Television has shaped global entertainment, providing viewers with countless hours of drama, laughter, and intrigue. From sitcoms that make us laugh until we cry to dramas that keep us on the edge of our seats, certain TV shows have transcended the small screen to become cultural phenomena. These series not only entertained millions but also set new benchmarks in storytelling, production, and character development. Here, we explore 10 amazing facts that reveal how some of the most popular television shows redefined the industry and captivated audiences worldwide.

Related: Top 10 Truly Terrible Television Series

10 The Cast’s Unbreakable Bond and Historic Pay Negotiation on Friends

One of the most amazing facts about Friends is the unity and solidarity of its cast. By the final two seasons, the six main actors—Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer—were each earning $1 million per episode, making them some of the highest-paid actors in television history. What makes this even more remarkable is that the cast insisted on negotiating their salaries as a group, ensuring equal pay for all.

Initially, the actors were offered different salaries based on individual popularity, but David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston advocated for equal pay, leading the entire cast to negotiate collectively. This united front set a precedent in Hollywood and became a symbol of their off-screen friendship and loyalty.

The show’s creators credit this camaraderie for the series’ success and longevity. Throughout its 10 seasons, Friends maintained a consistent cast dynamic that was beloved by fans worldwide. Their historic negotiation remains one of the greatest examples of camaraderie and teamwork in the entertainment industry. This unity translated on-screen, creating a believable and relatable group of friends who continue to resonate with audiences long after the final episode aired.^[1]

9 Revolutionizing Television Production with the Three-Camera Technique on I Love Lucy

An often unknown fact about I Love Lucy is how the show revolutionized the way sitcoms were filmed by pioneering the use of the three-camera technique. Desi Arnaz, who played Ricky Ricardo and was married to Lucille Ball, introduced this innovative filming method to capture the live performances of the show.

In the early 1950s, sitcoms were typically broadcast live or filmed using a single camera. Instead, Arnaz insisted on filming before a live studio audience with multiple cameras simultaneously capturing the action from different angles. This technique allowed for seamless editing, preserving the spontaneity of the performances while maintaining high production quality.

Moreover, I Love Lucy was one of the first sitcoms to be recorded on 35mm film, allowing for better preservation and syndication, which paved the way for future reruns. By being filmed in front of a live audience, the show’s creators could capture genuine laughter, adding an extra layer of authenticity to the comedic timing.

As a result, I Love Lucy became a pioneering force in the television industry, influencing the production style of countless sitcoms to come. Its success demonstrated the potential of multi-camera production, which remains the standard for many sitcoms today. Desi Arnaz’s vision transformed the sitcom landscape, making I Love Lucy a lasting legacy in television history.^[2]

8 The Global Cultural Impact of the Transformers Franchise

The Transformers’ incredible journey from a simple line of Japanese toy robots to becoming a globally recognized multimedia franchise spans decades. In the early 1980s, Hasbro licensed two transforming robot toy lines from Japan: Takara’s Diaclone and Microman series. To introduce these toys to the American market, Hasbro partnered with Marvel Comics to create a backstory and universe for them. Thus, the Transformers brand was born in 1984, along with a comic book series and an animated television show.

The Transformers TV show quickly became a cultural phenomenon, leading to the production of The Transformers: The Movie in 1986. The brand then expanded into comic books, animated series, video games, and the highly successful live-action film franchise directed by Michael Bay, which has grossed over $4 billion worldwide.

The most remarkable aspect is how Transformers has continuously reinvented itself to captivate multiple generations of fans while maintaining its core appeal: the epic battle between Autobots and Decepticons. The introduction of new characters and storylines in subsequent series, such as Beast Wars and Transformers: Prime, helped the franchise stay fresh and relevant.

Its enduring legacy and ability to transcend cultural barriers make Transformers one of the most influential toy lines and multimedia franchises in history. It continues to resonate with audiences worldwide, proving that the battle between good and evil robots never goes out of style.^[3]

7 Hugh Laurie’s Accent and Record-Breaking Salary on House M.D.

An amazing fact about House M.D. is how British actor Hugh Laurie convincingly portrayed the American character Dr. Gregory House and became one of the highest-paid actors in television history. Despite his native British accent, Laurie mastered an American accent so well that the show’s creator, David Shore, didn’t initially realize he was British during his audition. Laurie’s portrayal was so authentic that Bryan Singer, one of the show’s executive producers, called him “an incredible American actor.”

Laurie’s dedication to the role earned him critical acclaim and multiple awards. His sharp wit, complex character portrayal, and distinctive limp made Dr. House one of the most memorable characters in TV history. By the show’s final seasons, Laurie’s salary had skyrocketed to $700,000 per episode, making him one of the highest-paid actors in a television drama at the time.

His performance as the brilliant but misanthropic diagnostician became a defining aspect of the show, which ran for eight successful seasons. House M.D.’s global popularity helped redefine the medical drama genre and made Dr. Gregory House an unforgettable character. Laurie’s influence extended beyond the screen, as his impeccable American accent and sarcastic persona set a new standard for foreign actors taking on American roles.

Even after the show’s end, Hugh Laurie’s impact as Dr. Gregory House continues to be felt, as the character remains a touchstone for complex, flawed antiheroes in television dramas.^[4]

6 The Show’s Game-Changing Influence on Television Drama in The Sopranos

The most amazing fact about The Sopranos is how it revolutionized the television landscape, paving the way for modern TV dramas with complex antiheroes. Created by David Chase and premiering in 1999, the series followed mob boss Tony Soprano, played by James Gandolfini, as he balanced his criminal empire with family life.

Before The Sopranos, television dramas rarely explored deeply flawed protagonists like Tony Soprano, who struggled with anxiety and depression while ruthlessly managing his crime organization. The show’s intricate storytelling, character development, and psychological depth set a new standard for TV dramas, influencing countless series that followed.

Moreover, The Sopranos was one of the first cable TV shows to gain mainstream popularity, proving that high-quality, mature storytelling could thrive on premium networks like HBO. It opened doors for other groundbreaking series such as The Wire, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad, which further explored morally ambiguous characters.

The series won 21 Primetime Emmy Awards and remains widely regarded as one of the greatest TV shows of all time. Its impact on the television industry is immeasurable, cementing its legacy as a game-changer and elevating the standards for serialized storytelling in ways that continue to influence modern television.^[5]

5 The Show’s Unmatched Longevity and Regeneration Concept on Doctor Who

The most amazing fact about Doctor Who is its unparalleled longevity, making it the longest-running science fiction TV series in the world. First airing in 1963, Doctor Who has continuously reinvented itself, staying relevant for over six decades.

A significant factor behind the show’s endurance is the ingenious concept of “regeneration,” introduced in 1966. When William Hartnell, the first actor to play the Doctor, had to step down due to health reasons, the producers decided to have the character transform into a new body, allowing a new actor to take over the role. This concept enabled the show to refresh itself with different actors while maintaining the central premise of an eccentric Time Lord traveling through time and space in the TARDIS.

To date, 14 actors have officially portrayed the Doctor in the main series, with each one bringing a unique flavor to the character. This ability to regenerate and adapt to changing times has allowed Doctor Who to resonate with multiple generations of fans, making it a cultural icon across the globe.

Beyond the regeneration concept, Doctor Who has also pioneered special effects, storytelling techniques, and innovative writing that have contributed to its unmatched longevity. The show’s remarkable ability to blend science fiction, adventure, and humor has ensured its lasting appeal and a loyal fan base that spans the world.^[6]

4 The Luke and Laura Wedding Phenomenon on General Hospital

TV’s soap opera General Hospital gave us the unparalleled spectacle of the “Luke and Laura” wedding episode. On November 17, 1981, over 30 million viewers tuned in to watch the wedding of Luke Spencer (played by Anthony Geary) and Laura Webber (played by Genie Francis), making it the highest-rated hour in American soap opera history.

The episode marked the culmination of a storyline that captivated audiences nationwide, turning the couple into cultural icons. Their romance, filled with drama, twists, and turns, captured viewers’ imaginations, and the wedding was treated like a major cultural event. It was attended by real-life celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, who appeared on the show as Helena Cassadine and featured glamorous sets and costumes. The extraordinary viewership and media attention cemented General Hospital’s reputation as a pop culture phenomenon.

The popularity of the Luke and Laura storyline also propelled General Hospital to the forefront of daytime television, helping the show win the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series multiple times and securing its legacy as one of the most enduring soap operas in history. Luke and Laura’s relationship, though complicated, remains one of the most memorable in television history, embodying the dramatic highs and lows that make soap operas irresistible to their audiences.^[7]

3 G.I. Joe: The Action Figure That Became a Cultural Icon

G.I. Joe wasn’t just a toy; it was a revolution in the industry. Launched in 1964 by Hasbro, G.I. Joe, the “movable fighting man,” broke away from the idea of dolls being solely for girls. With its multiple articulation points and military theme, it became the first action figure designed to capture the imagination of boys. This innovation, along with a variety of figures and accessories, sparked the creation of the action figure industry as we know it today.

G.I. Joe’s influence extended beyond its initial design. The 1980s saw a reinvention with smaller, 3.75-inch figures. This shift, popularized by G.I. Joe, became the standard size for action figures like Star Wars and He-Man. The reinvented G.I. Joe also came with a rich backstory—an elite anti-terrorist team battling the evil Cobra. This narrative, along with accompanying comic books and a cartoon series, solidified G.I. Joe as a major cultural phenomenon.

From a simple toy line, G.I. Joe transformed into a global multimedia franchise. Its impact transcended playtime, proving that action figures could be the beginning of a cultural legacy.^[8]

2 Lynda Carter: Wonder Woman Takes Flight as a Feminist Icon

The Wonder Woman television series left its mark on pop culture in many ways, but perhaps the most amazing outcome is the enduring impact of Lynda Carter’s portrayal of the title character. Carter’s Diana Prince wasn’t just a superhero; she was a symbol of female empowerment who shattered stereotypes and inspired generations.

Premiering in 1975, the series showcased Wonder Woman’s strength and heroism, but Carter’s performance also imbued the character with compassion and elegance. She wasn’t just a warrior; she was a role model for young women who could be powerful and intelligent without sacrificing femininity. Carter’s iconic costume became instantly recognizable, forever linked to the image of Wonder Woman.

