The Worst TV Shows of 2013 (So Far)

Image via Complex Original

Stars: AnnaSophia Robb, Austin Butler, Ellen Wong, Katie Findlay, Stefania Owen, Brendan Dooling, Chloe Bridges, Matt Letscher

Make all the Sex and the City  excuses you want ("My girlfriend made me watch it!"; "I only know about Mr. Big by accident!"), but don't act like you never watched an episode that you liked. Despite all of its characters' superficial motivations and often cheeseball moments of melodrama, Sex and the City thrived on a healthy balance of viewer wish fulfillment and a genuine feelings of friendship. You wanted Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) to find true love, and you enjoyed watching her relationship with her friends develop.

And you cared so much about her that the proposition of watching her teenage years, at first, sounded quite appealing. After all, those experiences made her the woman she was on Sex and the City. But season one of The CW's prequel series The Carrie Diaries revealed a disappointing truth: Carrie Bradshaw grew up in a poor man's version of a John Hughes movie. She's Ferris Bueller, not Blair Waldorf, and, because of that, The Carrie Diaries is bubblegum-flavored bullshit.

Stars: Emily VanCamp, Madeleine Stowe, Gabriel Mann, Henry Czerny, Nick Weschler, Josh Bowman, Barry Sloane, Christa B. Allen, Connor Paolo, Ashley Madekwe, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Margarita Levieva, Dilshad Vadsaria, Wendy Crewson

It was all good just a year ago. An unexpected phenomenon throughout its addictive first season, the twisty, dark ABC nighttime soap Revenge impressed critics with its steadfast "revenge lust" story, about a clever knockout (Emily VanCamp) using her wits and looks to infiltrate Hamptons high society and avenge the imprisonment, and subsequent death, of her father. The leeriest of skeptics, however, feared that Revenge wouldn't be able to uphold its already thin premise's intrigue long enough to justify anything beyond one season. Hats off to those keen sets of eyes.

By trying to stretch the plot past its natural point of plausibility, Revenge's producers wrongly changed characters' motivations and personalities on a weekly basis, namely VanCamp's heroine, who gradually degenerated into a stock damsel-in-distress, abandoning the powerful attributes that made her such a unique protagonist in season one. Side characters, meanwhile, offered nothing more than filler.

A third season is in development for 2014; don't be surprised if the show's viewership numbers dwindle by then.

Stars: Kat Dennings, Beth Behrs, Garrett Morris, Jonathan Kite, Jennifer Coolidge

With every on-the-nose race joke and crass sexual pun, 2 Broke Girls stars Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs inch that much closer to losing all of the goodwill we've been giving them, acknowledging that they're both comedically gifted yet saddled with the worst kind of lowbrow sitcom material.

Whereas the CBS hit's first season left us hoping that its infantile pedigree was a matter of freshman growing pains (remember, Parks and Recreation was a bit of a mess during its first year), the second season of 2 Broke Girls confirmed all negative suspicions tenfold. Lame guest stars (Andy Dick, 2 Chainz) fittingly did little to elevate the proceedings, bringing more attention to Dennings' character's obnoxiousness and Behrs' one-note silliness.

It's enough to forgive Two and a Half Men for all of its recent awfulness—at least that show was kind of funny at one time. 2 Broke Girls hasn't even flirted with such a backhanded compliment.

Stars: Josh Gad, Bill Pullman, Jenna Elfman, Martha MacIsaac, Andre Holland, Amara Miller, Benjamin Stockham

Get used to the name Josh Gad—because of a starring role in Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Tony-winning Broadway smash The Book of Mormon, he's a hot commodity in Hollywood, with the potential to be leading man in big-deal comedy movies. But, let's face it, he's no Chris Farley.

And on the cancelled NBC sitcom 1600 Penn, that's what he and the show's creative team (including Modern Family overseer Jason Winer) wanted him to be—fat chance. The show's premise was basically Tommy Boy and Black Sheep melded together into marginally humorous TV: Gad's the collegiate slacker who returns home to live with his family, who just so happen to live in the White House since daddy's the President of the United States.

Predictable silliness, like Gad's character turning a White House tour into a wacky succession of sight gags, ensued, none of which elicited more than a few modest guffaws.

Stars: Radha Mitchell, Goran Visnjic, Clifton Collins Jr., Rade Serbedzjia, Luke Goss, Jaime Ray New Man, Wil Traval, Lee Tergesen

How's this for a sales pitch: Red Widow is a television show about Russian mobsters and the drug trade as written by the woman who penned the Twilight movies. And, no, it doesn't exist in some alternate reality where David Chase and David Simon have teamed up to co-author a new Teletubbies series. Red Widow lasted eight episodes before being mercifully cancelled by ABC.

