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When a television show premieres, the hope is that it will have a long, prosperous run. They hope it has longevity that lasts long after the final season. But not every show is afforded that opportunity. In the 2000s, television comedies surged like never before. The decade saw super hits like The Office and 30 Rock. They may not have aged perfectly, but they are still a major part of pop culture. Unfortunately, there are some shows during that era that not only flopped, but also aged like milk.
The titles on this list have been forgotten by time. They weren’t the worst of the worst, like Cavemen, whose legacy was so abysmal. And even in retrospect, we may have cringed that these sitcoms had been remembered. From stories set in places that are becoming extinct to lead actors who have been effectively canceled, these sitcoms do not hold up well. How many did you watch in real time?
‘Baby Bob’ (2002–2003)
We currently have a beloved sitcom in Ted Lasso that began as a bit character in commercials and promo spots. Before that, the aforementioned Caveman nearly threatened any chance of taking a risk of that nature. But Caveman wasn’t the first sitcom inspired by a gimmicky commercial. That honor is bestowed upon Baby Bob. Inspired by the character that appeared in commercials for the ancient website known as FreeInternet.com, the sitcom extended a 30-second bit into an ill-fated series. Created by Michael Saltzman, the comedy followed first-time parents Walter and Lizzy Spencer (Adam Arkin and Joely Fisher), who are shocked to discover that their six-month-old son, Bob (voiced by Ken Hudson Campbell), can talk like an adult. Walter wants to keep the talent a secret, while Lizzy wants to show him off, especially to her mother, Madeline (Holland Taylor), who brags about her other grandchildren, and Walter’s father, Sam (Elliott Gould). One of the only people he openly converses with is his babysitter, Teala (Marissa Tait). Stretching a one-joke web commercial into a prime-time series using dated, uncanny-valley CGI to make an infant move its mouth like an adult trucker, Baby Bob‘s thin premise went nowhere.
At its core, Baby Bob is funny in short sketches, but trying to extend it into anything more proved an ill-fated decision by CBS. Though canceling it to spend its budget and time on My Big Fat Greek Life didn’t pan out either. Baby Bob was simply exhausting. A talking baby was mildly amusing for about a monologue or two, but it was impossible to find any semblance of longevity. The premise was on a short leash; eventually, as Bob aged, he’d talk anyway, so what would happen next? Baby Bob tried to appeal to the allure of the Look Who’s Talking film franchise, but it was an already tired concept. Despite quite a strong ensemble, Arkin, Fisher, Taylor, and Gould were bogged down by weak, repetitive material. Looking back, aside from the premise, the CGI was a product of its time. It was quite terrible then, and looks even worse now. If you thought the sitcom was the final bow for Baby Bob, it was absolutely not. He lived on in a series of commercials for Quiznos.
‘Hot Properties’ (2005)
Looking at it now, Hot Properties may seem like it paved the way for reality shows like Selling Sunset, where attractive women dominated the real estate market. But that’s not what Hot Properties was. Shows like Selling Sunset may have learned from the short-lived ABC series about what not to focus on. Created by Suzanne Martin, Hot Properties centered on four single women working together at a high-end real estate office in Manhattan. They balance selling expensive properties with navigating their messy personal lives, dating struggles, and distinct quirks. The quartet featured Gail O’Grady as Ava Summerlin, the office owner in her 40s who is married to a much younger man and wants to start a family, Nicole Sullivan as Chloe Reid, a self-improvement-obsessed associate who struggles to find lasting romantic connections, Sofía Vergara as Lola Hernandez, a voluptuous recent divorcee who was married to a gay man for ten years and is terrified of re-entering the dating scene, and Christina Moore as Emerson Ives, a wealthy newcomer who bonds with the group after discovering her fiancé’s past wasn’t as virginal as she thought. Hot Properties tried to be the next generation’s Sex and the City, but could not find its footing.
Hot Properties was seen as an unoriginal premise with weak and derivative writing. But even if the script was better, the quartet simply lacked chemistry. Unlike shows like Sex and the City and The Golden Girls, the women were not on equal footing, and thus the hierarchy didn’t mesh. Even with a show like Designing Women where the setup was similar, those characters popped off the screen. It didn’t happen here. Hot Properties tried to use loud, overlapping yapping and recycled, predictable sitcom tropes and jokes to win over audiences, but it didn’t work. Ava lied about her age to get her husband. Chloe was aggressively neurotic about finding a man through self-help manuals. Lola continued to chase gay men “by accident” because she allegedly couldn’t find a man of her own. The humor frequently reduced women to body parts or panic over the biological clock. The series was pulled after only 13 episodes, cementing itself as a flop that tried to be edgy.
