WalletGuy

Much-bleeped comic Andrew Dice Clay (need I really go on?) headed the cast of the borderline abusive Honeymooners rip-off. Bless This House seemed determined to show that love means always having to say you are sorry. Watching this series which co-starred Cathy Moriarty as long-suffering wife Alice (blasphemy!) was like overhearing your neighbors arguing. If only we could have called 911.

"Has the jury reached a verdict?" the judge asks before prompting, "Hit it!" Then comes the rousing gospel number- "He's guilty judge, he's guilty" and TV's most jarring cop show ever. Steve Bochco had given the world Hill Street Blues and L.A Law, so who would question his idea for a gritty crime show in which characters from juries to junkies occasionally break into song? And not just a little humming here and there but full-scale, Debbie Allen-style production numbers. Producer hubris? "He's guilty judge, he's guilty".

Robert Blake as a priest with a punch (some items just write themseleves). Only Blake's world could include characters like Sister Angel Cake or a pool-playing dud called One Ball. Blake played the collared tough guy, nicknamed Father Hardstep because he'd been abandoned as an infant on a, uh, hard step. All in all it wasn't that good in my opinion.

Not so much a fever as a twenty-four hour bug. The 1978 hit film "Animal House" inspired this tawdry mid-season replacement, but CBS flunked the entire frat house after just one episode. It wasn't that good anyway.

A vintage wreck on the highway of bad television. Jerry Van Dyke plays a man whose mom is reincarnated as a 1928 Porter (voiced by Ann Sothern). The absurd, inane Mother rolled blithely over a trunkful of Freudian nightmares (checking Mom's undercarriage? hosing her off on weekends?)- and audiences didn't want to go their any more than we would today. Cocreators Chris Hayward and Allan Burns went on to produce, respectively, Barney Miller and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. They just needed the right vehicle.

Hands down the most cloying kids' show ever. Maybe the most cloying show of ANY kind. And it isn't the big purple dinosaur that has parents and others dreaming of the series extinction- it's those hyperactive, overacting children, mugging and prancing in ways even Soupy Sales couldn't have imagined. "Jurassic Park" was never as scary as Barney & Friends.

Very, very, sad. At 75, Lucille Ball was coaxed from retirement to reprise the shenanigans of her former glory (and what glory it had been). With the help of her longtime writers Madelyn Pugh Davis and Bob Carroll Jr. and her old pal, actor Gale Gordon, Lucy joined the 1980's as though the world stopped spinning in 1974 when Here's Lucy has signed off. "I didn't know that moving me in could be such a turn-on!" said Ball's character (named Lucy, of course) after catching daughter Margo (Ann Dusenberry) kissing son-in-law Ted (Larry Anderson). The ancient slang was all too indicative of Life with Lucy, and as critics savaged the series, audiences ignored it. Lucy's fans expected more, and Lucy desevered better.

Even in the fashion-tragic 80's, Matthew Star (Peter Barton), the Alien prince of Quadris looked foolish. The white jumpsuit, the Farrah hair, the pseudo-Michael Jackson glove. Midway through the run of the series, the producers took a good, long look at their Star. Their solution? Matthew became a secret agent. Better solution? Cancellation.