The 25 Worst Cameos in TV History

Image via Complex Original

We quickly learned to expect the worst from the 90210 reboot. That being said, we thought it was impossible to facilitate a bad Snoop cameo; we love nothing more than to see Snoop show up on our television to spew a string of nonsense words vaguely advocating smoking trees. The man knows how to use his persona to comedic effect, as seen in appearances on King of the Hill, Half-Baked and Pauly Shore is Dead.

Sadly, even Snoop couldn't inject some life into this tired sequence. The only way that Snoop would spend the afternoon cruising around LA with an overzealous teenage fan is if he was making as much cash as he got for repping Wonderful Pistachios.

Basketball legend turned television critic Kareem Adbul-Jabbar does his best Wilson (the sitcom neighbor, not the volleyball) impression in this episode of Full House. Your boy John Stamos gets himself into hot water with the family, as per usual, and ends up having play in some sort of charity basketball game to make it up to them. You'll be shocked to hear that Uncle Jesse thinks he's going to learn lessons about balling, but actually learns a little something about life. Retired athletes are so wise!

Before he was one of the most ridiculous presences on Twitter, he was a moderately successful pop star. Though the writers of Lizzie McGuire thankfully saved us from Carter's cloying preteen presence for most of the episode, the few minutes we have to endure Carter's awful cover of "I Want Candy" are enough to earn a spot on our list. Drop in at 5:30 and catch some dope slow-mo of pre-horny level Carter.

In our eyes, the First Lady can do no wrong. Well, almost. We have to call her out for her weak performance on the hit Nickelodeon show iCarly. We've always considered the First Lady the less wooden of the White House Obamas, as she is well known for dancing and shade throwing, but this appearance is just stiff and gesture-laden. It almost looks like she is doing her best impression of the hubby, complete with excessive hand motions and weirdly placed nods. Call us when you get back on the dance floor, Mrs. Obama.

It's the sitcom reunion no one was clamboring for on the worst television that everyone in America without taste watches. Two years ago, Jenna Elfman and Thomas Gibson, the leads from the forgettable '90s sitcom Dharma and Greg reunited on Two and a Half Men just to let us know that the sitom couple ended up bitter and miserable. Though most major pop culture blogs covered the event, we think we can all agree this was the result of slow news day and not anyone's yearning to see what the hippie and the square have been up to after all these years.

Despite being brief, unnecessary, and tough to watch, the cameo also felt appropriate in a way, as Dharma and Greg was known for their awful cameos back in the day, including a sell-out confirming visit from Bob Dylan.

Unlike the rest of the guest spots on this list, this episode of The Simpsons wasn't terrible on its own, but FOX quickly regretted the move, intended to buoy sagging ratings for The Critic. Matt Groening is notorious for his anti-establishment attitude, and The Simpsons, which famously enjoys freedom from network notes, has a reputation of being as pure a product as you can create on television. This made it all the more strange that FOX would attempt a crossover episode with another show, and a predictable blow-up resulted.

Groening took his name off of the episode, refused to record commentary for the DVD and, to this day, he cites the episode as his least favorite of all. The gambit didn't help The Critic much either, as the show got the axe after only two seasons.

Though today's television cameos play just as poorly as as they did back in the day, at least producers have reduced their frequency. Shows like Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch threw out cameos as often as they reaffirmed traditional gender roles.

Joe Namath popped up on The Brady Bunch in one of their darker episodes. Young Bobby (Mike Lookinland) pretends to have an terminal illness in order to lure Namath into his bedroom for an autograph. You'll be shocked to hear that Bobby learns a life lesson after coming clean, and receives a tough yet loving speech from the 'rents regarding his shenanigans.

After Full House rode off into the sunset following eight grating seasons of cameos and catchphrases, a gaping void was left in the sitcom stunt casting game. Friends quickly took up the mantle. Admittedly, the wildly popular show did a nice job of keeping their cameos innocuous: most of the attractive young talent they brought in to be more than just friends with "the friends," including Reese Witherspoon, Brooke Shields, and George Clooney, fit right in.

Jean-Claude Van Damme however? Not so much. Van Damme clearly has more chemistry with his action film adversaires than he does with leading ladies, as his guest spot opposide Rachel and Monica involved one of the most uncomfortable meet-cutes ever.