‘Life on a Stick’ (2005)
There was once a time when many teens sought out the mall for summer jobs. Or use it as a place to chill. Now that malls are becoming more and more extinct, the premise of Life on a Stick has not aged quite well. The Fox sitcom from Victor Fresco follows 19-year-old Laz Lackerson (Zachary Knighton), his best friend Fred (Charlie Finn), his girlfriend Lily (Rachelle Lefevre), and other teens who work and hang out at a mall food court, specifically at a hot dog on a stick stand called Yippee Hot Dogs. At home, Laz has a blended family, living with his spineless father, Rick (Matthew Glave), his bossy stepmother, Michelle (Amy Yasbeck), their 8-year-old son, Gus (Frankie Ryan Manrquez), and stepsister, Molly (Saige Thompson). Life on a Stick was a comedy about the mundane struggles of working a low-wage food court job and dealing with family strife. Sadly, Life on a Stick is a relic.
Life on a Stick felt even dated for its time. As sitcoms were moving toward single-camera workplace comedies, Life on a Stick was sticking around, holding on for dear life. It relied heavily on obnoxious canned laughter, predictable slacker clichés, and weak fast food puns. Life on a Stick presented this lifestyle as a drag when now, it’s a means for survival for some. The teens felt as if they were still stuck in the ’90s with how they were written and portrayed. They lacked a direction or desire for depth or growth. It had shades of That ’70s Show, but didn’t translate into a modern teen hangout comedy. The series tried to find its footing with an American Idol lead-in, but it did not work. Fresco, for his part, did find more success with two other projects of the era, Andy Richter Controls the Universe and Better Off Ted. Coincidentally, they were both gone too soon.
‘Method & Red’ (2004)
The fish-out-of-water concept is nothing new, but the tried-and-true format did not work when it came to Method & Red. In the 2004 sitcom starring hip-hop duo Method Man and Redman as fictionalized versions of themselves, the two successful rappers move into a wealthy, predominantly white New Jersey suburb, creating a culture-clash comedy with their uptight neighbors. And just like the on-screen clashes, the off-screen clashes caused major strife, leading to its ultimate cancellation. While the stars were searching for a clever, single-camera style comedy like Arrested Development, the show ultimately emerged as an awkward, ill-timed laugh-track sitcom. The mismatched format made the comedy feel stale and uncomfortable.
Arriving right before the big single-camera boom, Fox wanted to lean into the classic comedy tropes despite being shot on location. In turn, the disembodied laugh track clashed with the style and made the jokes fall flat. Especially those that were simply unfunny. Much of the comedic writing revolved around the duo’s wealth or making their suburban neighbors uncomfortable. At a time when hip-hop was still finding its footing in the mainstream, looking back, it led to some unfortunate cringes with how they forced a separation from the artist and the consumer. The paint-by-numbers format to appeal to Middle America backfired quickly. One of the worst things to come out of the series was how Method Man did anything but try to champion the series. He not only openly criticized the network’s changes, but he also advised fans not to watch the series, leading to the show’s quick cancellation. Method Man and Redman were known for boundary pushing in the music world. Method & Red was the complete opposite.
‘Rock Me Baby’ (2003–2004)
If we had a time machine, we would go back in time and advise Tim Kelleher that many of the decisions that went into his UPN sitcom Rock Me Baby were ill-advised. Rock Me Baby was meant to be an edgy shock-jock series. It backfired. The series followed Jimmy Cox (Dan Cortese), a provocative radio shock jock in Denver, whose wild life changes when he and his wife Beth (Bianca Kajlich), a former exotic dancer, have their first baby, Otis. Jimmy must balance new fatherhood with his edgy career. If Jimmy mocks his family on the air, his wife gets mad. If he talks about loving fatherhood, his boss thinks he has lost his edge. As they navigate parenthood, they have to handle Jimmy’s co-host and best friend, Carl (Carl Anthony Payne), who crushes on Beth’s glamorous friend, Pamela (Tammy Townsend). Rock Me Baby was a tired sitcom that relied on stale sitcom tropes that lacked laughs and suffered from an unfocused tone that alienated viewers.