The success of the show and Carter’s portrayal proved that audiences craved strong female heroes. Wonder Woman paved the way for future characters like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess, ultimately leading to the critical and commercial success of the Wonder Woman film starring Gal Gadot. Lynda Carter’s legacy as Wonder Woman is more than just a television show; it’s a testament to the power of female representation in media.^[9]

1 Who Shot J.R.? A Cliffhanger Heard around the World

The Dallas television series had its fair share of dramatic moments, but nothing quite captured the global imagination like the “Who Shot J.R.?” cliffhanger. This ingenious marketing ploy transformed a night-time soap opera episode into a cultural phenomenon.

On March 21, 1980, the season 3 finale of Dallas ended with J.R. Ewing, the show’s conniving villain, being shot by an unseen assailant. The cliffhanger left viewers hanging for months, sparking a frenzy of speculation about the culprit. Newspapers ran polls, fans debated endlessly, and even oddsmakers offered bets on who pulled the trigger.

The anticipation reached a fever pitch by the time the new season premiered. An estimated 83 million Americans tuned in to learn the identity of the shooter, making it the most-watched television episode in U.S. history at that time. Globally, over 350 million people watched the reveal, solidifying Dallas as a pop culture juggernaut.

The “Who Shot J.R.?” storyline not only saved a struggling series but also revolutionized television. It demonstrated the power of cliffhangers to generate excitement and audience engagement, forever changing the way television shows are structured and marketed.^[10]

Hacking is a misfortune we’ve had to deal with since even before computers and the Internet came along. We often think of e-mail accounts, websites, and cloud servers when we think of hacking. This is even though hackers can strike plenty of other things, including live television broadcasts.

Hackers have been hacking television stations for decades. The most notorious of such incidents occurred in the 1970s and the 1980s. The hackers would interrupt a live program and chip in whatever live or recorded audio they want. Some even took over entire broadcasts and replaced them with their own videos.

10 Southern Television

On November 26, 1977, someone hacked into the now-defunct Southern Television several minutes into the 5:00 PM news. (Southern Television is now a part of ITV in the UK.) Viewers could still see the newscaster, Andrew Gardner, but they could not hear his voice.

Gardner’s voice was replaced by that of someone claiming to be an alien called Vrillon. Vrillon claimed to be the spokesperson of an alien group called the Ashtar Galactic Command.

Over the next six minutes, Vrillon warned humans against engaging in warfare. He ordered the destruction of every weapon and advised humans to live in peace. He added that only peaceful people would advance to what he called “the higher realms of spiritual evolution.”

Gardner continued reading the news as Southern Television engineers tried to recover their audio while the transmission lasted. Most viewers thought it was a prank or some mix-up. The hacker remains unknown.^[1]

9 HBO

On the evening of April 27, 1986, a hacker hacked HBO satellites during a live transmission of the movie The Falcon and the Snowman. The hacker called himself Captain Midnight and had full control of the satellite for four and a half minutes. During that time, he replaced the movie with a still image of a message that read:

GOODEVENING HBO
FROM CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT
$12.95/MONTH ?
NO WAY !
[SHOWTIME/MOVIE CHANNEL BEWARE!]

Investigators later revealed that the hacker was John MacDougall, an engineer and satellite dish seller who had a personal vendetta against HBO.

During the early 1980s, satellite dish owners could use their dishes to receive any satellite-broadcasted programming, including that of cable networks. However, many cable channels, including HBO, started scrambling their signals, forcing viewers to buy the descramblers they were selling. HBO also charged $12.95 a month for access to its content. This affected the business of satellite dish sellers like MacDougall, since homeowners were no longer buying dishes.

MacDougall got back at HBO using equipment at the satellite transmission station where he worked. His job required him to upload movies to satellites. He had just uploaded a movie that evening when he directed the equipment at HBO’s satellite to transmit his message.

The Federal Communications Commission launched an investigation and arrested MacDougall a few months later. Fortunately, he got off with a light punishment. The court sentenced him to a year of probation and ordered him to pay a $5,000 fine.^[2]

8 WGN And WTTW

At around 9:15 PM on November 22, 1987, a hacker got into WGN-TV in Chicago. Fortunately, the incident didn’t last long before WGN engineers recovered their signals. However, the undaunted hacker returned to attempt another hack that night.

This time, the target was WTTW, also in Chicago. As he did with WGN, the hacker replaced WTTW’s live broadcast with a video of a man in a weird-looking mask. The man did several strange things, including ridiculing WGN and having a woman beat his bare buttocks with a flyswatter. He also did a free advertisement for Pepsi.

The notorious incident is remembered today as the Max Headroom Signal Intrusion. Interestingly, the hacker remains unknown. He would have received a one-year sentence and been ordered to pay a $100,000 fine if he had been arrested.^[3]

7 Playboy And American Exxxtasy

In September 1987, a hacker got into the live broadcasts of two adult entertainment cable television channels, American Exxxtasy and Playboy. The man hacked into the programs three times on the same day, twice into American Exxxtasy and once into Playboy. During all three hacks, he replaced the networks’ content with a religious message.

The hacker was later revealed as 38-year-old Thomas M. Haynie. Haynie worked for the Christian Broadcast Network (CBN), a cable channel that only produced Christian programs. Investigators claimed Haynie used CBN’s equipment for the hacks. However, CBN directors claimed that was impossible because their equipment was incompatible with Playboy’s and American Exxxtasy’s.

Investigators insisted that the equipment was compatible and even provided evidence to prove that Playboy was hacked using CBN’s equipment. Haynie was given one felony and one misdemeanor charge for the Playboy hack. Two charges of felony and misdemeanor involving the American Exxxtasy hacks were dropped because of a lack of evidence.^[4]

6 Al-Manar

In August 2006, hackers working for the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) hacked into the Al-Manar television station, the official broadcaster of Hezbollah. The IDF replaced Al-Manar’s broadcast with pictures of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. The pictures were captioned with words like “Your day is coming, coming, coming.”

The IDF also transmitted pictures of dead Hezbollah fighters with captions like, “This is the photograph of a body of a member of Hezbollah’s special forces,” “Nasrallah lies: it is not us that is hiding our losses,” and “There are a large number of corpses like this on the ground and Nasrallah is hiding this truth.”^[5]

The photos of the dead fighters broadcasted to counter Hezbollah claims that it won the 2006 Lebanon War against Israel. Israel had actually bombed Al-Manar in an attempt to take it off the air during the war. However, the station somehow survived the bombing and continued broadcasting.

Israel also hacked several websites and radio stations belonging to Hezbollah around the time of the Al-Manar hack. In addition, it sent voice and text messages to Lebanese citizens informing them that its attacks were targeted at Hezbollah and not Lebanese civilians.

5 The Weather Channel

On April 18, 2019, someone hacked the Weather Channel. However, the perpetrator was more concerned with stopping the channel from running its regular programming than causing mischief. The hacker struck between 6:00 AM and 7:39 AM.

The Weather Channel was forced to air a recorded program throughout the hack. It later issued a statement saying that the hack was a “malicious software attack on the network.” Investigations later revealed that the incident was a ransomware attack. That is, the hacker wanted the station to pay him money before they could resume airing.^[6]

4 Channels 2 And 10

In November 2016, a hacker hijacked Israeli television stations Channels 2 and 10 on the same night. Both stations were transmitting the evening news when the hacker struck. He replaced their broadcasts with messages mocking Israel and suggesting that recent wildfires which had raged through Israel were God’s judgement on the nation.

Earlier that month, several parts of Israel were ravaged by wildfires that forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes. Around 80,000 people were evacuated in the city of Haifa alone. There were suspicions that at least some of the fires were the handiwork of Palestinian or pro-Arab arsonists.

The hacker also transmitted images of Islamic religious areas and an audio of an Islamic call to prayer. The hack happened around the time the Knesset was deliberating before voting on a bill to ban loudspeakers in religious buildings. The bill affected every religion, but there were suspicions that it was targeted at Muslims.^[7]

3 KRTV

In February 2013, someone hacked KRTV, a station in Montana, during a broadcast of The Steve Wilkos Show. The perpetrator actually hacked into KRTV’s emergency alert system to warn viewers of an ongoing zombie invasion in Montana. The hacker claimed that zombies were leaving their graves and had already taken over parts of Montana. He advised viewers against approaching the undead assailants.

The warning was not taken seriously. Gawker later suggested it was probably an advert for The Walking Dead. However, the hack was real; investigations showed that the hacker had attempted to hack other television stations without success.^[8] His identity remains unknown.

2 KVOA

In February 2009, someone hacked KVOA in Tuscon, Arizona, during a live transmission of the Super Bowl XLIII between the Arizona Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Steelers. The hack only affected viewers in Tucson who were watching the game on KVOA through Comcast.

The hacker replaced the game with 30 seconds of pornography featuring a couple engaged in what viewers called “a graphic act.” Interestingly, many people watching thought it was just another commercial until the couple, shall we say, went overboard. The video itself was from Club Jenna, an adult cable television channel.^[9]

Comcast was so embarrassed by the incident that it gave a $10 credit to 80,000 customers for free. Two years later, the FBI unveiled the hacker as one Frank Tanori Gonzalez. Gonzalez worked for Cox Cable at the time he hacked Comcast.

1 An ABC Affiliate In Wyoming

In 2006, someone supposedly hacked an unnamed ABC affiliate servicing Niobrara County, Wyoming. We say “supposedly” because details of the hack remain sketchy, raising doubts whether it even really happened.

The name of the station involved is a mystery, and there is limited information about the whole saga. The video that was supposedly aired during the hack definitely exists. However, its veracity is questionable. Nevertheless, people who say it happened call it “The Wyoming Incident” or “The Wyoming Hijacking.”

The hacker supposedly struck when he interrupted the evening news broadcast with a five-minute video of an animated head and several static texts. The first text contained the phrase “SPECIAL PRESENTATION.” Subsequent texts included “YOU ARE ILL . . . WE JUST WANT TO FIX YOU” and “YOU WILL SEE SUCH PRETTY THINGS.”

However, the hack gained infamy after viewers reportedly ended up with headaches, nausea, amnesia, and hallucinations after the hacker showed several strange pictures with an annoying tone. Some viewers also vomited on hearing the tone.

Some scientists think the broadcast wasn’t a hack or any sort of paranormal activity as some claimed. They say the tone that made people sick was likely created after some other signal interfered with their television signal. According to these scientists, the frequency of the tone was such that it caused hallucinations in those hearing it.^[10]

Every now and then a show crosses a line in the sand and gets one of its episodes banned. Sometimes it’s for good reason, such as a health issue.

