The original post: /r/television by /u/NAveryW on 2025-11-12 01:36:27+00:00.
There was a lot of bad TV made since the beginning of the medium and there’s still a lot of bad TV now, but I think it’s interesting to observe how the particular manifestations of badness have changed over time.
For example, when I watch subpar dramatic works from the '50s and ‘60s, they’ll often have one central idea that could be conveyed in a few minutes, and be padded with stilted and sometimes redundant dialogue to reach the necessary runtime. Some of the lesser ‘Twilight Zone’ episodes suffered from this, as did plenty of the not-the-best episodes of other less-remembered anthology series of the era. Many of these episodes were, after all, expanded from short stories that were only a couple of pages long.
Padding, or at least padding that obviously feels like padding when you’re watching it, seems to be mostly a thing of the past; shows mostly understand they have to compete for attention and are terrified of losing the viewers’ interest even for a moment. The earliest show I can remember watching that veered hard in this direction was ‘24’, which threw in plot twists and cliffhangers wherever possible for the sake of keeping tension up from moment to moment regardless of whether or not the show as a whole benefited from their inclusion.
That same approach has changed the way bad dialogue now usually manifests. In shows made up through maybe the '70s, unnatural dialogue would usually feel like it’s written by someone who doesn’t understand how people talk, but now bad dialogue is often that which is written to be heightened on purpose, aiming for quotability or at least memorability, and failing.
I think the original run of ‘Doctor Who’ vs. the modern run exemplifies these changes pretty well. For example, in “The Space Museum” (1965), a minor character says: “I’ve got two more minims before I can go home. Yes, I say it often enough, but it’s still two thousand Xeron days.” As Elizabeth Sandifer pointed out in her review, this line is impressive for being both awkward and communicating nothing to the audience. It’s the sort of line that I don’t think could make it to television any longer unless it were in a show that’s meant to be self-consciously awkward for the sake of comedy. Contrast this with the episode “Asylum of the Daleks”, made 47 years later. Early in the episode, the Doctor realizes that the Daleks are sending him down to the Dalek Asylum planet to do their work for them because “You’re all too scared to go down there!” It’s an interesting observation on its own, but then later in the same episode, as Amy is resisting being gradually converted into a Dalek by nanites in the Asylum planet’s atmosphere, she says she’s scared, and the Doctor says, “Hang on to scared. Scared isn’t Dalek.” I think Steven Moffat’s written a lot of brilliant stuff, but when he flounders, which is increasingly often, it’s because he aims for moment-to-moment impressions of cleverness that don’t hold up if you look at the bigger picture. Series 4 of ‘Sherlock’ consists almost entirely of “Look how clever I am!” stuff that is instead very stupid.
Any given modern ‘Doctor Who’ story also likes to keep up a feeling of a rapid pace, whereas the 1980 story “The Leisure Hive” is bizarrely slow paced, specifically because the script David Fisher turned in was a comedy, and the new producer John Nathan-Turner wanted to give the show a more serious tone so he simply cut out most of the jokes, leading to many long sequences of little to nothing happening to fill out the runtime. An alien slowly cuts a circular hole in a wall, and we watch as the whole circle is slowly carved out. The '80s are probably the last decade in which you could get away with something like that.
Then there’s kitsch. A lot of '80s sitcoms, for example, baffle me. How could they possibly have been so successful with family or even adult audiences? The TV series ‘Small Wonder’, I think, epitomizes that which could probably only have been made in the '80s. Everything about it is kitschy in a specifically '80s sort of way. Kitsch is still around, but I think more time will have to pass before we can really assess modern kitsch.
Of course there’s also production value. It almost goes without saying that convincing (or at least serviceable) special effects have just gotten easier and easier over time, so you have stories that rely on special effects much more now that just couldn’t have been done in the past. Not a very original observation, but I guess it does need to be mentioned.
I don’t know why this stuff intrigues me, but I am interested in any thoughts anyone else may have on the subject. What do you think about how bad television has changed over time? Are there significant developments in bad TV history that I’ve missed? Do you find any specific era’s bad TV more palatable?