Movie bombs get all the publicity and airtime due to the gaudy amounts of money sometimes lost, but as the recent Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien fiasco proved TV is also pretty good at pissing away money. Entertainment Weekly put out a list of TV’s 50 biggest bombs in this week’s issue, but they are focused more on bad decisions. We’re more about the dollars and cents here, so we’ve put together a list of 7 of the worst flops in TV history, based purely on amount of money spent. Rankings here are somewhat subjective as it’s not always easy to tell exactly how much a TV show cost (or lost, plus you have to factor in inflation, etc. for older shows), but we think it’s a pretty good list.
7. Manimal
Manimal was pretty high concept for a show made in 1983. Although everything was kind of high concept back then admittedly. Anyway, Manimal was concerned with the character of Dr Jonathan Chase, a man who could turn into literally any animal. Naturally he used this ability to fight crime.
Unfortunately the tech in 1983 really wasn’t ready for such powers, and so Chase mostly just turned into either a hawk or black panther, and his transformation took place with the same backdrop each and every time, presumably for budgetary reasons. Sometimes he’d change into other animals, but only off screen. There’s a lot of bitching about CGI today, but it’s easy to forget just how cheesy anything at all fantastical looked back in the day. Sure there’s still goofy CGI on TV today (Lost submarine I’m looking at you), but at least we don’t have to sit through a guy turning into a panther every week against the same backdrop. Despite the budgetary precautions Manimal still clocked in as the most expensive show on television at the time, and only made it through eight episodes.
Here’s Chase famously turning into a panther:
Picture this happening every week and you generally get the idea.
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