Stupidest TV Show Ever

General wisdom has it that "Gilligan's Island" is the stupidest TV show ever, it is commonly cited as a low point in the medium. But that show has been of the air for nearly 40 years, and certainly dumber things have come and gone. Things that were less humorous, more poorly conceived and executed, and asked us to stretch credibility beyond the point we had to to accept that 7 people lived on an island without killing each other or sleeping with each other. Like Mr. Howell didn't try to get Ginger on the casting couch with some vague promise of bankrolling a major motion picture starring her when they got back to society.

I am only counting TV shows made at a national level, there are far too many local shows to sift through, and in the end their faults are venial.

Before naming the show, let me state I was never a fan or a regular viewer of this show. I am not going to, or feel the need to, watch all the episodes before I make this choice. But I did come across an syndicated episode of this (I had no idea it was being syndicated, but the channel was so far down the chain I was not surprised they ran this show), and it was so bad it brought back all the repressed memories of this televised piece of excrement. Which by the way, was shoved down our throats, we were always told how funny this show (and particularly, the star) was, so much so that people today accept this judgment.

The show was "Mork and Mindy". The "funny star" was Robin Williams.

What makes this show so stupid is that to buy into the premise, you had to believe that an alien came to earth to 'interact" with humans and to report on them to his home planet. And the human chosen from whom this alien could learn something was some woman in Boulder, CO with no life and no friends. And the supposedly superior alien race sent someone who had no idea how to interact with people, so excuses had to be made for his erratic (and supposedly humorous) behavior.

But this was all a big set-up so we could watch Robin Williams be "funny". He could talk in the funny voice, and wear the funny suspenders, and make the frenzied hand gestures, and we were all supposed to find this funny because...well, I could never figure this out. Pop culture just decided that he was some new brand of comedian, and if you didn't find him funny, then there was something wrong with you, you didn't "get" modern comedy, and you should be watching a Bob Hope special with your grandmother.

Instead of getting a comedian, we got a 2 year old doing anything to get daddy's attention, and we are supposed to find this funny. Instead of writing scripts for this show, we got minor plot points around which Robin could do his improv.

This show was so ill-concieved that they had to change direction a few times. In the first season, Mindy seemed to spend all the time hanging out at her parents music store. Then some suit thought it was really odd that an attractive 20-something had no friends, so they made up some friends that worked at a deli. There was no on-screen chemistry with Mindy, so the friends disappeared and the concept kind of drifted back to the parents. Then someone decided they should fall in love, get married and have a kid, but it would be really funny if the guy got pregnant (how original), and the "kid" is a full grown adult that acts like an infant, and hey, let's have have that adult kid role played by Johnathan Winters (I guess the bottom left Hollywood Square was closed for repairs), who is kind of his generation's Robin Williams. And when things get boring, we'll give Mork a pet, a thing that looks like a Tribble and scoots across the floor and makes funny noises (what was with this show and funny noises? Didn't anyone every tell the writers to write dialogue for this show?).

And of course, we had to learn "lessons" when watching this show. Like having emotions is hard and messy but it's part of being human. Actually, we probably just got that lesson over and over.

Say what you want bad about "Gilligan", but at least they actually wrote jokes and tried to make us laugh without the need for a "lesson". Nowadays, you could sit through a "Gilligan's" episode and laugh, and all the episodes are on DVD. "Mork and Mindy" is painful to sit through.