Dave Holmes Revisits The 20 Lowest Rated TV Shows From Valentine’s Day 1993

At 20th-to-last place, we have a tie. You are of course familiar with Herman’s Head, the legendary adults-only Inside Out featuring a post-Fright Night William Ragsdale as the titular Herman, with a pre-Friends Jane Sibbett, and mid-Simpsons Yeardley Smith and Hank Azaria as his wacky co-workers. Inside his head, actors portray the competing emotions of lust, anxiety, intellect, and sensitivity. Guess which one’s played by a woman!

But you may be less familiar with the short-lived Jack’s Place, sort of a Cheers/Love Boat hybrid starring Hal Linden as the owner of a jazz club where people just can’t help falling in love. The show also featured John Dye, who would soon move on to Touched By An Angel, and General Hospital’s Finola Hughes, attempting the difficult and rarely-attempted Deidre Hall —a successful move from daytime to prime— the landing of which she did not quite stick. Keep an eye out for a very young Adam Goldberg in this pilot episode, and an ear out for what must have been an early draft of the Will & Grace theme music.

We were still showing full-length, edited-for-content theatrical movies on network television, usually on Saturday nights, which is where ABC played this down-home Chevy Chase comedy from a full five years before. This is like a 2018 CW an entire sweeps month night to, like, We’re The Millers.

Where to stream Funny Farm

Into whose body at what time in history would you zap yourself? I might go Armie Hammer, right now, just for the track suits.

Where to stream Quantum Leap

News magazines were both the highest and lowest rated shows on television in 1993, just because there were a billion of them. They’re also boring to talk about, so let’s get into this week’s pop charts instead. ‘90s R&B and crossover hip-hop were really at their peak in February 1993- the top 40 includes songs from Shai, En Vogue and Jade, from PM Dawn, Paperboy and Positive K. But the greatest of these might be the best lost R&B song of the decade, this week moving from 15 to 11: “Here We Go Again!” by Portrait. Here they are singing it at the Junior Prom on Family Matters.

Do you think they put a clause in their contract forbidding Steve Urkel from interrupting their performance? I would have.

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A Current Affair-style paranormal news show in the slot that would eventually go to The X Files. Then as now, we liked our aliens fictionalized. (We sure did brush past that recent Air Force video where the pilot spots a UFO in a big hurry, didn’t we?)

A long-running, low-rated crime show which served as David Simon’s entry point into television and introduced Richard Belzer to the TV audiences who didn’t already know him from An Evening At The Improv.

Nurses was a spinoff of Empty Nest, which itself was a spin-off of The Golden Girls, and one of its stars was Jeff Altman, who 13 years before had starred in the greatest television flop of all time, 1980’s Pink Lady and Jeff. PL & J —not to be confused with PB&J— was a variety show featuring young Altman and then-allegedly-popular Japanese singing duo Pink Lady. They made a formidable comedy trio, except for two things: Pink Lady spoke very little English, and Jeff Altman seemed sweaty and exasperated every single moment. Here are some highlights. I’ve cued it right up to the most objectionable.

This show was a season-two re-working of a failed NBC sitcom called The Torkelsons, in which a poor family scrapes and struggles and generally fails to be as charming as the Conners on Roseanne, but the lead teenage girl does punctuate most episodes with long monologues she delivers to The Man In The Moon, so there’s that. When the show became Almost Home, two of the main family’s kids were simply erased, and the mother became a nanny to Perry King and his precocious children, one of whom was a pre-Clueless Brittany Murphy. Here’s an episode of Almost Home featuring a very young Ben Affleck as a thick-headed jock, perhaps the part for which he was always best-suited. Ben was months away from filming his breakthrough role as teen steroid addict Aaron Henry in A Body To Die For: The Aaron Henry Story. I miss early-‘90s Ben Affleck.

At right around this time in 1993, Darren Star was learning his lesson about Melrose Place: People were just not going to tune in for a Fox take on thirtysomething. The gang at the apartment complex were going to have to do something different. Something explosive. Something Locklear. This week’s episode was wicked advertising executive Amanda Woodward’s third, and she stayed right through to the bitter end, though Locklear never lost her “Special Guest Star” designation. Two episodes before that, Laura Leighton brought the sass as Jane’s mischievous sister Sydney. The show was in the middle of a vast and thorough soapifying: characters were getting more conniving, plots were getting campier, slaps were being delivered to faces at the rate of about three a week. Poor Doug Savant as TV’s token gay man Matt Fielding still had nothing to do.

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More aliens, still neither a Mulder nor a Scully to be found, so back to the pop charts we go. Snow’s “Informer” was moving up, as was Arrested Development’s “Mr. Wendal” and Digable Planets’ “Cool Like That.” These acts took hip-hop in directions we couldn’t have seen coming even a couple of years before, and we would never hear from any of them ever again.