SEE ALSO: Top 10 Movies That Have Been Banned Around The World

Sometimes the ban is based on current events and unfortunate timing. Sometimes there’s no good reason at all, and occasionally a show even willingly bans its own episodes!

From adult favorites to children’s cartoons, shows from all over the spectrum have found themselves on the wrong end of society’s sensibilities and been subjected to censure. Some even ended up censored on later releases on DVD and digital platforms.

These 10 episodes were banned from televisions across the world for reasons ranging from the reasonable to the insane, and I for one am delighted to share them with you!

10 Peppa Pig
“Mr. Skinnylegs”

If you have a child at home, you probably already know about Peppa Pig, the spunk little piglet who’s show revolves around teaching kids wholesome lessons about life and how to deal with fears. She’s also been the subject of many internet jokes and memes, bringing joy to people far beyond her typical audience.

Of course, as you guessed by her inclusion on this list, she also happens to have a banned episode.

The 2004 episode “Mr. Skinnylegs” is a seemingly harmless episode advising children not to be afraid of spiders, as they are more scared of you than you are of them, and won’t hurt you. Normally this message would be fine, and rings true enough…Unless, of course, you live in Australia.

In 2012, and again in 2017, the Australian Broadcasting Company banned the episode from airing on the Australian version of Nick Jr because of its “inappropriate message”. While to someone from the US or the UK, this might seem crazy, it’s important to note that Australia is home to massive, incredibly poisonous spiders such as the Redback Spider and the Sydney Funnelweb.^[1]

9 Pokemon
“Electric Soldier Porygon”

[WARNING: The above clip may trigger seizures.] Everyone knows Pokemon, the extremely popular game where you collect and battle cute little monsters to make them bigger and stronger. It also spawned many spin offs, several shows, a Japanese comic (called a manga), a card game, and tons of merchandise.

With such a massive, family friendly franchise, it’s hard to imagine they could do anything so bad they would get themselves banned from the airwaves, right?

Well, you are half correct! It wasn’t the story content of the episode, so much as the visuals. “Electric Soldier Porygon”, featuring the man-made Pokemon ‘Porygon’, had flashing and strobing lights to simulate a cybernetic explosion. This display caused over 600 children to need a trip to the hospital as the lights caused various illnesses ranging from nausea to seizures to temporary (but frightening) blindness!

Team Rocket couldn’t have come up with a better nefarious plot!^[2]

8 The X-Files
“Home”

The X-Files has never been one to shy away from horrible things. Monsters, mutants, and mayhem (oh, my!) abound in this show, both the original and the 2016 continuation. So it’s really no surprise that they would have found themselves on the wrong end of the banning stick when, in 1994, they released the episode “Home” onto TVs across the nation for the first time.

In the episode, a deformed baby is found buried in a baseball field in Mayberry, Pennsylvania. Mulder and Scully arrive (as is customary) to investigate, and soon uncover something much more awful than a monster or alien invasion: a family of inbred monster men whose matriarch, lacking arms and legs, lives under a bed in the family home.

The episode was so disturbing and received such strong backlash that it was immediately banned from the airwaves and received only one rerun, in October of 1999.^[3]

7 Sesame Street
The Entire Show

There’s nothing that really brings back the feeling of childhood quite like Sesame Street. The muppets, friendly kids, and reassuring adult characters bring back a feeling of safety and gentle nostalgia that wraps you in its arms like a warm hug.

There could be nothing worth banning about the show, right? I mean, it’s recommended showing to pre-school aged children as a primer for kindergarten, so surely it couldn’t be harmful!

Yet, in May of 1970, the state of Mississippi took a rather different view of the show. Citing its fully integrated cast of diverse characters and how that might clash with the views of the average Mississippian, the state of Mississippi actually banned the show from playing on state channels for 22 days.

While the ban was eventually reversed, it left a mark on the history of the show and the state.^[4]

6 Cow And Chicken
“Buffalo Gals”

Ah, the ’90s. Was there ever a better time for television? The answer is yes, but that’s neither here nor there. If you were a fan of cartoons in the late ’90s, you probably watched Cow And Chicken, a show about a pair of siblings, a heifer named Cow and a rooster named Chicken.

As was the style of the time, the cartoon was often crude, hiding adult jokes in plain sight and making various jokes about bodily functions, both human and animal.

One such joke crossed the line however, and ended with the episode being banned from the airwaves after just one airing! The episode, titled “Buffalo Gals”, was about a group of female bikers who wore buffalo head helmets, played softball, and broke into peoples houses to chew up their carpets. The episode, being chock full of innuendo as it was, aired once, and then was never seen again.^[5]

5 Family Guy
“Partial Terms of Endearment”

We all knew Family Guy was going to show up on this list sooner or later. How could it not, being one of the raunchiest, grossest adult cartoons of all time? You would think, given its history, that banned episode would revolve around Herbert the Pervert, or perhaps something to do with Quagmire’s many exploits (and exploitations).

It seems however that the straw that broke the FOX’s back wasn’t Quagmire or Herbert or even one of the many gross and outlandish adventures of Stewie, but instead an episode that tackled abortion and pro-choice vs pro-life views.

“Partial Terms Of Endearment” focused on Lois’s decision of whether or not to get an abortion after the couple she was going to surrogate for die in a car accident. The episode handles the topic in typical Family Guy fashion, with many jokes and jests at both sides of the argument. The episode was too much for FOX Network, however, who pulled it from airing before it could even run. While you can still get it on the DVD box sets, the episode is banned from public airtime.^[6]

4 The Amanda Show
“Episode 29”

Remember Amanda Bynes? ’90s Kids grew up tuning into her sketch show on Nickelodeon after school, watching her and her co-host Drake Bell put on a variety of sketches, mock interviews, and physical comedy bits for our collective amusement.

The ill fated banned episode, simply titled “Episode 29”, featured a skit called ‘The Lucklesses’, about a family with absolutely abysmal luck trying to go about their day, with various disasters culminating in their house being hit by a meteor.

The episode had the unfortunate luck itself of airing in March of 2001, just 6 months before 9/11. The episode was subsequently pulled from the air for fear of it resembling the Tower attack too much and was never shown in the US again.

Those Lucklesses really couldn’t catch a break, could they?^[7]

3 Married With Children
“I’ll See You In Court”

A beloved jewel of the 1980s, the well known sitcom Married With Children often used crude humor and remarks to tickle the funny bone of its home audience. For the most part, they were successful, but apparently one woman wasn’t laughing in January of 1998, when the show aired an episode titled “I’ll See You In Court”.

The episode shows the main characters suing the owner of a local hotel for filming their…intimate time, we’ll call it, without their permission. It also features a mention of homosexuality, and a woman removing her bra. While today that’s a big nothingburger, in the 1980s it was apparently so shocking that a Michigan woman had to start a letter writing campaign to FOX Network and its advertisers, demanding the episode be pulled and complaining of its disgusting and shocking contents.

Eventually, under pressure from its advertisers, FOX acquiesced to her demands, pulling the episode from the air.^[8]

2 You Can’t Do That On Television
“Adoption”

Is it any wonder that a show titled “You Can’t Do That On Television” would get at least one of its episodes banned? According to one of the show’s creators, Geoffrey Darby, it was very much a surprise.

The episode in question, titled “Adoption”, was about a couple who, as you may have guessed, had several adopted children. The children were poorly treated, but in a funny way as per the rules of comedy, slime was dumped on everyone, the audience laughed.

Or rather, the audience became quite upset, as the episode ended up pulled from the channel after many complaints were made. Darby himself notes that the episode went “too far”, and was pulled after airing “maybe once”.^[9]

1 South Park
“201”

South Park is the Holy Grail of offensive shows. Parodying and mocking anyone and everyone without limit or concern of consequence, South Park has been a stronghold of pure expression for 23 years, refusing to compromise on its jokes or values.

Until, that is, episode 201. Following directly on the heels of the story line of Episode 200, 201 was to feature the Super Best Friends, a team of religious icons acting as super hero’s, fighting against Tom Cruise and other celebrities looking to destroy the town of South Park and become exempt from criticism or ridicule.

The episode was most notable for featuring Muhammad, the prophet of Islamic faith who is not allowed to be depicted in any form. The episode, doing just that in reaction to the backlash to Muhammad’s previous appearance on the show, netted the network and creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker threats to life, limb, and bank account. While Stone and Parker would have gladly braved the storm for their art, the network was not convinced to do the same, and the showed was aired once, heavily edited, and then never again, even stripped entirely from digital platforms.^[10]

About The Author: Deana Samuels lives with her girlfriend and no cats, and has recently acquired a massive collection of Hello Kitty dolls and memorabilia. She hopes to one day achieve her dream of filling an house with plastic balls, like a Mickey D’s ball pit.

When the topic turns to terrible television series, we often find ourselves walking a tightrope of wet tissue. Some would argue for Cop Rock (1990), Steven Bochco’s musical police drama.

Others contend that the undisputed winner is The Flying Nun (1967–1970), which featured diminutive Sally Field as Sister Bertrille in a Puerto Rican convent. Thanks to brisk island winds and her starched cornette, she defied the laws of aerodynamics.

See Also: 10 Failed TV Shows That No One Should Have Approved

But certain shows are light-years beyond the average syndicated coprolite produced by the world of television. In fact, their horrendous quality approaches the sublime.

10 Heil Honey, I’m Home!
1990

Purporting to be a recently rediscovered “lost sitcom” from the 1950s, this British series was an effort by writer and producer Geoff Atkinson to parody American sitcoms “that would embrace any idea, no matter how stupid.” Atkinson captured the dullness of his intended target right down to the inane theme music and obligatory applause greeting every character’s entrance.

The premise of the series, set in 1937, has Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun as a typical suburban couple living in Berlin. Much of the comic misadventure arises from their next-door Jewish neighbors, Arny and Rosa Goldenstein.^[1]

However, the Holocaust and the estimated 70–85 million total deaths from World War II proved tough material for punch lines. This horribly inappropriate sitcom was canceled after one episode.

9 You’re in the Picture
1961

Jackie Gleason (1916–1987) was an extraordinary talent, as shown in his classic TV sitcom The Honeymooners and his performances in memorable films like The Hustler (1961), Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962), and Soldier in the Rain (1963).

