems like some actionable judicial overreach. Also,
one of them is a free-spirited artist, and the other one is an uptight businessman! What
an original concept!
Really, though, if you tried to run this past a test audience today, they'd just be left
wondering why the two dads weren't in a relationship with one another.
When you get right down to it, the weirdest thing about Dinosaurs was that it managed
to run for a full four seasons with the premise of "it's a regular sitcom, but instead of
humans, it's dinosaurs in elaborate costumes operated by multiple puppeteers."
Seriously, everything in the show is exactly like contemporary life in the early '90s,
without even having the veneer of Stone Age sight gags that you get on The Flintstones.
Their TV isn't a paleolithic bird drawing pictures as fast as it can. It's just, you
know, a TV.
To be fair, Dinosaurs was pretty forward-thinking for its time, partly because it was a pet
project that Jim Henson had been working on before his death in 1990. Most of the episodes
make a solid attempt at social satire, taking on topics like religious extremism and corporate
greed. Unfortunately, most satire ages about as well as a fresh avocado, and today's audiences
are far more likely to see the show's attempts at dealing with social issues as toothless.
Just take the episode about gender roles that boils down to "men are acting like women,
women are acting like men, isn't this hilarious?" Or worse, the episodes that are just downright
inappropriate. Like the episode where Monica is harassed at work by a character who is
literally named "Sexual Harris". A trial is called to try to figure out what, wait for
it, "Sexual Harris Meant". If that isn’t the worst pun of the 90’s, we shudder to
think what is.
Out-of-date jokes aside, there’s also the issue of Dinosaurs absolutely bonkers ending.
After 4 seasons, the entire cast, even the baby, are explicitly doomed to a slow death
by freezing and starvation, as well as the extinction of their entire species. It might
be a nod to the apocalypse that killed Earth’s real dinosaurs, but it's hard to imagine modern
audiences thinking that's a good way to finish off your series. Then again, if you're watching
a show about dinosaurs, you've gotta be prepared to see that ending coming.
"And hey! I’m sure it’ll all work out OK! After all, dinosaurs have been on this
Earth for 150 million years. And, it’s not like we’re going to just…disappear."
After The Simpsons became a cultural phenomenon, FOX’s competitor networks tried to jump
on the trend by making their own adult-oriented animated shows. Unfortunately, they forgot
to make them good, leading to a brief explosion of prime-time cartoons so bad that they make
The Simpsons (season 26) look like The Simpsons (season 4).
The weirdest one of the bunch was Capitol Critters, a cartoon about all those rats in
Washington, D.C. You know...Congress? Zing! But seriously, it was about actual rats and
mice who live in the White House and are menaced by cats drawn as caricatures of George H.W.
Bush and Dan Quayle. It's sort of like if you combined The West Wing with An American
Tail, and then made the resulting chimera drink grain alcohol until it couldn't see
straight.
To be fair, the premise isn't inherently terrible, even if it would probably be better-suited
for a newspaper comic strip than a TV show doomed to fail after a single season. The
real problem here is that the episodes themselves were way darker than audiences at the time
– or today, for that matter – might expect.
This is a series that started with an episode where a simple country mouse has to move to
Washington after witnessing the graphic on-screen murders of his family by exterminators, including
a sequence where he tries to tear a grate out of a wall to free his mother as she's
being gassed to death. Two episodes later, the story is about the mice getting a gun,
like an actual human-sized revolver, so that they can murder a cat who killed one of their
friends in the episode's opening moments.
We don't really truck with the idea that today's generation is oversensitive or easily upset,
but if audiences in 1992 rejected this thing, there's no way an audience in 2020 would want
to deal with it. We've got our own problems, thank you.
Family Dog was created by Brad Bird, who would go on to direct animated classics like The
Iron Giant and The Incredibles. The show got its start as an episode of the anthology series
Amazing Stories, which was produced by Steven Spielberg and featured designs from Tim Burton.
In other words, that's a pedigree that, on paper, should lead to a mind-blowing, underrated
classic of animation.
Unfortunately, Family Dog is both miserable and shockingly uninspired. For evidence of
the latter, look no further than the fact that there are two different episodes based
around Jonah, the title pup, having to deal with larger, meaner dogs owned by two different
sets of neighbors.
Recycling a plot is one thing when you've got a long-running series, but Family Dog
clocked in at just ten episodes, one of which was a rerun of the Amazing Stories segment.
