Although we live in a time which has been anointed as television's golden age, the TV powers that be are not above the occasional misstep. They're only human, after all. Still, once you start to look closely at the worst new shows to air in the last decade, you start to see more than a few patterns, and not just because they all ended in cancellation. Is it still human error if the same mistakes are repeated over and over again? Perhaps these terrible shows are assembled by machines after all. TV's mistakes are so repetitive that we've managed to create a step-by-step guide to making an awful TV show. Follow it carefully and your chances of making it to season two will rapidly diminish. Alternatively, take the worst show you've seen recently and treat this article as a checklist, because the more boxes it ticks, the less likely it is that it'll be back on your screen.
10. Remake Another Show For No Reason
Take one beloved hit show, strip away everything that made it a) beloved and b) a hit, and you are going to get cancelled. Remakes can be excellent in their own right, but only when they have something new to say, and the worst simply take old premises and utterly disrespect them so that they can adhere to current trends. The recently concluded Ironside, for example, forgoes all the charm of the original in favour of a lacklustre procedural, and Knight Rider resurrected a fantastically ridiculous 80s TV titan and replaced it with a humourless drama. Yes, remaking a show gives you a ready-made set of characters and storylines, but it also gives critics a ready-made version of the show which did everything right. Quite why TV executives think this is a good plan is incomprehensible.
