Dumb Game Shows Someone Should've Been Fired For

It's really hard to come up with a good idea for a game show. Shows like Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy!, and The Price Is Right never go off the air, probably because there's just nothing good to replace them with. Not that folks haven't been trying for decades. Every network has tossed up dozens of terrible ideas for game shows, only to see them fail one after another. Here's a look at some of the absolute dumbest game show ideas that should have (and probably did) gotten someone fired.

Hard to believe, but there were actually two versions of this idiotic series: Britain's version in 2010, and the American one in 2011. Both of them had the same pointless premise: contestants would answer banal trivia questions, and if they lost, they'd be eliminated from the show in some ridiculous way, like being tossed through a glass window by stuntmen, or attached to an anchor and dropped into the ocean. These means of egress were also saddled with even dumber "funny" names, like "You Fuse, You Lose," "What the Truck?," and "Indiana Jeff and the Temple of Boom."

The British version lasted just eight episodes, while the American version only made it to six before being launched out of a cannon into a vat of fish. Or however ABC cancels their shows.

Considered by many to be the worst show ever aired on British television, 2000's Naked Jungle featured an obstacle course run by nudists, in an effort to collect fig leaves to cover their genitals. Strangely enough, the series caused an uproar in the British media, with members of Parliament even debating it in the House of Commons. Host Keith Chegwin later said it was "the worst career move I made in my entire life." Naked Jungle only ran one single episode, but it wasn't due to poor ratings — on the contrary, Channel 5 landed nearly four times as many viewers as their target. Don't get any ideas, Mark Burnett.

No less a personage than famed tennis champion John McEnroe hosted this game show about people sitting in a big chair. Running on ABC at the beginning of 2002, The Chair would strap contestants into a chair, which would then monitor their vital signs. If the pressure of having McEnroe yell trivia questions at them got to be so much that their heart rate rose above a certain level, they would lose money from their potential prize. Tennis judges around the world could sympathize with the contestants' plight, since McEnroe was infamous for haranguing people who happened to be sitting in the umpire's chair at his tennis matches. That would seem to be his only qualification for hosting this show, but it didn't matter — the whole thing was so stupid, it got cancelled after nine episodes anyway. We're still waiting for the inevitable spinoff show, The Couch.

Finally, there's the insanely nonsensical 2011 British game show, Don't Scare the Hare. See if this makes any sense to you: host Jason Bradbury pretended to live in a magical forest, where his only companion was a gigantic robotic rabbit. Contestants would then engage in a series of stunts. If any of them did something wrong, loud noises would frighten the robot rabbit, causing it to run around and metal-squeak in robotic terror. Successful tasks were rewarded with plastic carrots — acquire enough of these, and the contestants could move to an end game where they had to lure the rabbit into a fake garden and trap it for a monetary prize.

This psychotropic nightmare lasted nine episodes before BBC One presumably ran out of hallucinogens, and cancelled the show to ensure it couldn't do any more long-term mental damage to viewers. Thank goodness.