UPN routinely tortured their shows' producers and audiences with forced cameos from America's Next Top Model contestants. Smallville, One Tree Hill, and Gossip Girl were all co-opted at one point or another. Poor Veronica Mars got it the worst.

For three straight years, contestants were rewarded with brief spots on the teen noir as a sort of public service announcement to remind the country's teenagers that there is a difference between modelling and acting. Kim Stolz's flaccid performance as a rental car associate went just about as well as you would expect.

"Very special episodes" have plagued television since the early days of sitcoms. When a cameo is thrown into the mix of one of these downer episodes, the results are rarely pretty. Case in point: when Nancy Reagan visited Gary Coleman on Diff'rent Strokes. All was not well on the '70s sitcom: drugs were being sold on school property. Luckily, Nancy Reagan was available to pop by and shame students for trying drugs.

Music sampling producers were blessed by Reagan's appearance on show. She addresses the class with, "Hasn't anybody else done a little experimenting?" and we can't help but imagine every cheeky DJ we know dropping that line in the club in hopes of getting the party started.

In the scope of Paris Hilton's acting career, this is some of the least offensive work she's done. Of course, it's important to remember that her cinematic feats include such abominations as The Hottie and the Nottie. Though there are some pleasantly self-aware moments in Hilton's performance as a goddess hungry for some new sacrifices, that can't make up for that fact that we are watching Paris Hilton perform.

Boy Meets World wasn't exactly an exercise in realism, but why the Hell did Jim Abbot suddenly appear in the Matthews' living room? Apparently Mr. Matthews sent Jim Abbott 63 telegrams before the Yankee hurler was motivated to jump on a plane and give Cory a pep talk. Abbott sweeps in, tells Cory to stop being a little bitch and get a "major league education." Totally worth those telegrams.

As if the episode weren't inexplicable enough, it ends with Cory videotaping his parents making out. It's good that both father and son were able to exhibit some seriously psychotic tendencies in this episode.

Though his former paramour has had more cameo experience, including brief stints on Will & Grace and How I Met Your Mother, K.Fed does more in one minute than Britney has achieved in dozens of projects. His goal here is to present a character we want to punch, and after about 30 seconds, we are practically jumping through the screen for a chance to knock that stupid look off of his face. The way that Federline captures douchiness and put-on swagger in this episode of CSI: Las Vegas will likely be remembered as one of the great performances of the early 21st century. Bravo, sir. Bravo.

If you have been aching to see Maragaet Cho and Quentin Tarantino test their on-screen chemistry, then you're probably alone in that sentiment. For the approximately zero of you who have such a wish, we can unfortunately recommend the "Pulp Sitcom" episode of Cho's short-lived All-American Girl. Though there isn't much that is at all impressive about the writing here, we were pretty impressed by how many Tarantino in jokes that they shoved into this terrible episode of television.

We have all heard the old saying, "There are no small parts just small actors." A lesser-known saying that is no less true is, "There is no cameo too small to be terrible." If Entourage had a calling card, aside from misogny and terrible acitng, it was unnecessary cameos. Usually, these painful appeareances would involve entire scenes, but here Michael Phelps affirms that his Subway commercials were his best work, despite having only one line.

This was truly the, "Yo watch out man, what's up?" heard round the world.

Michael Phelps's one-line appearance on Entourage is pretty bad, but it is nowhere near the level of terrible that Richard Nixon managed to reach in his one-line appearance on Laugh-In. Apparently, "Sock it to me" was catchphrase of on the sketch show, and Tricky Dick was brought in to deliver it. Nixon hits the "Me" at the end harder than his boys would hit the DNC headquarters in what is easily one of the shortest and most uncomfortable celebrity cameos we've ever seen.

Chris Brown's attempt at book-report monologuing on everybody's favorite teen drama is the worst piece of acting we've seen in ages. His performance as "Will" wouldn't even earn him a spot in the chorus of a high school production of The Music Man. He manages to strip any trace of emotion or punctuation of out lines like, "I'm not like the other guys at this school. I don't play water polo" and "Do you maybe like want to do something?" Personally, we prefer his later work.

Full House resorted to some awful cameos during its cornball run, but everyone's favorite show to claim false nostalgia for hit rock bottom with their Beach Boys cameos. That right, plural—the Beach Boys appeared on Full House on three seperate occassions.