Rock Me Baby had no idea what it wanted to be. Was it meant to be about the raunchy “bad boy” and “bad girl” turning to the good side or a sweet show about the struggles of new parenting? Either way, neither panned out. By shifting focus and tone, Rock Me Baby lacked an identity. Rock Me Baby was all about inane arguments that lacked little semblance of humor. Instead, it led to the core characters making poor, frustrating parenting decisions, making it near impossible to root for the parents. The narrative relied on tired culture clashes between an edgy on-air radio persona and domestic life. Unfortunately, by today’s standards, most shock jocks and the equivalent podcast hosts marry the two, so the concept has been lost to time. Even some subplots, including panic about their son wearing a dress inciting “gender-confusing memories,” played into the fragile masculinity and casual heteronormative anxieties that would cause a groan today. Many shows of the UPN era have been lost to time. Rock Me Baby is one.
‘Stacked’ (2005–2006)
For much of her career, Pamela Anderson made a name for herself based on her appearance. Many years later, she’s shed that identity, owning natural beauty and leaving her past behind for a new chapter in her career. So, looking back at the unfortunate Fox series Stacked, based on Anderson’s latest era, the series has aged like milk. Created by Steven Levitan, Stacked featured Anderson as Skyler Dayton, a tired party girl who gets a fresh start working at a small, family-run bookstore called “Stacked Books” in the San Francisco area. Pitched as the inverse of Cheers, where it’s a story of a smart person in a dim setting, Stacked features a ditzy, good-natured person in an intellectual environment. Unfortunately, unlike Cheers, Stacked was not the place you wanted to go.
Stacked was a mediocre one-joke premise. The series relied on cheap, obvious sex jokes with an uninspired workplace sitcom format. If you look at the comparisons to Cheers, there were quite a few one-for-one characters. The Sam (Ted Danson) and Diane (Shelley Long) trope was played out with Skyler and Gavin Miller (Elon Gold), the cynical, divorced co-owner of the shop who is initially annoyed by Skyler. Katrina (Marissa Jaret Winokur) was a Carla (Rhea Perlman) type as the coffee counter worker who feels threatened by Skyler’s presence. And then there’s the regular in the form of Harold March (Christopher Lloyd), a retired rocket scientist. Unfortunately, the writing leaned heavily into elementary, bawdy double entendres rather than clever joke structure. The series sadly lacked charm. Stacked‘s entire identity was a reliance on a pun title, a high-profile glamour queen who wanted to avoid the one-note tropes, only to be forced to perform low-brow humor week after week. 2020s Anderson would never.
‘The Michael Richards Show’ (2000)
Finding a sitcom life post-Seinfeld was not easy for everyone. While Julia Louis-Dreyfus had two hit follow-up comedies after her flop Watching Ellie, the same couldn’t be said for Jason Alexander and Michael Richards. Unfortunately, the latter has had some unfortunate moments in his life that have marred his success, including his attempt to front a sitcom. In 2000, Richards attempted to lead a sitcom with NBC’s eight-episode run of The Michael Richards Show. The sitcom followed Richards as Vic Nardozza, a clumsy and eccentric private investigator working for McKay Investigative Services. Despite his bizarre, unconventional methods and frequent mix-ups, he always manages to solve cases. The mission of the series was to distance Richards from his iconic role as Cosmo Kramer, but with network pressure for something else, The Michael Richards Show led to an inconsistent tone that blended traditional mystery elements with slapstick comedy.
After a failed pilot, the series was forced to retool and pivot. Instead of a slick, deadpan investigator, Richards’ Vic became an awkward balance of serious detective and goofy physical comedian, thus living in the shadow of Kramer. So, NBC tried to hook viewers to the likeness, despite the differences. Richards reused repetitive, manic slapstick humor without the clever writing of Seinfeld. The comedy wasn’t laugh-out-loud, thus it heavily relied on a booming laugh track to force the at-home audience to feel obliged to chuckle. Even with a solid ensemble, including William Devane and Tim Meadows, nothing landed. The “Seinfeld Curse” launched because of The Michael Richards Show, but after Richards’ infamous 2006 stand-up meltdown, it retroactively made re-watching his transitional flop even more uncomfortable to bear.
‘The Mullets’ (2003–2004)
Using a tired stereotype as the premise for an entire series tends not to go well. Such was the case for The Mullets. The UPN series follows two blue-collar, wrestling-loving brothers named Dwayne and Denny Mullet (Michael Weaver and David Hornsby) who proudly sport identical mullet haircuts, aka “business in the front, party in the back.” Dwayne is loud and brash while David is quiet and easygoing. They work in roofing and dream big while entirely out of step with reality. Their proud mother, Mandi (Loni Anderson), marries Roger Heidecker (John O’Hurley), a refined, clean-cut game show host who is the complete opposite of her sons. The humor of The Mullets comes from the culture clash between the sophisticated stepfather and his rowdy, mullet-wearing stepsons. While the haircut relied on the ’80s and ’90s iteration, the mockery of the style has aged poorly as it’s back in fashion in a very different style.
