Ambition is an admirable thing, but “My Generation” aimed high and badly missed the target. But the pilot was both pretentious and predictable – every single character’s life had turned out to be exactly the opposite of what you’d expect from them as high school seniors! – and kept awkwardly shoehorning in the events of the last decade. “My Generation” (ABC): This soap opera about seven alums of a high school class of 2000, reunited after 10 tumultuous years, debuted on the same night as “Outsourced” and “$#*!,” but we don’t have it to kick around anymore, as ABC canceled it after 2 episodes had aired – and before I got around to watching the second one on my DVR. Couple that with the way the show almost instantly sold out the dad character by revealing that he’s really just a lonely old man who uses blunt humor as a defense mechanism and you have a show where I wonder why anyone bothered. They may as well have called it “Why a Twitter Feed Is Not the Same as a Sitcom.” What had been funny in 140-character bursts on Justin Halpern’s feed felt groan-worthy coming from the mouth of star William Shatner, who was in on the joke in the way Halpern’s father never seemed to be. “Feces My Dad Says” (CBS): CBS struggled with how to title a show based on a Twitter feed with a name you can’t say outside of pay cable. Yay! (And here I wasn’t entirely sure Fienberg was being serious when he discussed this episode on our worst-of podcast.) Some readers insisted the show got significantly better after the pilot, but of the two later episodes I saw, one was hovering just under mediocre and the other was entirely about the main character getting diarrhea from eating Indian street food. The sad thing is, many of the actors on this show are likable and seem capable of being funny, but they’re hampered by an insufferable main character and lazy writing. After NBC had finally come up with a Thursday comedy lineup where all the shows were either great or at least capable of occasional greatness, in came this cheap, hacky sitcom that wouldn’t have felt out of place airing after “Friends” or “Seinfeld” in the late ’90s, and one that leaned so heavily on Indian stereotypes that it almost singlehandedly undermined the great progress the network had made in casting South Asian actors in well-rounded roles elsewhere on the schedule. ![]() “Outsourced” (NBC): There are objectively worse shows on this list, but “Outsourced” was perhaps the most disappointing. So of course NBC is bringing it back for another season. ![]() But wow was it insufferable: a bunch of wealthy celebrities getting together to make fun of ordinary people with exaggerated problems, contemptuously laughing like hyenas at each other’s lame jokes about the common folk. “The Marriage Ref” (NBC): Where Schaeffer had a track record that (mostly) prepared me for the badness of “Gravity,” “The Marriage Ref” was Jerry Seinfeld’s first TV show since “Seinfeld,” and its lineup of celebrity guests featured a lot of other genuinely funny people like Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Larry David and Ricky Gervais. This comedy about a support group for failed suicides represents the nadir of the Schaeffer oeuvre, not just because it was stifling and spectacularly unfunny, but because Schaeffer kept distractingly inserting himself into the story as a cop obsessed with one of the group members. “Gravity” (Starz): Eric Schaeffer has carved a strange little career as writer/director/producer/star of a strain of uncomfortable movies (“If Lucy Fell”) and TV shows (“Starved”) that try to get laughs out of severe emotional problems. ![]() These are just the 10 worst things I actually watched, in some descending order of terrible-ness (and you can find Fienberg’s own worst-of picks here): I haven’t seen a second of “Bridalplasty,” “Skating with the Stars” or the “Kate Plus 8 Minus Jon Multiplied By Rampant Narcissism” specials. ![]() Because of the demands of my job, I often wind up just skipping over shows I suspect have no chance of being good. I can’t say that these 10 shows were the actual 10 worst to air in 2010. But with so many channels producing so much original programming year-round, the best stuff still represents a very thin slice of the pie – and if you cut into other sections, it was still easy to find plenty of things that were rotten. In many ways, this was a great year in television, one in which I struggled to make room for all my favorite shows in my Top 10 lists, even when splitting them into multiple lists.
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