Here’s a story about Arrested Development: in 1994, they played my college’s big spring concert, and it was my job to pick them up from the airport. I showed up in the campus-activities van, grabbed all eleven of them, and headed back toward school. They were a lively bunch, a friendly Speech, a gregarious Dionne Farris, a courteous DJ Headliner. Their spiritual leader Baba Oje- the old guy you see rocking on a chair in their videos- was mostly quiet, but as I unloaded their gear and helped him off the van, he looked around, put a hand on my shoulder, leaned in, and asked “Where the pussy at?”

Here to cleanse your palate is Toad The Wet Sprocket, at #23 with “Walk On The Ocean.”

A true-crime reenactment show about real cases from the US Secret Service. This week’s episode contained segments called “Reach Out and Rob Someone,” “Jet Threat” and “Larceny, Inc.” The show was hosted by Steven Ford, son of former President Gerald. Here’s a fun or heartbreaking fact, depending on your level of personal cruelty: Steven was supposed to have Lorenzo Lamas’ role in the film version of Grease, but he dropped out due to stage fright. He now sits on the board of directors of the Gerald Ford Foundation and looks so much like his father it is actually weird.

Batman: The Animated Series aired on Sunday nights opposite Life Goes On and 60 Minutes. For reasons I don’t understand, in these days, prime-time on Sundays began at 7pm. That extra hour became a whimsical time full of homespun wisdom and soft-focus drama, an hour even more family-oriented than the designated family hour of 8-9pm. It’s where you’d find an Our House starring Deidre Hall, executing a successful Deidre Hall. It’s where this week you’d find Patti LuPone and Kellie Martin in Life Goes On, just barely out-rating this nighttime version of Batman, which aired too late for little kids and too early for the adults who still watch cartoons. Fox was still finding its legs in February 1993.

Kind of a first-draft Dharma & Greg, starring indie movie darling Corey Parker and fresh face Tea Leoni. The year before, Tea had been one of the leads in a Fox reboot of Charlie’s Angels that never went to series. The audition monologue for her part was a long monologue about the character’s dead father, after which the character pauses, shakes it off, and says something like “Let’s go, girls.” To separate the speech from the final line, the stage directions said “(beat.)” Like: the character takes a beat before continuing. But Tea, new to auditioning, read the whole thing. She actually said the word “beat” out loud. Like: “Man, it’s beat that my dad died.” That, my friends, is how you get a casting agent to remember you.

Did you know that Patti LaBelle had a sitcom on NBC? (Editor’s Note: I, in fact, did not!) Did you know Boyz II Men, Jodeci and TLC performed on it? Did you know it was created and produced by the guy who does “The Borowitz Report,” those humor-adjacent posts your mom puts on your Facebook feed? This was all 25 years ago. Life is long.

A sketch show with Jennifer Aniston, Tom Kenny and Wayne Knight in the cast, but the star was Julie Brown. Here is their Wilson Phillips parody “Lucky Day.” The joke is that Carnie Wilson is fat, so she eats a lot of candy. Do you get it? You get it.

Also, I guess the whole cast would die at the beginning of every episode? How often do you think Jennifer Aniston thanks God that she was released from this monstrosity in time for the next pilot season?

Okay. This sitcom lasted for five episodes in 1992, with one lone episode held over until this week in 1993 for some reason. It was about a white guy with a black-sounding name who mistakenly gets hired at a soul-music radio station and hilarity fails to ensue. Rhythm & Blues starred sitcom stalwart Anna Maria Horsford as the station’s manager, and as the hapless white guy, Roger Kabler. Kabler would go on to fame as the spokesperson for Zima. Here is one of those ads. I’m zorry.

A one-hour Northern Exposure knockoff in which Fisher Stevens takes a job at a Key West newspaper and Jennifer Tilly plays the island’s priciest prostitute. No, really. It didn’t last, but this week’s big movie release, Groundhog Day, went on to have a little staying power.

At last, the greatest and lowest-rated of them all, a show I legitimately miss and think about more often than is healthy. Class of ’96 was a college take on Beverly Hills, 90210, starring Jason Gedrick as an idealistic freshman at Havenhurst College. His classmates included Kari Wuhrer (from Remote Control!) as the campus’ hot girl, and Gale Hansen (Nuwanda from Dead Poets Society!) as “Stroke,” the campus’ mover and shaker. Here are the opening credits. Look at the generic quad. Look at the baggy Abercrombie on every male actor. Look at the air guitar.

Class of ‘96 had heart, it had soul, but it lacked Locklear, so American audiences cho-cho-chose not to watch it. I mourn to this day.

Whether you are spending this Valentine’s Day with a special someone, or alone with a Domino’s and the Olympics, I wish you a very happy one. Don’t be sad today. That would be beat.

Dave Holmes is an editor-at-large for Esquire.com, host of the new Earwolf podcast Homophilia, and his memoir Party of One is in stores now.