Who can blame the network's brass for taking a chance on it, though? In addition to Twilight scribe Melissa Rosenberg's publicity-ready presence, the implausibly high-concept Red Widow—about a woman who has to enter the world of organized crime after her gangster husband gets smoked—benefited from having the always solid Radha Mitchell as its lead. On paper, it seemed like a no-brainer, yet Red Widow didn't have the pieces necessary to sustain intrigue beyond its pilot—i.e., any believable characters capable of helping the show overcome its many storytelling flaws.

Has the whole reality television officially jumped the shark? If Bravo's Married to Medicine doesn't make you shout a resounding "yes," then you're probably one of the 2.7 million viewers who tuned in to watch one of its episodes. And you're also a likely candidate to have Basketball Wives and Love & Hip-Hop saved in your DVR memory banks.

Hey, we're not judging here—here's always room for some turn-the-brain-off entertainment. But, really, a show about female doctors and their spoiled friends who bicker with one another while on wine-tasting trips and hosting "Hollywood Glam" parties? If any given Real Housewives series is, say, Saved by the Bell, the perfunctory Married to Medicine isn't even California Dreams.

Stars: Anthony Edwards, Carmen Ejogo, Scott Michael Foster, Addison Timlin, Jacinda Barrett, Michael Nyqvist, Charles S. Dutton

There's a good chance that you've never even heard of ABC's Zero Hour, which, believe it or not, is currently slogging through its uneventful first season in the network's Saturday night dumping ground. But, until ABC debuts a show that's somehow less interesting, Zero Hour will hold a unique historical distinction: Its February premiere ranks as ABC's "lowest-rated in-season debut for a scripted show ever."

Of course, dire ratings don't always justify poor quality, but in Zero Hour's case, the connection makes sense. Starring Anthony Edwards (who, frankly, deserves to lead an AMC-level drama of some kind), it's an adventure series with a premise that'd be better served in a paperback novel. Edwards plays a cynic whose disbelief in the paranormal gets tested when his wife's kidnapping leads him into a search for a relic located somewhere in Nazi Germany.

See, the potential for a Da Vinci Code kind of potboiler is strong, yet Zero Hour's producers mistakenly think blocks of expository dialogue enables proper forward momentum, when, sadly, it's either unintentionally funny or straight-up angering.

Of course Amazon wanted to compete with Netflix. With David Fincher's prestigious House of Cards, Eli Roth's campy Hemlock Grove, and the long-awaited Arrested Development revival, Netflix has hosted some of the most talked about TV of 2013. So rather than try to one-up Netflix with its own crop of ambitious dramas, Amazon opted for a lineup of diverse sitcoms. Eight, to be exact: Zombieland, Supanatural, Betas, Onion News Empire, Alpha House, Dark Minions, Browsers, and Those Who Can't.

The release strategy was novel: stream the pilots on Amazon's website and let users vote on which ones get picked up for series and which ones get prematurely canned. After watching all of them, we vetoed all of them. From sophomoric wastes of fun source material (Zombieland) to uninspired ripoffs of better, currently popular shows (Alpha House, for instance, wants to be Veep), Amazon didn't even make the Netflix regime blink.

Not ones to pass on a moronic piece of reality TV programming (see: Khloe and Lamar, The Gastineau Girls, Sunset Tan, etc.), the suits at E! presented their undiscerning viewers with a question as grand as, "What's the meaning of life?" The inquiry was simple: What would famously airheaded Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte do if put in front of cameras and asked to live his life?

The answer, unsurprisingly, was waste people's time. And also say a bunch of dumb things (On fashion, "I want to design everything from the bottom of shoes all the way up to the top of hats."), try to make "Lochterage" happen as a pop culture zeitgeist term du jour (it didn't), and give The Soup's writers more material than they could handle.

Stars: Debra Messing, Jack Davenport, Katharine McPhe, Megan Hilty, Anjelica Huston, Jennifer Hudson, Jeremy Jordan, Krysta Rodriguez, Leslie Odom, Jr., Andy Mientus

In its earliest episodes, NBC's now-cancelled Smash was something that many wouldn't have admitted to ever wanting: an entertaining and vibrant drama about the makings of a Broadway show. That's right, folks (read: us) who watch zombies eat flesh on The Walking Dead, gangsters unload Tommy guns on Boardwalk Empire, and Walter White ruin people's lives on Breaking Bad were suddenly clamoring to watch Smash co-stars Katharine McPhee and Megan Hilty compete to headline a Marilyn Monroe musical. Both actresses sang wonderfully, had tons of charisma, and promised an epic diva-off.

