Whether or not you feel like 2014 was The Best Year For TV Ever, I'd like to believe that you'll agree with this assertion: There's more *good* TV now than ever before. I'm just talking volume here. Network TV is churning out more programming than ever before and even if it isn't necessarily great, a lot of it is very good. And if you don't like what's happening on the networks, more cable networks are producing more original scripted shows than ever before and then there's the ratings-free Wild West of streaming services, which have proven to be yet another fertile playground for creative talents.
But with more TV, you get more good TV and also probably more bad TV, which produces a problem: I can only watch so much TV and I have a hard enough time following the stuff that's worth my attention. So maybe I had less time in 2014 than ever before to watch bad TV.
That brings me to the rule I repeat every year with my Worst Of… lists, a rule that some commenters are sure to ignore or forget: I don't insult things I don't watch. You'd think this would be really very simple. Bravo may make a half-dozen shows about entitled rich people splashing wine on each other and those may represent the small screen's nadir and I may suspect those shows are dreck, but I don't watch them. They're not here. I don't watch things about dynastic hunters of ducks or the embarrassing sex acts that send people to the emergency room and no matter how homophobic or disgusting the latest Bachelor may have been, I couldn't pick him out of a lineup. I didn't check in on “Criminal Minds” at all this past season and even though I know exactly how heinous it is, I stopped watching “2 Broke Girls” only four episodes into 2014, so I'm cutting it some slack.
My policy, in fact, has always been that I don't rank shows on my Worst list if I didn't continue watching them after their pilots and that's still true here, but I've only ranked my Bottom 8 for 2014 — Those are all shows I watched every inglorious second of — and then I've done some “Worst” honorable mentions because damned if I was gonna let this gallery go by without mentioning “Stalker.”
So let's get down to business with TV's Bottom 8 of 2014, plus some Dishonorable Mentions. [And expect Firewall & Iceberg's Worst of 2014 Podcast on Wednesday.]