Even that might be forgivable if the series had any of the charm that Bird would show
in his later work, but Jonah's family is made up of a bunch of idiotic jerks so unlikable
that even the most jaded viewer would be left asking themselves, "Do these people have any
redeeming qualities?"
It was justifiably short-lived in 1993, but one has to imagine that it would fare even
worse today. Modern viewers have enjoyed not only 30 years of The Simpsons but also 20
years of Adult Swim redefining what grown-up animated shows can be, especially ones focused
on characters that viewers find it hard to like. This thing would be laughed out of the
room by the creators of Squidbillies, but really, that would be for the best. If it
hadn't, Bird might've never gotten to work on that movie about the big robot that wants
to be Superman.
"Superman."
Released in 1997, Over the Top sadly isn't about a trucker who somehow has to win both
an 18-wheeler and custody of his estranged son in an arm wrestling tournament. Instead,
it's a show about an out-of-work actor whose career has gone so sour that he has to move
into a hotel full of wacky characters, run by the woman he was once married to for 12
days.
Intrigued? Probably not, since it's a pretty generic premise. But take a look at this cast:
Tim Curry stars as the actor, Annie Potts is the ex-wife, and Steve Carell is one of
those wacky characters, appearing as a chef named Yorgo. By all rights, this series had
the combined comedic power of Ghostbusters, The Office, and Clue, and that should be enough
to elevate even the worst premise into something worth watching.
Do not, under any circumstances, be fooled into checking it out. Curry, Potts, and Carell
are all phenomenal talents in their own right, but Over the Top brought down such a weight
of crushing mediocrity upon them that they never had a chance. It was canceled after
three episodes, and while its bizarrely star-studded status has earned it some interest via bootlegs,
it's just not worth watching. It's only made worse today by the fact that, while two of
those actors already had a respectable career under their belts, the third has gone on to
become a sitcom icon.
“Ketchup and mustard and relish! Perhaps you’d like to take it, sprinkle some dirt
on my cooking, maybe that would make it taste better!”
Carell did manage to wring some comedy out of it eventually, though. At more than one
awards show, he's read a review of Over the Top that goes,
"I have stood in a freezer full of dead people at the morgue. I have seen a man's scalp pulled
back over his nose...But I can now honestly say that until Steve Carell's turn in the
premiere of Over the Top, I have never known true horror."
From the United States’ founding through the Civil War and Reconstruction, America’s
history of slavery has been a terrible stain on the nation, and certainly not something
to joke about. And yet, somehow, against all odds, The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer
exists, once having been greenlighted on basic cable.
At least it didn’t last for long. It disappeared after just four weeks back in October 1998
on UPN, a network that apparently figured if nobody was watching anyway, they might
as well do whatever they wanted. In this case, "anything" was a sitcom about Desmond Pfeiffer,
played by Chi McBride in a role that could best be described as "slumming it".
Pfeiffer is English expatriate and con artist who came to America and got a job as Abraham
Lincoln's valet during the Civil War. Unsurprisingly, this premise didn't work at all. The jokes
were built around Lincoln as a poor henpecked husband to a shrewish Mary Todd, Union General
Ulysses S. Grant's alcoholism, and how well-endowed Confederate general Stonewall Jackson was.
This show started with an episode about Abraham Lincoln sexting via telegram, memorably titled
"AOL: Abe On Line"
And that's the joke that holds up best.
“Shove it up your stovepipe, Abe! I can’t believe the war is the easy part of my day!”
Needless to say, Pfeiffer's brief tenure on UPN was heralded by protests from the NAACP
and the ire of critics, who were left in disgusted disbelief by some of the jokes in the pilot.
Those included Desmond narrowly escaping being hanged, a minstrel show number, and a joke
about how Desmond should get his feet off the table because, quote, "the slaves haven't
been emancipated yet."
When that got out, UPN switched up the episode order and went with a slightly less offensive
episode, which The Washington Post called, quote, "controversial and asinine" and "about
as funny as getting your teeth cleaned." On the bright side, they did say that it, quote,
"was not so much racist as it was stupid." So that's a plus, relatively speaking.
The years since haven't done Pfeiffer any favors. If anything, it seems like a worse
idea now than it did then, which is saying something. These days, the show's lasting
legacy is that it was mentioned as the favorite show of the characters on Clerks: The Animated
Series, and really, when your lasting legacy is being dunked on by another show that only
lasted six episodes, something definitely went wrong.
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