But then two unexpected things happened: One, that diva-off actually materialized on ABC's underrated country soap Nashville, and, two, Smash's creative team quickly lost confidence in McPhee and Hilty. Instead of letting their characters duke it out on the show's centerstage, the producers introduced a plethora of lame side characters with vapid plotlines, to the point where this year's season 2 devolved into a desperate succession of useless guest stars (Jennifer Hudson, Liza Minnelli, Rosie O'Donnell). The McPhee/Hilty tandem deserved better.

Stars: Matthew Davis, Jessic Lucas, Robert Knepper, Alona Tal

What a waste of a dynamite premise. The short-lived series Cult had a great narrative hook: There's a TV show within the show called, yes, Cult, and its fans are reenacting its fictional, heinous crimes in real life. And with that, Cult promised a twisty mix of meta storytelling and mind-warping horror—well, if it were on any network other than The CW, that is.

Limited by the network's reliance on massaging, not pushing, boundaries and making sure all of its shows characters are beautifully airbrushed, the series never stood a chance at capitalizing on its intriguing, dark concept. The result was sanitized and dull, akin to Darren Star trying to be more like David Lynch.

Reality TV is television's answer to community theatre—anyone can participate. Hell, even Ryan Lochte got his own show, so the fact that Kevin Jonas—the least interesting of the altogether bland Jonas Brothers music group—headlines a reality program isn't a surprise. That enough people watch it to warrant a second season, which thankfully only included six episodes earlier this year, is the real shock.

Apparently there's a market for watching a boy band member's previously anonymous wife, Danielle Deleasa, working at Cosmopolitan. Or a show whose main source of conflict derives from Kevin's brother-in-law's attempts at starting his own schmaltzy singing career. It's all so painfully vanilla that one wishes Joe Jonas' rumored sex tape would suddenly air in its place. Or, screw it, even Farrah Abraham's. Anything with a pulse.

Stars: Kristin Kreuk, Jay Ryan, Max Brown, Austin Basis, Nina Lisandrello, Brian White, Sendhil Ramamurthy, Edi Cathegi

Only The CW—the network whose ability to cast gorgeous twentysomethings in all of its original shows is uncanny—could so shamelessly eliminate all of the fantasy out of the classic love story Beauty and the Beast. A better title for the show would be Beauty and the Even More Beautiful, since, you know, there's nothing supernatural or even animalistic about its "beast."

As played by cardboard Tiger Beat cutout Jay Ryan, he's just a dude with PTSD, a hackneyed sci-fi conspiracy backstory, and a really bad temper. Yes, he's the Hulk if Bruce Banner turned to science after a failed audition to become the sixth member of The Wanted.

All of the best TV shows know when to call it quits. Breaking Bad begins its final eight-episode run this August, for example, while Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner has gone on record to say that the AMC drama's 2014 season will be its last. Though it's a reality series, and thus much easier (and cheaper) to produce, MTV's The Real World needs to follow a similar trajectory—as in, stick a fork in itself, because if (unfortunately) loyal viewers have to endure another season that's as obnoxious and desperate as this year's Portland edition, Jersey Shore haters will owe The Situation an apologetic phone call. "Sorry, buddy—you aren't so bad after all."

Gone are the days when The Real World handled real-life issues of legitimate importance, like AIDS awareness, depression, or racial insensitivity. In Portland, the "realest" that The Real World ever got was when housemate Nia opened up about once being raped before offering to go down on roommate Jordan in front of the entire house. Teen Mom doesn't look so bad anymore, does it?

Stars: Kevin Bacon, James Purefoy, Natalie Zea, Shawn Ashmore, Annie Parisse, Valorie Curry, Nico Torterella, Adan Canto, Kyle Catlett, Warren Kole

It's the show that millions of viewers loved to hate and hated to miss. Because to miss an episode of The Following meant that you wouldn't get to see Ryan Hardy—the incredibly inept FBI agent played by Kevin Bacon—make one idiotic decision after another, like breaking protocol and running off on his own cavalier search-and-rescue missions. Which, of course, always ended with someone saving him right in the nick of time, though not before every random actor not listed in the show's opening credits revealed himself or herself to be one of cult leader Joe Carroll's (James Purefoy) gullible minions.

Created by Kevin Williamson (The Vampire Diaries), The Following was the year's strongest hate-watch event, plowing through every familiar serial killer trope on its way to the first season finale's lame, maddening anti-climax. Somehow, though, The Following kept us intrigued, perhaps due to its occasional moments of startling gruesomeness, scenes of impressive shock wild enough to appease any genre fan's morbid sensibilities. Makes sense, too, considering that morbid curiosity describes what it took to not erase The Following from our DVR schedules.