However, no career of any longevity can escape the scarring of a major debacle. For Gleason, it came on the game show You’re in the Picture.

The format of the show involved a panel of four celebrities inserting their heads into holes cut out in life-size pictures depicting well-known song titles, historical events, or popular expressions. Unable to see the illustrations, the panel would try to guess the content of the pictures based on questions directed at Gleason.

Part of the problem was the illustrations themselves. While one tableau depicted the popular song “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” another represented “The Burlesque Beef Trust Girls,” a vaudevillian chorus line of beautiful women. That last one left the celebrities and home viewers scratching their heads.

Still, the major problem was Gleason. For all his talent, he lacked the folksy demeanor of Garry Moore or the comic sensibilities of Groucho Marx. Critics roasted the debut episode unmercifully, with Cecil Smith of the Los Angeles Times calling it “an insult to the audience.”^[2]

The criticism was not lost on Gleason. Those who tuned in for the second episode found Gleason sitting on a bare stage where he spoke directly to the camera:

There’s nothing here, except the orchestra and myself. [ . . . ] We have a creed tonight, and the creed is honesty. [ . . . ] Last week, we did a show that laid the biggest bomb—it would make the H-bomb look like a two-inch salute.

According to Time magazine, You’re in the Picture proved that the 1960–61 season was the “worst in the 13-year history of U.S. network television.” In 2002, TV Guide “honored” You’re in the Picture with the number 9 ranking on its list of the “50 Worst TV Shows of All Time.”

8 The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer
1998

Efforts by American television executives to refashion successful British series for U.S. audiences have produced some spectacular successes. However, UPN’s The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer, although inspired by BBC’s Blackadder the Third, managed to provide viewers with a first-class window seat on the Hindenburg.

Through a series of misadventures, Pfeiffer (Chi McBride), a black British aristocrat, finds himself employed as Abraham Lincoln’s manservant. However, Lincoln and the members of his cabinet are such twits that they couldn’t win a game of checkers if they were playing against a dead hamster. So the business of beating the South, saving the Union, and ending slavery is left to Pfeiffer.^[3]

Even before the show aired, the network drew criticism for trivializing the issue of slavery. Protests organized by the NAACP were held in front of Paramount Studios.

For the show’s creators, Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan, the issue wasn’t race. Instead, it was sex and politics with an eye toward Bill Clinton’s presidency, then in his second term.

The result was scenes like the one in which Pfeiffer chides Lincoln for “acting no better than a horny hillbilly from Arkansas” when Pfeiffer discovers the “Great Emancipator” trying to meet strange women for “telegraph sex.” The episode was titled “A.O.L.: Abe On-Line,” a sly reference to the sex opportunities on the Internet.

UPN both debuted and dropped the series in October 1998. In 2002, TV Guide ranked The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer as the 11th-worst TV series ever.

7 Casablanca
1955

Adapting cinematic blockbusters for television audiences seems a surefire way for producers and networks to hedge their bets in the battle for market share. However, except for rare successes like M*A*S*H (1972–1983) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), it usually doesn’t work out well.

Case in point: the two attempts at repackaging the 1942 film classic Casablanca for American TV sets. The first undertaking was an effort by Warner Bros. Studios to gain a foothold in the “new” medium of television.

During the 1955–56 season, the studio broadcast three different series in rotation under the heading of Warner Bros. Presents. The concept was dubbed a “wheel program.” Two series were based on films produced by the studio—Kings Row and Casablanca.

In the 1955 Casablanca TV series, the role of “Rick,” played by Humphrey Bogart in the film, nearly went to a rising young star named Anthony Quinn. But the studio refused his salary demands. Instead, “Rick” was played by Charles McGraw, who is best remembered today as the contrarian fisherman in the diner from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963).

Returning to Casablanca, the decision was made to “update” the action to set it in the “present day” of the 1950s. As a result, the ruthless Nazis of World War II became the ruthless communists of the Cold War.^[4]

Casablanca (1955) was canceled after its first season.

6 Casablanca
1983

It took almost 30 years for Warner’s second attempt at relocating Rick’s Cafe Americain to TV screens in the United States. The second series returned the action to the early days of World War II, and this time, care was taken in the casting.

The role of Captain Renault was ably filled by Hector Elizondo, Ray Liotta tended the bar as Sacha, and Scatman Crothers played the piano as Sam. David Soul, who had become a TV icon in Starsky and Hutch, was cast as the brooding Rick.

Still, the NBC series never succeeded in freeing itself from the shadow of the original movie, and the show was pulled after three episodes. The last two unaired episodes were burned off during the summer.^[5]

5 Manimal
1983

Manimal featured Simon MacCorkindale as crime-fighting New York University Professor Jonathan Chase. Remarkably, the mysterious Chase could change himself into any animal.

Due to budget constraints in the eight episodes that aired before the series’s cancellation, Chase’s shape-shifting was limited mainly to a sizable black panther.^[6]

Considered one of the worst science fiction shows of all time, Manimal had the dubious honor in 2004 of being ranked by the British trade magazine Broadcast as the fifth-worst television program ever exported by the U.S. to the UK. It was beaten out by Baywatch, The Anna Nicole Show, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Wild Palms.

Despite its infamy, or perhaps because of it, there have been persistent rumors of Manimal receiving the big-screen treatment as a possible Will Ferrell project.

4 My Mother the Car
1965–66

1965 saw the premiere of some of television’s best-remembered and most far-fetched series: Hogan’s Heroes (1965–1971), O.K. Crackerby! (1965–66), The Wackiest Ship in the Army (1965–66), I Dream of Jeannie (1965–1970), Green Acres (1965–1971), and F Troop (1965–67).

The NBC series My Mother the Car fit right in. When attorney David Crabtree (portrayed by Jerry Van Dyke, Dick’s brother) goes shopping for the family’s second car, he finds himself inexplicably drawn to a dilapidated “1928 Porter” touring car.

After purchasing the aged jalopy and driving it home, he is thrown into a stammering, wide-eyed fluster when the antique auto begins speaking to him via its dashboard radio. The Porter turns out to be the reincarnation of Crabtree’s deceased mother, Gladys. And that was pretty much the comedic benchmark for the show.^[7]

Car enthusiasts were quick to point out that Van Dyke’s four-wheeled costar, for which Ann Sothern provided the voice, was actually a Model T touring car.

The sitcom took a detour to cancellation after a single season.

3 Cavemen
2007

We are used to seeing Hollywood pictures revamped and rebooted for the small screen as TV series. These programs are interrupted by commercials filled with slogans and mascots pitching their products and services to the American consumer. Occasionally the characters in these commercials trade their humble 30-seconds for an expansive 30-minute sitcom.

This was the journey taken by the cavemen made famous in a series of commercials for GEICO insurance, which gave rise to the series Cavemen. The cavemen were first introduced in a 2004 commercial which claimed that Geico’s website was so easy to use, “a caveman could do it.” The success of that 15-second spot spurred GEICO to air additional commercials featuring two cavemen who took offense at GEiCO’s slogan. The commercials were so popular that the ad agency pitched the idea for a sitcom.^[8]

Set in San Diego, Cavemen showcases the lives of three—you got it— cavemen: Joel (Bill English), Nick (Nick Kroll), and Andy (Sam Huntington). Living among homo sapiens for the first time, they face racial prejudice and pressure from the rest of society. Even though they are ordinary guys with regular jobs and girlfriend troubles, their comments about and efforts to experience the modern world fall short, leaving behind few laughs and further cemented stereotypes.

ABC canceled the series after only six episodes.

2 The Hathaways
1961–62

Walter Hathaway (Jack Weston) and his wife, Elinore (Peggy Cass), help out family friend and theatrical agent Jerry Roper (Harvey Lembeck) with an unusual problem. Soon to be off on an overseas tour, Jerry needs to find a home for his “kids.”

So, Walter and Elinore eagerly sign on as foster parents to Candy, Charlie, and Enoch. The fact that these children are chimpanzees doesn’t seem to matter in the least.

The ABC series only lasted one season.^[9] But it began a long tradition of orangutans, chimps, and monkeys on television, including Daktari (1966–69), Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp (1970–71), Me and the Chimp (1972), B.J. and the Bear (1978–1981), and Mr. Smith (1983).

1 Star Wars Holiday Special
1978

Directed by Steve Binder, the Star Wars Holiday Special is the tale of Chewbacca and Han Solo trying to return to Chewbacca’s homeworld, Kashyyyk, in time to celebrate “Life Day” (their version of Christmas). In this universe of schmaltz, Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, and Carrie Fisher find themselves in the same galaxy as Diahann Carroll, Art Carney, Bea Arthur, and Harvey Korman.

For the first time, we meet Chewbacca’s wife, Malla; his son, Lumpy; and his aged father, Itchy, back on Kashyyyk. Some of the original Star Wars characters are seen in archival footage of the movie. But it is the injection of the veteran television personalities that adds a surreal gloss to the whole enterprise.

It starts when Saun Dann (Carney), a family friend, arrives with Life Day gifts in hand. Itchy receives a computer disc that offers a performance by Diahann Carroll singing “This Minute Now.”

Other weirdness follows, including Korman as a four-armed alien cook. There are additional musical interludes, including a music video by Jefferson Starship. The special concludes with Chewbacca back in the arms of his loved ones as Princess Leia (Fisher) gives a short speech on the meaning of Life Day. It ends with her singing a celebratory song.

The special was called “the worst two hours of television ever” by David Hofstede, author of What Were They Thinking?: The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History. George Lucas denied any involvement with it.^[10]

Humans have always been fascinated with (and terrified by) the paranormal. This doesn’t prevent some of them from going out of their way to try and force an encounter with the unseen. However, sometimes spooks are the furthest thing from their mind when they are suddenly confronted with something they can’t explain.

It is no wonder that there are a variety of paranormal reality TV shows all dealing with real-life ‘encounters’ with ghosts, demons and other apparitions. Obviously, most of these shows have eye-roll inducing episodes because of the bad acting or weird re-enactments, but occasionally they produce a gem, regardless, that causes real goosebumps.

Potential spoilers ahead!

10 Paranormal Events Linked To Mass Tragedies

10 Terror in the Woods

Woods can be scary places. You can’t always see the dangerous creatures hiding between the trees or thick undergrowth, and that is just the real-life ones. Many people have had unsettling experiences hiking or camping in the woods, while others have purchased homes in remote woods only to find that there is something sinister lurking inside.

