What were you thinking? Bad Sit-Coms

Off Topic!!!
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The Hathaways is a 26-episode situation comedy, which aired on ABC from October 6, 1961, to March 30, 1962, starring Peggy Cass and Jack Weston as suburban Los Angeles “parents” to a trio of performing common chimpanzees. Weston portrayed Walter Hathaway, a flabby real estate agent. Cass is his zany bride Elinore, “mother” and booking agent to the Marquis Chimps, named Candy, Charlie, and Enoch. The chimps had earlier appeared on CBS’s The Ed Sullivan Show, a Jack Benny special in 1959 and several commercials in 1960.[1]

Ratings for the Screen Gems series were so low that ABC had largely to self-sponsor the program (although the series was sponsored on alternate weeks, throughout most of the season, by Ralston Purina). The writers included Tom Adair and James B. Allardice; story consultants were Hugh Wedlock and Howard Snyder, who co-wrote the premiere episode with Dick Wesson.[citation needed]

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Latter-day television critics Castleman and Podrazik (1982) have called The Hathaways “possibly the worst series ever to air on network TV”, criticizing the production, scripts, acting, the “utterly degrading” premise, and the overall “total worthlessness” of the program.[2]

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One other weird and terrible sitcom, this time from Canada:

The Trouble with Tracy: This Canadian sitcom was hastily assembled in 1970 to comply with upcoming Canadian content requirements and had an extremely limited budget for both time and money. 130 episodes of the series were produced, requiring scripts to be recycled from 1940s radio dramas, line mistakes to be kept in the finished product due to time and money constraints, and virtually the entire series shot from one small living-room set. As a result of the poor-quality end product, the series is often considered one of the worst of all time.

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It’s so bad, it’s good!

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Have you seen it?

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Yes, it’s so thoroughly awful. What confuses me most is the laugh track…never for any real jokes…it’s like Rabbits in that regard.

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Okay, I’m checking it out now.

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Huh. Watching the first episode and there’s no laugh track at all.

It is terrible, however. It does feel like an old 1940s radio show in terms of comedy.

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It starts out when she goes to the loan office…

ETA: It’s like they didn’t have someone to hit the play button for it.

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Wait, you mean the laugh track just kicks in later in the episode at a random point?

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Yeah, and I thought there were laughs during the intro, then gone, only to come back later.

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The same year this debuted, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Flip Wilson Show and The Odd Couple also debuted on American TV.

OMG, the laugh track really did just randomly kick in!

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I was surprised to see a young Tom Servo playing her best friend !

ETA: Sorry, but the way he is dressed reminds me of a MST skit, perhaps Roger Whitaker?

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This is aggressively terrible. This is the opposite of they just didn’t try. They worked hard to make this show this awful.

Edit: Okay, I’m starting to be convinced that this is Canada’s Comedy Bang Bang.

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The implications of the “Tracy’s Horse” episode are quite frightening.

They use horse puns the whole way through…

https://media2.giphy.com/media/Nx1SKuGiafvFK/giphy.gif?cid=da589c9c10idvbsuein8fnulkn9prmfndhubyq4dk79lpsqk&ep=v1_gifs_search&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g(image larger than 4 MB)

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Okay, that episode had to have been recycled from an old radio script. It ended with a joke that included a line about not kissing in front of her mother.

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I swear Paul is Kevin Murphy, if you haven’t seen the “Horse” episode, you should.

Paul dresses up like Huggy Bear from Tim Horton’s.

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I’m watching it now. It starts with narration. The first one didn’t.

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The comments say it’s based on a radio play, “Easy Aces”.

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Looks like the Wikipedia page on Easy Aces agrees.

A Canadian television sitcom, The Trouble with Tracy, was adapted from the Easy Aces scripts in the early 1970s. Through a variety of factors – notably, that 7 episodes were recorded every five days, allowing no time for retakes for flubbed lines or missed cues – The Trouble with Tracy has been labelled by some television critics as one of the worst TV comedies ever produced.[50]

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According to the show, Paul ate the equivalent of 130 dollars worth of eggs in one sitting…that’s about 34 dozen eggs…the man has a serious issue !

ETA: I’m now obsessed with Paul, he’s a dead ringer for our man !

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