Choosing our least favorite Full House Beach Boys episode is like choosing between our illegitimate children, but at the end of the day, we have to go with "Forever" as the worst of the bunch. With little more set-up than "Hey, Jesse, the Beach Boys are here!" and a plot arc the ends with the Beach Boys giving one of their songs to Uncle Jesse because for his wife's cooking, there's little that makes any sense in this cameo.

It's expected that a musician cameo will involve a live performance from the guest, but The Full House writers room went a bit overboard here. The hackneyed scribes took more of a week off than usual, devoting half the episode to Beach Boys' jams.

Boy George performing for a crowd of rowdy rednecks feels more like a piece of performance art than a legitimate attempt by a network to produce ratings. How does the Culture Club work into an action packed episode of The A Team? Face (Dirk Benedict) thinks he's going to make easy money as a club promoter, but it turns out that he's been duped. He thought he was going to be managing a Cowboy George concert at the local roadhouse.

Unfortunately for Face, the old bait-and-switch gets pulled on him, and Boy George arrives to play the concert, and, would you believe it, the area rednecks aren't the biggest Boy George fans.

This particular episode of The A-Team is legendary for this damning cameo. "Cowboy George" has lived on in infamy, making a YouTube list of the most embarassing TV moments.

It wasn't enough for the Beach Boys to sink their claws into Full House. The venerable surfer dudes also made an appearance on Home Improvement as Wilson's cousins. Never mind that the Beach Boys themselves aren't all related; this was all it took to get Tim and Jill Taylor to mix it up with the '60s icons for six long minutes.

If you've seen the Full House clip, this is pretty much the same thing, down to the weird references to vegetarian cuisine.

When the Harlem Globetrotters washed up on Gilligan's Island, a gold standard for ridiculous celebrity cameos was put into play.

Gilligan's Island had long been known for their celebrity stunt casting by 1981, but the TV movie, The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island indulged in some of the most self-conscious, riduculously camp cameos ever to apear on television. Of course, even a short clip of the made-for-TV movie is unwatchable.

There's a silver lining to this dark cameo cloud: if Gilligan had never met the Globetrotters, then we would never have had some of the Futurama's greatest episodes.

"A famous rockstar showing up out of nowhere to hang out with a girl she barely knows."

That line is actually delivered in the course of Pete Wentz's painful guest arc on One Tree Hill. In the grand tradition of guest stars whom producers are worried people won't know by looking at them, four different characters use the phrase "Pete from Fall Out Boy" in Wentz's first scene, in which he's inexplicably cooking breakfast.

It all goes down hill from there, as "Never Have I Ever" is played and a character quotes Wentz's lyric to him in one of the most ego-stroking moments in television history. Don't take our word for it—go ahead and waste eight minutes of your life watching Wentz's acting chops.

The Palins were spread across the television landscape like a verdant fungus towards the end of the last decade. Unfortunately, quantity doesn't always mean quality.

Bristol has acting chops on par with her mother's polical acumen. The intentions behind lines as simple as "come on, we have to get going" seem to elude her as she attempts tough talk with a fellow single mom. Sadly, the Internet provides us with only a small snippet of Bristol's tour-de-force performance. Don't worry though: You can confidently feast your eyes on this short clip with the knowledge that it won't leave you wanting more.

We don't care what you say, those fresh blonde tips are just as dope today as they were back in the Y2K era.

Lance Bass's time in the limelight was so mockable that he still endures as a pop culture whipping boy today. One of the greatest remaining documents of Lance Bass' era of embarassing himself on a national stage is his guest appearance on 7th Heaven. In the course of this powerhouse performance, Bass actually delivers a line expressing that he would totally join Habitat for Humanity if he'd known that girls who build houses were so cute.

If you can endure this painfully awkward sequence, you'll learn a valuable lesson: "Friends don't kiss friends." That's some deep shit.

In perhaps the most '90s moment in history, the opening of this WCW/Baywatch crossover involves wrestling stars in a jetski accident being saved by well-endowed lifeguards led by one Pamela Anderson. The aqua rescue of two of wrestling's all-time greats is just the tip of the iceberg. Shortly after their jetski jaunt, Macho Man and the Hulkster get some bad news: A devious developer, the Nature Boy Ric Flair himself, is closing down an athletic center for troubled youth. Only a tag team match can resolve the fate of the gym, naturally.

And they say we are only now in the golden age of television. If Pamela Anderson and the Hulkster joining forces doesn't constitute a golden age, we can't imagine what does. Watch this masterpiece here.