Bill and Charisse Stark experienced their own horror story that was eventually aired on Destination America’s Terror in the Woods. They couldn’t believe their luck when a cabin owner sold them his property at the edge of a geological reserve in Red River Gorge, Kentucky. The cabin was to be their dream ‘retirement retreat.’ The dream soon turned nightmarish when unexplained incidents started happening in and around the cabin.^[1]

At one point, Bill installed a security camera outside which captured a green mist that seemed to fade in and out. The camera also caught what looked like a bright light coming up from the ground and floating off. Bill found a weird footprint in the snow outside the cabin, and the couple’s TV and PlayStation would on occasion turn on by itself. When they inspected the game console, they found a slimy substance covering it.

Later, in their Terror in the Woods episode, it was revealed that a woman suffering from a terminal illness had died in the cabin. It was also reported that strange things kept happening in the cabin after the episode aired.

9 Ghost Hunters

Ghost Hunters ran from 2004 to 2016 and was revived in 2019. During its original 11-season run, Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson investigated haunted locations in the US as well as the UK. They are the founders of TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society) and work alongside a team of ‘ghost hunters.’

During the multitude of episodes, many strange things happened including faces materializing in darkness, multiple EMF meters triggered at the same time, disembodied figures wandering around and voices calling out from basements. During “The Armory” episode the team was investigating the New Bedford Armory in Massachusetts when their sound man, Frank DeAngelis, inexplicably fell backwards. He couldn’t get back on his feet and had to receive medical attention.

Afterwards, DeAngelis claimed that he felt something pass through him. He also quit the crew the next day because he was too traumatized to carry on with the investigations.^[2]

8 True Terror with Robert Englund

Who better to host a scary show than Freddy Krueger himself? True Terror with Robert Englund premiered in March 2020 (as a continuation of True Terror with George Takei) and has received great reviews. The show takes historical news stories of the paranormal kind and brings them to life using Englund’s celebrity and general creepiness.

One of the stories of the pilot episode included a man from North Carolina who dreamt of his own death and the countdown to it. There is also the tale of a New Orleans teenager unable to escape a waking nightmare and his eventual grisly fate. (Sounds like something Freddy Krueger could be involved in, right?)

One of the creepiest episodes, however, is the one that relates the true story of the Axeman of New Orleans, who was one of America’s most infamous serial killers. The Axeman initiated a dark chain of events in which he challenged the public and the police with an open letter. The media printed several responses from citizens in which they challenged the killer right back. Italian American immigrant, George Columbo intended to meet up with the Axeman and what followed is the stuff of nightmares.^[3]

7 Paranormal Lockdown

Imagine spending 100 hours in an infamously haunted house, with an unpredictable demonic entity. This is exactly what paranormal researchers, Nick Groff, and Katrina Weidman, did for Paranormal Lockdown in 2016. The Black Monk House episode was slated as a two-hour special that filled the ‘gap’ between the show’s first and second seasons.

Black Monk House in Pontefract, England, has been visited by several paranormal investigators, some of whom have experienced objects levitating and people being attacked by an unseen entity. A girl was dragged upstairs in what could only be described as a scene from a modern horror movie, while some ghost hunters who have encountered the ‘poltergeist’ that resides in the house, refused to stay at the property. The caretakers of the house also refuse to stay inside by themselves.

Nick and Katrina spent four days trying to capture the poltergeist, The Black Monk, on camera. The result makes for one of the best (if not most terrifying) episodes of the series.^[4]

6 Unsolved Mysteries

Before Unsolved Mysteries 2020, there was Unsolved Mysteries 1987 presented by Robert Stack, among others. As the name states, each episode revolved around mysterious incidents including murders, hauntings, disappearances, and accidents. Robert Stack’s inimitably deep voice and the iconic intro music gave many a viewer a goosebump or two. Alongside this, some of the episodes were truly creepy and are still being discussed on internet forums such as Reddit years after airing.

One of the most memorable, and truly terrifying, episodes aired during Season 7 and related the story of Pam and Eric Ellender. In 1991, Pam and Eric were found dead in their bed in Sulphur, Louisiana. Their infant daughter was unharmed and crying from her bedroom when police made the discovery. It was revealed afterwards that the killers threw a party in the couple’s home soon after killing them and while their bodies were in the bedroom. While the murders were technically solved, there were many chilling details included in the episode that kept viewers at the edge of their seats. It is truly an episode that must be watched.^[5]

10 Gruesome Deaths That Have Been Attributed To Ghosts

5 The Dead Files

Cheerfully named The Dead Files sees medium Amy Allan and former homicide detective Steve DiSchiavi investigate haunted locations at people’s request. The core of each episode revolves around Steve and Amy doing independent investigations at a specific location and then revealing their findings to one another at the end of the show.

Even though the show has attracted a lot of criticism over the years, it remains a firm fan favorite and has aired its 12th season earlier in 2020. One of the spookiest episodes, according to fans, details the story of Annie who has lived in her home for more than ten years and believes that the hooded figures she keeps seeing on her property has made her existing health problems worse. Annie also claimed to have seen the ghosts of long-dead Native Americans surrounding her house in Cedar Park, Texas. Annie’s friend, Joel, claimed to have seen what looked like paper cut-outs in the shape of people hanging in the trees around the house, jumping between the branches.^[6]

4 Celebrity Ghost Stories

Celebrities are not exempt from brushes with the paranormal. There have been so many stories of celebrities experiencing something unexplained that there is even a TV show or two dedicated to those celebs who want to share their scary stories.

Celebrity Ghost Stories (American version) debuted in 2009 featuring Belinda Carlisle and Gina Gershon, among others. Other stars throughout the series included Joan Collins, Alice Cooper, Kelly Osbourne, Nene Leakes, who heard the voices of ghost children, and Paula Abdul.

One of the episodes feature shock rocker, Marilyn Manson, who related the story of his encounter as a teen with a copy of the Necronomicon. His friend implored him to read the incantations in the book, and Manson believed that doing so caused a disturbance in the energy around them. Manson also claimed that a scary disembodied voiced asked them ‘do you believe in satan?”

Manson stated during his segment that he had read enough of the Bible to know that what was happening was ‘not good’ and that people’s energy stays with the things they were attached to in life after they die.

3 Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction

Much like Unsolved Mysteries, Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction also gained a cult following its premiere in 1997. Presenting 5 stories in each episode, of which some are fact and some fiction, was the premise of the show.

The show’s opening episode, The Apparition, was one of the most unsettling in the series. It tells the tale of a woman who suffered a nervous breakdown and after her recovery starts seeing the ghost of a dead woman in a mirror on the second floor of her home. The ghost tries to say something, but never succeeds.

One night a man breaks into the woman’s home and follows her when she runs upstairs trying to escape him. The man then sees the ghost in the mirror and freaks out.

Even though the episode aired years ago, it still packs a chilling punch and is worth a watch. It was revealed at the end that the story was based on true events.

2 Paranormal Witness

Paranormal Witness is one of the most popular spooky TV shows and ran for five seasons between 2011 and 2016. The stories covered during the show included the weird abilities of Don Decker, the Capitol Theatre Haunting, werewolves, creepy dolls and, of course, demons.

One of the most horrifying episodes details the incident in which 23-year-old Christene Skubish died after she fell asleep at the wheel while driving along Highway 50 in California and crashed down a steep incline in 1994. In the car with Christene was her 3-year-old son, Nick. When she didn’t arrive at her intended destination, her stepfather reported her missing. Five days later, a woman named Deborah Hoyt and her husband were travelling along Route 50 when Deborah spotted a woman lying on the side of the road. The woman was naked, and her arms covered her head. The couple immediately notified the police, but when the authorities arrived, the woman was gone.

This incident led police to the discovery of Christene’s body inside her wrecked car and Nick laying in a fetal position in the passenger seat, weak and dehydrated but alive. Doctors agreed that if Nick had been inside the car for another hour or two, he would have died.^[7]

The details of this story are both chilling and heartbreaking and one of the best episodes of Paranormal Witness.

1 Haunted

Haunted premiered in 2018 on Netflix and recounts terrifying true stories of people who have found themselves face-to-face with evil. One of the episodes in Season 2 of the series details a nurse’s encounter with a possessed patient at a nursing home which caused many viewers to freak out.
However, Season 1’s Slaughterhouse episode, in which two sisters reveal that their father was a serial killer, is about as terrifying as they come.

Their childhood was spent listening to the terrible sounds of people being murdered in their house, after their father picked up ‘strays’ from the streets and bars. They lived on a couple of acres of forest land and their father disposed of his victims’ bodies in the woods. The sisters believed that the murders led to their house becoming haunted, and their father also engaged in dark rituals in the woods which led them to believe that he was possessed.^[8]

The episode unleashed controversy with many viewers taking to Twitter to voice their scepticism about the validity of the claims made by the sisters.

10 Terrifying Haunted And Creepy Mask Stories

It’s common practice to refer to horror films where there were significant problems during production as “cursed.” The streaming service Shudder has an entire series devoted to this concept. As it happens, focusing on events surrounding horror movies exclusively is unnecessary. You can find uncanny occurrences across all genres. 

We’ll be looking both behind the curtain and at the content of programming released for public consumption. Whether it be the private lives of actors or the names in a script, there are plenty of occurrences on both the small and big screen that will make you wonder if there’s something very strange at work behind our understanding of reality. More than a few will make you wonder if that thing is sinister indeed. 

10. Roundhay Garden

Our first stop is at the very birth of cinema, if not sooner. The first piece of motion picture film ever shot from a single camera (so early in the process that it was printed on paper instead of celluloid film) Roundhay Garden was a two second long sequence by inventor Louis Le Prince, shot in the front yard of his in-laws in 1888 in Leeds, England. Louis’s mother-in-law Sarah Whitely and son Adolphe Le Prince are on screen, with Adolphe walking parallel to the camera and Sarah and her husband dancing. To watch it today, you wouldn’t suspect that the first motion picture seemed to bestow a sort of curse upon its cinematographer and stars. 

