Five of the most hated TV episodes of all time
There isn’t a single TV show that’s managed to ensure every single one of its episodes was inarguably excellent, with plenty of the all-time greats harbouring at least one chapter that divides opinion.
There’s a difference between being underwhelming and irredeemably awful, though, a distinction several classics have failed to make when delivering their weakest, worst, and most excruciating standalone episodes.
It’s impossible to maintain greatness across a multi-season run, but the fact that certain instalments have been allowed to slip through the cracks in spite of their tedious, unimaginative, or outright disastrous nature boggles the mind when the show in question endures as an all-time favourite on the whole.
No season, show, or episode can truly be called perfect, but trying to find anyone willing to defend the following five chapters is an unenviable task that could take a great deal of time.
The most hated TV episodes:
5. Teso Dos Bichos (The X-Files, 1996)
Some of the very best, most memorable, and iconic episodes of The X-Files were the standalone ‘Monster of the Week’ stories, but ‘Teso Dos Bichos’ was such a disaster that the cast and crew were fully aware even when making it that it was going to be a disaster.
Mulder and Scully investigate the unexplained deaths to follow in the wake of an ancient artefact being brought over from South America. Naturally, she suspects terrorism, and he opts for the supernatural. Regardless of who was proven right, the results were nothing short of awful.
The dynamic duo being under attack from feral cats is ludicrous and not in the good kind of way The X-Files regularly mastered. Director Kim Manners called the episode “an absolute disaster” and at one point even begged showrunner Chris Carter for a leopard because domesticated felines simply weren’t cutting it.
David Duchovny actively despised it, too, a sentiment shared by the majority of X-Files fans. Knowing what everyone had been subjected to, Manners made a point of printing out ‘Teso Dos Bichos Survivor’ T-shirts for anyone involved.
4. The Lost Sister (Stranger Things, 2017)
Creators Ross and Matt Duffer described ‘The Lost Sister’ to Entertainment Weekly as “like doing a whole little other pilot episode in the middle of your season”, which is precisely why it’s the worst and most jarring episode of Stranger Things.
It feels like a backdoor pilot for a spinoff the siblings may or may not have been considering, although it was definitely one that was never going to move forward once the backlash began. Pointless, meandering, and tanking any and all momentum built up beforehand, ‘The Lost Sister’ never needed to exist in the first place and did an embarrassing job of convincing anyone why it deserved to be made.
Few shows of the modern era have taken over pop culture to the same extent as Netflix’s flagship original series, which only served to make it all the more noticeable when a genuine stinker of an episode was dropped right before the showstopping final two entries of season two.
3. Stranger in a Strange Land (Lost, 2007)
Watercooler television at its finest, the weekly mysteries thrown up by Lost had audiences glued to their screens each time a new episode aired, but season three episode ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ had them stifling their yawns of boredom, as opposed to keeping them holding onto the edge of their seats for dear life.
Matthew Fox didn’t have his real-life tattoos covered up for the show, which is perfectly fine. Did that necessitate a turgid filler episode that gave them an entire backstory and long-winded justification that nobody cared about in the slightest? No, no, it did not.
Lost hadn’t quite jumped the shark at this point of its run, but ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ inadvertently became the beginning of the end. Dubbed “universally, the worst episode we ever produced” by no less of an authority than Damon Lindelof, it was this chapter that led to conversations of a definitive end date for the show being settled on with the network.
2. The Principal and the Pauper (The Simpsons, 1997)
The so-called ‘Golden Age’ of The Simpsons stands tall as one of the best runs any TV series has ever been on in terms of nothing but sheer consistent quality, but the good times were pretty much over after ‘The Principal and the Pauper’ aired.
Revealing Principal Skinner was really an imposter named Armin Tamzarian who’d stolen another man’s identity during the Vietnam War was a baffling decision, and while The Simpsons has barely referenced it ever since, the damage was immediately and irrevocably done.
While things didn’t slide downhill immediately after ‘The Principal and the Pauper’, it was the first significant crack to appear in the show’s armour of acclaim, one that left the fandom infuriated, the critics sharpening their knives, and creator Matt Groening decrying it as “a mistake, we’ll never speak of this matter again” in an interview with Rolling Stone.
1. The Iron Throne (Game of Thrones, 2019)
For seven seasons, Game of Thrones was nigh-on unimpeachable as the biggest and most popular show on all of television until the wheels came off and the train careened spectacularly off the rails in the eighth run, culminating in the finale plummeting to the ground below and exploding on impact.
There aren’t many episodic projects where the very same demographic who’d dedicated years of their lives to following the ongoing adventures of the key characters signed petitions demanding the entire final season be remade except good this time, but that’s exactly what happened to Game of Thrones.
Several notable cast members also voiced their disapproval of season eight, which undid so much of the goodwill that had been built up during the acclaimed and awards-laden adventures in Westeros. It’s arguable whether ‘The Iron Throne’ is the single worst Game of Thrones episode ever, but as the ending point for a once-mighty series that had botched the landing so badly, it was the hardest slap in the face.