The Mullets was a one-note gimmick that made a joke out of a hairstyle while making a mockery of class and status. With low-brow slapstick and formulaic redneck stereotypes, the series wore out quickly. Unfortunately, there was no wit in the writing, and therefore, there was no mileage beyond the premise. The humor relied heavily on stupefying gags like the brothers falling off of roofs and getting into fistfights, accompanied by canned laughter to force a giggle. The trouble with The Mullets was, despite being created and run by respected veterans from The Simpsons, Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, the comedy from the animated classic didn’t translate to a live-action series. Another relic of the forgotten era of UPN, The Mullets missed the mark, lasting only 11 episodes.
‘The Pitts’ (2003)
We all love a little bit of schadenfreude now and then, but we tend to wish it upon people who deserve it. Like the Bluths of Arrested Development. But Fox decided to give a lot of bad luck to a seemingly normal family in The Pitts. Created by Mike Scully and Julie Thacker, The Pitts told the story of the titular family unit—dad Bob (Dylan Baker), mom Liz (Kellie Waymire), and kids Faith (Lizzy Caplan) and Petey (David Henrie)— an ordinary, cheerful suburban family who experience absurdly bad luck and bizarre, supernatural disasters like demonic possessions, stalker nannies, and werewolves. A dark comedy with a sunny disposition, The Pitts was an ill-timed comedy that used tired tropes in hopes that you’d laugh at the dark elements. The Pitts was meant to satirize traditional, wholesome American family sitcoms by pushing the events to the extreme. Unfortunately, it backfired.
The Pitts was rooted in over-the-top, cartoonish disaster plots that clashed terribly with the traditional live-action family sitcom format. It was severely mismatched and desperately unfunny. Many of the plotlines felt in poor taste, going to extremes because they could. With cartoon logic in a live-action setting, The Pitts was doomed to fail. The co-creators tried to force frantic, animated sight gags into scenarios that did not work. It was completely disjointed. It wasn’t warm satire but a story of an unfortunately cursed family. After being canceled five episodes into a seven-episode order, a 2007 animated revival was announced, with Baker and Caplan set to return. They were meant to be joined by Allison Janney and Andy Milonakis, replacing Waymire, who had passed away in 2003, and Henrie, who was starring on Wizards of Waverly Place. Unfortunately, it never came to fruition.
‘The War at Home’ (2005–2007)
The antics of a dysfunctional family were at the center of the Rob Lotterstein-created sitcom, The War at Home. Running for two seasons on Fox, the series centers on Dave and Vicky Gold (Michael Rapaport and Anita Barone), a Jewish-American couple living on Long Island, New York, as they struggle through the daily chaos of raising three opinionated and fast-growing teenagers, Larry (Kyle Sullivan), Hilary (Kaylee DeFer), and Mike (Dean Collins). Focused on the friction, misunderstandings, and behavioral challenges of modern parenting, Dave and Vicky attempt to maintain discipline as their children push the boundaries regarding sex, substance abuse, and growing up. Utilizing the fourth wall abstract void trope of talking to the audience, even with a laugh-track at its core, The War at Home relied on aggressive, mean-spirited humor, uninspired family clichés, and a very unlikable protagonist who constantly ranted using casual bigotry, sexism, and homophobia—which has followed Rapaport in his career to this day.
Rather than a kind-hearted, warm family of traditional values, The War at Home relied on bullying, hostile atmospheres where comedy stemmed from insults. The series tried desperately to look edgy by tackling hot-button social issues, but it did so through crude stereotypes. Plot lines heavily centered on Dave’s uncouth paranoid anxieties, including his freak-out about his daughter dating a Black teenager and worrying that his middle son might be gay. The irony was that Larry’s loyal best friend, Khaleel Nazeeh “Kenny” Al-Bahir (Rami Malek), ultimately turned out to be gay. With so much of the writing featuring punch-down humor in which Dave would ultimately be let off the hook in the end, he never experienced real growth. It was completely anti-PC. Since the series, Rapaport has had a steady career, though his name blew up after his blatantly disrespectful remarks against gay contestant Colton Underwood during the most recent series of The Traitors. His character on The War at Home ended up being closer to home than anyone imagined.
The War at Home
- Release Date
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2005 – 2007-00-00
- Network
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FOX
- Directors
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Andy Cadiff
- Writers
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Rob Lotterstein, Stephen Engel, Darin Henry, Claudia Lonow, Mark Driscoll
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Michael Block
Almontather Rassoul