Within ten days, Sarah Whitely died. Indeed, she had collapsed from the heat during the process of shooting the film, and spent her last ten days trying to recover from it. Within two years, Louis Le Prince disappeared from a train on September 16, 1890, while on a trip to arrange a screening in New York City which would have been the first public exhibition of his invention. As if that weren’t enough tragedy for a home movie, eleven years after that, Adolphe died very suspiciously while out hunting. Even at the time, there was considerable speculation that no less than Thomas Edison had done in Louis Le Prince to get rid of a competitor for his own cinematic inventions and then his rival’s son to put a stop to investigations, but no conclusive evidence has ever been brought to public attention. 

9. The Tall Target

John Kennedy has to save newly-elected president Abraham Lincoln from assassination. Sounds like a wacky time travel comedy? It’s not, it’s the premise of Anthony Mann’s historical crime thriller The Tall Target, starring Dick Powell as Police Sergeant John Kennedy. If it seems like ridiculous pandering, consider that the movie was released in 1951, back when Kennedy was a representative in the US House and before the publication of Profiles in Courage which would do so much to increase his national prominence. 

The events of the film are loosely based on a real event. Specifically the process of moving Lincoln to Washington DC for his 1861 inauguration under heightened alert because the Pinkerton Agency had caught word that there was an attempt planned on the extremely polarizing president’s life. It became known as the Baltimore Plot, for the period of the journey on February 22, 1861 spent on the Baltimore rail line. There was no Police Sergeant John Kennedy involved, though there was a H. F. Kenney who accompanied the Pinkertons during the escort mission. Part of Kenney’s contribution was giving a carriage driver intentionally bad directions in case the driver was intending to bring them into an ambush, which would have potential for the setup to a wacky comedy instead of the taut thriller Mann intended. 

8. All My Children

With more than 10,700 episodes of melodrama over its run from 1970 to 2011, there was plenty of room for morbidness both on and off camera to happen. Unquestionably the most morbid began in August 1997. During an episode that month, actress Eva LaRue’s character Maria Santos was on a plane. It crashed, and she did not survive. In a moment that probably would not be included today, her significant other Edmund was reassured that at least she would live on through her children, which were “the greatest gift she could have given.” 

Fast forward to September 10, 2001. Eva LaRue was booked for a flight on American Airlines Flight 11. Because she was eight months pregnant with her daughter Kaya (she’d been in New York City for a baby shower) she wanted to sleep in and rescheduled her flight at the last moment. As a result, she rescheduled her way out of being one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center, as she later tweeted about and confirmed in an interview. If this sounds familiar, it’s because a similar narrow miss happened to Seth McFarlane. For her part, LaRue claimed that the brush with death was the kind of experience that “took the fear out of you.”  

7. Poltergeist

While the intro said the list wouldn’t focus on horror movies exclusively, there was nothing about excluding them, and the events relating to this 1982 classic are very harrowing. Shortly after the first film’s release in 1982, Dominique Dunne, who played the teenage character Dana, was strangled to death by boyfriend John Thomas Sweeney on the driveway of her home in West Hollywood. Specifically the killing took place on October 30, and in 1986 became a subject of public outcry again when in 1986 he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, and it didn’t even prevent him from returning to his old job as head chef at The Chronicle restaurant. As many pointed out at the time, strangulation was nearly the cause of death for Robbie, Dana’s younger brother in the film, and Oliver Robbins, the actor who reportedly was only prevented from asphyxiating by Steven Spielberg’s intervention. 

Arguably even more disturbing was the fate of Heather O’Rourke, who played the character if Carol when she was only seven years old. She would star in all three original Poltergeist movies and become perhaps the most iconic character (if not her then definitely her line “they’re here”). And in 1988, when she was only twelve years old, she passed away during an emergency surgery for an ailment induced by tainted well water. She and her costar were buried in the same cemetery, adding to the sense there was some grim curse on the Poltergeist films.     

6. The West Wing

In the final season of this Aaron Sorkin-created drama, the character Leo McGarry, a war criminal and advisor to President Josiah Bartlett, had two heart attacks. One at Camp David where he was left in the woods for several hours, and another on the night of an election where he was the running mate for Matthew Santos, the second one proving fatal for the character. Actor John Spencer was not featured in the scene where his character’s dead body is discovered, because he had passed away before the episode was produced.  

John Spencer was just shy of 59 years old at the time of his passing, so he was still relatively young as far as average life expectancy went in 2005. To add to the discomfort of fans giving that final season a rewatch, McGarry says of his campaign staff that they’re going to kill him in an episode that aired days before his passing. According to Martin Sheen, after Spencer passed away, the entire season was rewritten to change the outcome of the season-long election arc. 

5. Troy

This 2004 film from Das Boot director Wolfgang Petersen is not very celebrated today. Commercially it was only a success due to worldwide box office, critically it was at best a modest success. I was widely criticized for being a wildly unfaithful adaptation of Homer’s The Iliad by people who never would have read the ancient epic in their lives. Yet there was a curious form of verisimilitude, or maybe if you were a form of method acting, that occurred during the shoot. 

During one of the stunts, star Brad Pitt injured his achilles tendon in what he referred to as a “bout of stupid irony,” as a major development in the original Iliad is the character Achilles being brought down by a vulnerability in the same body part. This was no trifling occurrence for the production, as there was shutdown for weeks as he healed. The delay caused even more headaches for Petersen when it kept the crew in place for a hurricane to strike and destroy much of their equipment and sets. It’s surprising that Troy isn’t more remembered for being a cursed movie shoot.    

4. Above Suspicion

Christopher Reeve was of course best known for playing all-American hero Superman for four films over a decade. Behind the scenes he bolstered his good guy image through activism such as for Amnesty International and leading a protest march against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Still throughout his career he would be cast in roles that subverted that image such as in 1982’s dark comedy Deathtrap, 1991’s Bump in the Night where he played a child predator, and 1995’s Above Suspicion, where he played a man who married his wife and brother and tried to fake paralysis as an alibi. In what might have been stunt casting, Reeve’s real life wife, Dana Reeve, played a detective investigating his character. 

Those with the least familiarity with Reeve’s later life know of his 1995 horse riding accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down. What takes it from the realm of what Brad Pitt called stupid irony to viciously cruel irony is that the injury occurred within days of Above Suspicion’s premiere. For what it’s worth, Dana Reeve said in interviews that she disliked sentimental depictions of Reeve’s misfortune while he was doing charity work for the disabled, so during their time, they seemingly didn’t want anyone’s pity.    

3. McMillan & Wife

This police procedural about the married couple Commissioner Stewart McMillan and his wife Sally solving crimes is little discussed today, yet considering it ran from 1971 to 1977 it enjoyed a decently long run. It’s not hard to see why. The fact its episodes were 60-90 minutes meant it was a bit more difficult to syndicate than concurrent police procedurals like Columbo. It also doesn’t help that the movie had Susan St. James’s character Sally and her son killed off over a contract dispute did not reflect too well on the artistic integrity of the production. This decision took on a horribly grim note decades later. 

By 2004, Susan St. James had married NBC executive Dick Ebersol and had a fourteen year-old son with him named Teddy. On Thanksgiving weekend that year, St. James’s husband and son were in a plane crash. Dick Ebersol survived, but their son did not. St. James said of the ordeal that her way of dealing with it was to remind herself and her family that they should move past it, and “resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other guy dies.”  

2. The Omen

Similar to the hype surrounding The Exorcist during production, there were many stories of how so many things went wrong during the production of The Omen that it seemed as if the forces of Satan were working to sabotage the shoot. As pointed out by Screenrant regarding The Exorcist, many of these supposedly uncanny occurrences were more the result of irresponsible filmmaking and salacious marketing and promotion, and that of course a process that lasts more than nine months is going to have some problems. So it is with The Omen as well, though there is one anecdote that requires no participation by the Devil or anything supernatural to be bloodchilling. 

A year after the release of The Omen, special effects artist John Richardson was driving through Belgium with his assistant Elizabeth Moore while they were working on A Bridge Too Far, the World War II film about Operation Market Gardens, a failed Allied effort to capture a number of Dutch bridges in late 1944. There was a grievous car accident, and as a result, Elizabeth Moore was decapitated. Richardson himself reported how the accident was uncannily similar to a decapitation effect he had taken part in during the shoot for the Omen, and reportedly the accident occurred near the town of Ommen.  

1. The China Syndrome 

This 1979 film starring Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas, and Jack Lemmon centered around an attempt to smuggle footage out of a nuclear power plant showing that a nuclear meltdown had very narrowly been avoided was one of the big hits of its year. It was condemned by many in the nuclear energy industry as alarmist, and received a form of vindication that surely brought cold comfort to its makers when the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, a disaster which cost more than a billion dollars in clean up and which certain (heavily disputed) studies claim caused a 64% increase of some local cancer rates, occurred within 12 days of its premiere.

Unlike The Omen and The Exorcist, reportedly the studio did not try to cash in on real life tragedy, and the word from studio executives and stars like Michael Douglas was to tell any news outlet who asked “no comment.” Despite that, Michael Gray, who wrote the original script for The China Syndrome, accepted a job writing an article covering the Three Mile Island disaster for Rolling Stone Magazine, which became typical of the way other news outlets would try to spread the story of how The China Syndrome and Three Mile Island were comparable. 

Dustin Koski also cowrote Return of the Living with Jonathan “Bogleech” Wojcik, a horror comedy about the first sighting of a living creature centuries after all Earth died and became ghosts. 

Over the years, television broadcasting has proved vital across the globe. Millions of people watch television daily. The evolution of television made it the primary source of information and entertainment for everyone worldwide. Information and entertainment are pretty much what modern-day society is all about. Even with the rise of social media, television broadcasting keeps everyone up to date on the latest news, weather, and other important information in our daily lives. There is always something new to be informed on through the news, documentaries, and even commercials. Sports, movies, and comedy-featured content also serve as entertainment avenues to television viewers.

All this has been made possible with the emergence of various television channels throughout the years. Some of these channels remained in existence for decades, with quite a few rebranded over time. Unfortunately, others have also been brutally closed down or replaced by other television channels, having existed for a limited time. This list accounts for ten popular television channels that impacted television broadcasting—whether good or bad—even after being closed down.

Related: Top 10 Truly Terrible Television Series

10 Setanta Sports Channel, UK

Most English Premier League fans may very much recall Setanta Sports. The sports channel, founded in the United Kingdom, was bought by Eircom Limited (EIR) in 1992. Eircom was a telecommunication company based in Ireland that purchased the Setanta Sports channel to bring Irish sports to fans worldwide. The channel expanded to have operations all over the United Kingdom and was very popular by the end of 1998.

