So bad they were bad, what you can be glad you missed this year

This year has been exceptionally good for the entertainment industry, with new series dropping and movies raking in the money. Streaming is of course always on the rise, with Netflix leading the charge for online content by spending 16 billion this year alone.

Discovering a new show to watch is like falling in love for the first time. It’s magical…

And sometimes, you get your heart broken into a million pieces. Sometimes you stumble upon shows that are so bad that you seriously consider not watching TV ever again. Bafflingly, amazingly bad.

Here are four of the worst shows of the year, those amazing epic fails that made us scratch our heads in astonishment.

New Look

The biopic is quickly becoming my worst genre: the main problem is shying away from the worst aspects of their protagonists, which makes sense as no estate will greenlight a show that trashes their relatives. But that doesn’t mean we have to suffer a revisionist take on them. New Look is an Apple+ series about the birth of the modern fashion industry, focusing on Coco Chanel and Christian Dior in Paris, during and after the Second World War.

Bizarrely, fashion takes a back seat in this supposedly fashion-centric show, instead focusing on the hero’s relationship with the Nazi regime that occupied Paris at the time, which would have been fine, if the show didn’t gloss over Chanel’s well-documented relationship with the Germans. The show makes cheap excuses and tries to pull on heartstrings but falls flat.

New Look is a missed opportunity. Maybe leaning in on the fashion angle in juxtaposition with the brutality of war would be a better choice, but we will never know.

Sugar

Here’s my theory for Apple+ Sugar: two writers submitted two different scripts for two completely different series. At the studio head offices, an intern was tasked with printing out the scripts to pitch them to the studio heads. It was the intern’s first day and he somehow got the script pages mixed. As the entertainment industry is filled with huge egos, nobody wanted to point out to the studio heads that they greenlighted a jumbled mess.

Far fetched? Well, it is the only reasonable explanation for the absolutely inexcusable mess that is Sugar. Colin Farell stars as John Sugar, a private investigator in LA who takes on the case of the missing daughter of a studio exec. It is a modern neo-noir that starts ok and finishes insane cause it turns out that John Sugar is (are you sitting?) an alien.

My jaw dropped.

This was like watching a gritty movie about the holocaust that turns into a colourful musical as prisoners and guards dance hand in hand. The shift in tone was so abrupt it’s a wonder the creators didn’t break their necks. Somehow, for some reason, it got renewed for a second season so who knows? Maybe it will turn out to be a landmark TV series that ushers in a new era in storytelling.

Mr MacMahon

Our third entry is a mix of the two above in the sense that there is a gear shift at the end and that historical accuracy takes a quick coffee break.

Mr MacMahon tries to tell the story of Vince MacMahon, the former owner of the WWE, the wrestling federation that is today a billion-dollar industry. Watching it though is painfully obvious that the creators never intended it to be a show that exposes the ugly truth about MacMahon, the phenomenal abuse of professional wrestlers and myriad of allegations against MacMahon himself. It is a documentary about the story of wrestling where MacMahon’s misdeeds were rushed in as it was a developing story at the time. The documentary goes into the allegations late in the series and barely scratches the surface.

Beast Games

Only an unimaginably rich person would watch Squid Game and instead of getting the message of the decadence of a late-stage capitalist society and how people are nothing in it, could think “Oh yeah, this dystopian future looks so cool”. The fact that Amazon greenlighted this project is proof that these people do not hang out with regular people and instead prefer the company of fellow multibillionaires.

Beast Games is a series by YouTube personality MrBeast, where 1,000 contenders compete in a series of games to win a prize of $5 million. Even before it started, the series was inundated with complaints from contenders about dangerous onset conditions, inappropriate work environments and partnering with companies that might trap unsuspected users.

If watching people being degraded for the amusement of our new robber barons is a thing you enjoy, then go right ahead. I watched one episode of this and cancelled my Amazon subscription.