With the acquisition of Setanta, Eircom was able to expand its television coverage to more customers. Setanta acquired broadcast rights to American golf, English rugby union, boxing, and football. Setanta also made a big step in having the rights to the Scottish Premier League in 2004 and 46 Premier League matches from 2007 to 2010.

The channel appeared to be expanding rapidly despite facing fierce competition with Sky Sports during that period. However, the channel was bound to face problems because it borrowed millions of pounds to acquire the rights to particular sports matches. The UK-based company was on the verge of collapse, with a debt of around £250 million. Setanta was forced into bankruptcy in 2009 after failing to make payments for television rights, owing the English Premier League £30 million. As a result, several British football clubs faced financial difficulties during the 2009/10 season. The channel had to close down as it accumulated too much debt.

After Discovery purchased the Asian version of the channel, Setanta is still active in Eurasia. All other international versions of the television channel, including the UK-based ones, were purchased by various media companies. Sky Sports, however, continued to expand its brand and is now considered one of the best sports media outlets worldwide.^[1]

Despite Setanta’s problems, it brought joy to football fans all over the United Kingdom.

9 The Comedy Channel & HA!

Although the world can never have enough laughter, it does not mean it requires two comedy channels. There were two comedy networks in 1989, which merged in April 1991. Home Box Office attempted to bring the chuckles 24 hours a day with the Comedy Channel, whiles Viacom had a similar idea, launching HA! about five months later in April 1991. Finally, both channels merged to form Comedy Central.

Before the channels merged, the Comedy Channel focused on stand-up comedy specials and clips from the classic comedy of feature movies. However, HA! produced content centered on acquired off-network situation comedies.

Both channels could not develop significantly during their years together, with only roughly seven million members apiece. According to the executives from both industries, the reluctance of cable system operators to take sides in a war between two industry giants was the reason for both channels not developing. Economically, the 50-50 marriage provided comedy television a 15 million-subscriber pool, nearly double the average starting capital. The merged television channels changed to Comedy Central, which is currently active and very popular among television viewers in the United States.^[2]

8 HawkVision

HawkVision was a United States television channel that came to light in 1992. It was a short-lived television subscription service founded by Bill Wirtz, owner of the Chicago Blackhawks. The ice-hockey team never had their home games televised after the 1992 National Hockey League season as the Blackhawks owner believed broadcasting the home games would not be fair to season ticket holders.

Bill Wirtz decided to cancel all traditional broadcasting offers from various television channels and offer HawkVision as a television subscription service. The sole purpose for the existence of the HawkVision channel was to broadcast Blackhawks games from their Chicago stadium to the homes of fans for a fee of up to $19.95 per game. Wirtz kept HawkVision going after the Stanley Cup playoff games by offering access to regular-season home games for the next two seasons for a fee of $29.99 per month. The fans reacted angrily to the increase in price. It was unlikely anyone was going to pay that amount. The HawkVision television channel proved unprofitable after one season, as ticket sales figures dropped massively. Bill Wirtz passed on in 2007, which saw the home game television restriction removed.^[3]

7 ITV Play

ITV Play was a British 24-hour participation television station that aired for a brief time. The channel lasted less than a year due to the infamous premium rate phone-in scandal that ruined it. When it was operating, it ran shows like The Common Room, The Debbie King Show, and the popular quiz show, Quizmania.

The television channel faced legal issues for charging people a lot of money to participate in the contests with very slim odds of winning. ITV set aside £5 million in its half-year results to deal with the financial fallout from the premium-rate phone-in controversy. The business had to pay for the Deloitte report and other inquiries into its phone-ins. As a result, the broadcaster announced in 2007 that it had set aside £18 million to cover the incident.

After that, all text and interactive voting on shows came to a close. Phone-in votings on the X-Factor show also ceased. ITV said on March 5, 2007, that all premium-rate phone competitions and quizzes, as well as the ITV Play channel, would be suspended. The ITV play channel closed down in the early hours of March 6, 2007.^[4]

6 Men & Motors

Men & Motors was a lifestyle television channel in the United Kingdom. The channel, founded in 1996, focused solely on men who enjoy motors and ladies. Having a show full of cars and women back in the day was bound to draw millions of viewers. Men and Motors had numerous car content shows, fueled action movies, adult cartoons, and plenty of footage of scantily clad women.

Unfortunately, the lifestyle channel aired for less than a year on Freeview. The channel stopped broadcasting on digital terrestrial television to make way for ITV to establish ITV Play. Men & Motors was then only available on satellite and cable television because of the restricted bandwidth on the platform and a wish to retain the ITV family.

The channel was re-launched in 2012. Shane Lynch and Torie Campbell were the new hosts. A new revenue stream opened up for One Media, which purchased the rights to Men & Motors from Granada Television Products and ITV Digital Channels. The new channel has thrived as a YouTube offering, with 134 million minutes of viewing in 2020. It airs the best shows from the extensive archives in a new on-demand format.^[]

You wouldn’t guess by looking at it now, but the Men & Motors channel was a force to be reckoned with when it was active.

5 Dumont Network

Dumont was one of the first major television and media networks in the United States. Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), Dumont, and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) dominated television in the United States during the 1940s. During the war, most television channels had sporadic television content. Dumont, on the other hand, devised a deal for advertisers. The network ran a midweek special, where sponsors and advertisers could use the Dumont labs for commercial purposes. Dumont Network was very ambitious compared to the other two major television networks. Every show took place inside the Dumont building, owned solely by the Dumont Corporation. The Honeymooners was among the show’s sketches, inspiring the popular CBS sitcom, Gleason.

Since Dumont lacked the financial resources of NBC and CBS, the network trailed behind those two in terms of star power and production quality after the 1940s. Dumont was placed fourth in the Nielsen ratings after American Broadcasting Company (ABC) and United Paramount Theaters merged in 1953. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) limited the number of television stations an organization could possess and made it difficult for Dumont to expand the network. Dumont was on the verge of purchasing ABC and becoming the largest station in the United States until the FCC disapproved of the purchase. ABC, however, received financing from Paramount. Dumont converted to Ultra High-Frequency (UHF) broadcasts to save money. Unfortunately, no one liked UHF transmissions in the 1950s, resulting in the closedown of the channel.

The high cost of transmitting and the limit imposed by the FCC massively impacted Dumont Network and other television channels across the United States during the 1950s.^[6]

4 Nuts TV

Television nostalgia buffs may recall a short-lived television channel in the United Kingdom that aired various fun and bizarre content. Nuts TV was a British television cannel that debuted in 2007. Unlike other failed stations, Nuts TV was available on the Freeview network. Despite promising a never-ending parade of bizarre content, it was unable to attract viewers. Nuts TV had celebrity hosts, Lucy Pinder and comedian Dan Wright hosting the shows on the channel. The evening content always had the same pattern. Each night began with news, followed by sports, girls, and sex-related content.

It was barely on our screens for two years, which was a shame. The channel presented a wide range of unique and fast-paced comedies. It also featured a bizarre segment in which Lucy Pinder, the famous model, read famous works of “literature” while dressed in lingerie. The channel aired 20 hours of live television every week on Freeview channel 42.

The Cable News Network (CNN) replaced Nuts TV. It was scheduled to premiere on Freeview in January 2009, pending approval from Digital Television Multiplex Operators Limited, which oversaw all Freeview channels. Unfortunately, the Nuts television channel became inactive in 2009, followed by the Nuts magazine five years later.^[7]

3 The Cable Music Channel

The Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) owned the Cable Music Channel (CMC), a short-lived American cable channel. Ted Turner founded the all-music video channel, which debuted in 1984. With the Satellite News Channel going up against CNN back in the day, Ted turner wanted to give MTV a run for its money and music. But not all of his ideas turned out to be successful. While MTV had Madonna acting like a virgin on live television, CMC took a family-oriented approach. “I Love L.A.” by Randy Newman was the first video to air on CMC. Turner debuted the music channel with much excitement after his music video show, Night Tracks. However, with MTV still striving to expand its distribution, there was no room for a second music video network on cable systems.

Ted Turner decided to shut down the business after a month. The Cable Music Channel was sold to MTV’s parent company because it lacked the cable providers, videos, and viewership to compete with the all-music channel. The Cable Music Channel aired from October to November 1984. MTV, however, is now one of the leading entertainment channels worldwide^[8]

2 Sumo TV

Imagine a world where you could create a platform and have users provide all of the content, such a bizarre world. Sumo TV debuted in 2006, claiming to be the first user-content television channel. Unfortunately, most people in 2006 did not have access to high-quality cameras or widespread internet access. This idea was quite astonishing because YouTube had only recently launched. But having a user-generated format could never work on broadcast television. It was one of the main reasons why Sumo TV failed.

Unsurprisingly, the channel faced a problem with the Office of Communications (Ofcom)—the British version of the FCC—for imposing broadcast regulations on the people who sent the clips. After ruling against two Sumo TV clips, Ofcom cautioned broadcasters about user-generated content.

Ofcom was concerned about the responsibility placed on creators for adhering to the Sumo network broadcasting code on the user-generated clips rather than the network performing adequate checks themselves. The channel officially closed down in 2012 and was replaced by the Horror Channel.^[9]

1 National Educational Television

National Educational Television (NET) was an educational and public television network created in early 1952. The Ford Foundation previously owned it, and it was later co-owned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. From 1952 to 1972, the NET collection contained a lot of television programs on the humanities, public affairs, social issues, science, and education from non-commercial TV stations and producers. The channel aired documentaries and discussions on the black freedom struggle, the Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, poverty, and student activism.

In 1963, NET decided to show documentaries that addressed issues regarding poverty and racism. The perceived liberal bias from the shows aired on the channel made it very unpopular with viewers. The Ford Foundation and the government decided to cease funding the television channel for continuously broadcasting such content. Within a year, the channel had lost so much money that it had to close down.

In 1970, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) replaced the educational channel, which initially began operations in 1969. The NET’s refusal to stop airing the critically acclaimed but contentious documentaries led to its closure by both Ford and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1970.^[10]

With hundreds of shows being produced a year on Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon alone, older television can seem like it can’t possibly be worth checking out. Visually, it’s almost certain to look staid beyond being grainy and black and white. The reference points for the comedy will likely be so dated as to be incomprehensible, the plots of all the shows will have long been ripped off to death or spoiled by the time you can see them these days, and surely the censors removed with surgical precision everything halfway interesting.

But no. Entertainers had just as much desire to break out of creative molds decades ago as they do now. Censors could miss what would today be considered the most jaw-dropping content you could imagine. Also back then when screwups happened, they could put a whole season’s worth of blooper reels to shame. All that and more are available below, thanks to the dedicated efforts of antiquarians who scoured through hours of television for its hidden novelties.

10. William Shatner’s Twilight Zone Slur

Everyone who knows about Rod Serling’s 1959-64 sci-fi/fantasy classic remembers William Shatner’s struggle with his sanity and against a gremlin on the wing of the plane in Nightmare at 20,000 Feet in the final season. Turns out that two seasons earlier he starred as Don Carter in a much less-remembered but also extremely good episode called Nick of Time from the third season, probably because in that episode he did battle with a little novelty fortune teller with uncannily accurate answers in a diner, meaning it was less relateable than an embodiment of the commonplace fear of flying.

In both episodes Shatner is accompanied by a beleaguered wife who doubts his sanity. In the middle of the episode, after Don Carter has already had six straight fortunes confirmed by the toy in the diner, his obsession is clearly worrying her. While they’re crossing the street after leaving the dinner, Shatner delivers the shocking line “Oh, stop treating me like a retarded child.”

Despite what you might think, “retarded” was considered an insult at the time. According to Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic by Martin Grams Jr., Serling’s office received a letter from a mother of a child with Down’s Syndrome expressing her discomfort with its use in the show. Serling wrote a letter of apology and told his staff that they should never use the word in such a context again.  

9. William F. Buckley Calls Gore Vidal a Slur as He Threatens to Punch Him

In 1968, during the Democratic National Convention, ABC aired numerous debates between National Review founder William F. Buckley and incendiary author Gore Vidal. During a debate about whether allegations over waving Vietcong flags justified police using tear gas and beatings, Vidal took the chance to call Buckley a crypto-Nazi for favoring using those methods on protestors. Buckley replied “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face.”

It became enough of a scandal that a year later Buckley called back to it on Firing Line while debating Noam Chomsky. Buckley came to regret it, writing several letters to Vidal questioning how he could have lost control like that. Indeed, in 2017, two Academy Award winners made a documentary Best of Enemies that focused in large part on how that loss of poise changed the tone for televised American debates for the coming decades.

8. Jackie Gleason’s Half-Hour Apology

Now, here’s something a little lighter in tone. If you think that today the media spends too much time apologizing for the slightest trespasses, you should see what the creator/star of The Honeymooners got up to in the early sixties. Admittedly, he was much more entertaining about it than most.

On January 20, 1961, the day that Kennedy was inaugurated, Jackie Gleason played host to a program called You’re in The Picture where contestants stuck their heads through pictures, such as a picture where there was an image with a body of a woman in a yellow polka dot bikini in it. It’s a common photo gag at vacation spots, which might have been part of why the show got such a tepid reaction.The next week, with just two commercial breaks, he spent a half hour of airtime dissecting the terrible pilot, calling it the biggest bomb in entertainment history, and explaining the creative process behind it. This half hour made such an impact that Johnny Carson brought it up on The Tonight Show when he interviewed Gleason in 1985. Though since Carson had been one of the contestants on You’re in the Picture, he probably only felt comfortable bringing it up because he’d just gotten around to forgiving Gleason for it.

7. Lon Chaney as Frankenstein Doesn’t Even Try to Break Chairs

In 1952 Lon Chaney (best known for playing the titular role in The Phantom of the Opera (1925) was hired to play Frankenstein‘s Monster for a 1952 live broadcast of Tales of Tomorrow. Through some confusion that either stemmed from Chaney being confused after how long it took to apply his makeup or drunkenness, he thought much of the performance was a rehearsal instead of a live broadcast. This led to the hilarious sight of Chaney picking up chairs to smash them in a monstrous fury, only to gently set them down again.

Since at one point he was supposed to be leaving the set as he breaks a chair, he turns almost straight into the camera and in his regular, barely audible voice says “I’m saving the chair.” For the remainder of the program Chaney gave a perfectly competent and very physical performance, which put to rest the claims he’d been drunk. Still, it was hard for audiences to forget the Frankenstein Monster’s bewildering delicacy with furniture.

6. Dorothy Gray’s Cold Cream Campaign

You get some sense of how prevailing fear of nuclear destruction was in 1950s America that the concept of “duck and cover” as a means of attempting to survive an atomic strike was taught in elementary school. But then this commercial comes along and shows just how ambivalent feelings were at the time about radiation in general.

The Dorothy Gray cosmetics company had been founded in 1916, so it had been around 38 years and entered the cultural consciousness by the time it launched what would today be considered a truly shocking ad campaign, especially for a relatively benign skin treatment. To demonstrate the effectiveness of their cold cream, in commercials that aired in 1954 they would spread radioactive dirt on the faces of their models, use a geiger counter, then apply cold cream, and use the geiger counter again to demonstrate how effectively it removed the dangerous substance, all of which the narrator cheerfully explained. Considering that the company lasted until it was bought out in 2008, it seems a safe bet that models didn’t sue them for all they were worth for reckless endangerment.

5. Andy Griffith Explains Gunless Law Enforcement

Among right-wing pundits, this sitcom that ran from 1960 to 1968 is particularly treasured for presenting a wholesome portrait of small town values. Even 50 years after it ended, the town of Mount Airy is kept afloat by tourism because it was Andy Griffith’s real hometown and preserved numerous locations that inspired stories set in the fictional town of Mayberry. This makes a monologue that Sheriff Andy Taylor gives particularly surprising.

In the 1965 episode TV or Not TV, Andy Taylor is asked why he doesn’t carry a gun. He answers, “When a man carries a gun all the time, the respect he thinks he’s gettin’ might really be fear. So I don’t carry a gun because I don’t want the people of Mayberry to fear a gun. I’d rather they would respect me.” It is at least a critique of the notion that guns are necessary to keep the peace, and the militarization of the police. Also, this was deep in the Civil Rights movement, when it might have been a more inflammatory statement than it seems today. It is true that his deputy Barney Fife has a gun, but he was often shown as being a combination of buffoonish and horribly dangerous with it, which seems like only a slightly subtler critique of gun enthusiasts than Griffith’s words.

4. I, Claudius Brings Graphic Violence and Nudity to Public Television

This 1976 12-part adaptation of Robert Graves’s epic story of the man who went from palace clown to emperor is still one of the most acclaimed BBC productions of all-time. The obvious low budget and technical limitations (numerous cast members said early on that they didn’t expect the show to work) didn’t prevent audiences from appreciating the stellar performances and the riveting story. But it had a potentially much greater obstacle to mainstream appreciation, especially as far as America was concerned: A frank attitude towards graphic sex and violence, as could be expected of any show set dealing with palace intrigue during the height of the Roman Empire.

When the Public Broadcasting Station agreed to air it in 1977, the political climate provided much that should have given them pause. ABC had recently experienced a concerted boycott campaign for the the comedy series Soap which had only mentioned then controversial topics such as transvestism. It had cost the network considerable advertisers by the time the show had run its course. A publically-owned network was even more vulnerable to such pressures. And yet beheadings, toplessness, and other provocative material and all, the series also ran its course on the 270 local PBS affiliates.

3. Poor Devil: Sammy Davis Jr. is a Demon  

You might have heard that this member of the Rat Pack joined the Church of Satan for a few years beginning in 1968. Apparently he wasn’t just fine about people knowing but wanted to spread the word because in 1972 he managed to sell NBC on a pilot where he would play a demon who has to go around convincing people to sell their soul to Satan (played by a perfectly cast Christopher Lee).

His primary target is played by Jack Klugman – then in the middle of his run as Oscar on The Odd Couple, to show how much he was putting on the line by attaching his name to a sitcom that portrayed a demon sympathetically. As surprising as it is that such a show ever got a green light in the 1970s and made it to air, it’s probably not so surprising that it never made it to series. Probably didn’t help that instead of airing it more sensibly on Halloween it premiered on Valentine’s Day.

2. Queen for a Day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YW-uv3Ibm8

The following program would sound like something out of some especially grim science fiction dystopia except that as Stephanie Buck wrote for Timeline, it was a real program that ruled the airwaves from 1956 to 1964. It was a game show on NBC Universal hosted by television bit player Jack Bailey, although not so much a game in the Jeopardy! sense as in the Hunger Games sense.

The nature of the show was that the contestants would tell audiences their financial troubles in hopes of garnering enough sympathy to win, through written ballots, some variety of prize from the show’s sponsors that would hopefully lift them out of poverty. Not conventionally fabulous prizes: Things like artificial legs, lessons for a beauty school, or a year’s supply of baby food. One woman of the several who had to fly out at their own expense per episode would be given the prize per episode. Even at the time it was well understood how emotionally exploitative this was, with the show and its knockoffs known as “misery shows” or “sob shows.”

1. Twilight Zone’s Pro-Child Marriage Episode

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5rotr2

In the third season episode The Fugitive, the story is about a kid named Jenny with leg braces and her aged friend Old Ben. Jenny lives with her aunt in a small apartment. One day, after Ben and Jenny play a ball game with some friends and it’s revealed that two agents show up. They use some kind of sci-fi/magic device to put Jenny in a coma. Ben then heals her, and heals her legs (which involves removing her leg braces and socks), and then it’s revealed when the agents show up that he’s actually a runaway king and the two agents are there to bring him back to his planet, which will mean he has to abandon Jenny.

After the agents give them a moment alone to say goodbye, they come back and see that Ben has turned himself into Jenny, meaning they have to bring both of them back to their planet. Serling then shows up to do the outro while sitting on Jenny’s bed and tells us that Jenny will become “an honest to goodness queen,” and shows us a photo of what Ben supposedly looks like, and Ben’s actually a handsome young man. It’s literally a happy ending where a girl is taken from her home and marries the much older man who’s known her since she was maybe eight-years-old.

You might think that since this was way back in 1962 that this might have just been the product of a more innocent time. But considering that the issue of age of consent had been a controversy even back in the late 19th century and was still a controversial topic in 1939 when the exploitation film Child Bride was released, the episode was clearly made at a time when such portrayals would have been at least decades out of fashion. It’s bewildering how censors, producers, and network executives all could have failed to see what a creatively blinkered episode this was.