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21 TV Shows So Controversial They Were Canceled
A while back, we wrote about shows that were canceled before even airing a single episode — now, we're back to write about shows that did manage to get on the air, but only for a few episodes. Here are 21 shows that were quickly pulled due to controversy! The Book of Daniel only aired four (of eight) episodes before being canceled by NBC. The controversial drama starred a narcotics-addicted priest who frequently spoke to Jesus himself. This priest, named Daniel, had a martini-addicted wife, a weed-selling daughter, a promiscuous son, and a gay son, which would prove to be one of the most controversial aspects of the series. Many of the network's affiliates refused to air the series, and the series had trouble finding advertisers, causing it to be pulled after only a few episodes. Suggested by google_105419362496916314857 Adults Adopting Adults only aired three of ten episodes on A&E before its own cancellation. It was reported to Variety that it had been canceled due to low ratings, but it's hard to believe the controversy surrounding the show had no effect. One couple involved, Christy and Danny Huff, planned to adopt a pregnant 20-year-old from Austria, but there were concerns that Danny might develop romantic feelings for the woman, which had happened when he had tried to adopt an 18-year-old prior. Viewers were uncomfortable with Danny's behavior towards the 20-year-old, who was named Ileana. Danny had also made problematic racial comments in deleted TikToks. Huff denied misconduct or inappropriate behavior towards Ileana and said he was not to blame for the show's cancellation. Suggested by Pteri69 I'm sure you've heard of The Osbournes, but I highly doubt you've heard of their short-lived variety show, Osbournes: Reloaded. The show only aired a single half-hour episode back on Fox in 2009. It's not just that the show was awful, featuring unfunny parodies and mocking the not-so-rich and famous, but that it also featured heavy profanity and "risque" content. Almost 14% of Fox affiliates refused to air further episodes, causing Fox to drop the show entirely. Another celebrity variety show, The Richard Pryor Show, was canceled after five episodes due to its envelope-pushing content. Case in point: the first episode began with a scene of shirtless enslaved Black men, including Pryor, being whipped. Pryor is eventually given a worse punishment...a job at NBC. The Melting Pot is an older show that was canceled after a single episode in 1975. In the show, Spike Milligan and John Bird appeared in brownface, playing Pakistani immigrants coming to London. The show was full of offensive content and only aired one of its seven episodes. Kid Nation actually did air a full season, but the controversy it attracted stopped a planned second season in its tracks. I actually watched Kid Nation as a kid and wanted to apply for Season 2 — it was actually a super interesting look at kids having to form a functioning society without adults (but for the host, who wasn't around except for challenges). Still, ethical complications obviously arose, along with concerns about the potential violation of child labor laws. A second season was planned, but was canceled before it could come to be. Suggested by kyleeavery Another controversial show that only lasted a single season was Bridalplasty. Now, this wasn't *necessarily* canceled due to controversy — viewership wasn't great either — but it was so wildly controversial I have to include it on this last. In the show, brides competed for the chance to win plastic surgeries before their wedding. Each week, the bride who won a challenge would get one of their desired surgeries and be immune from elimination the next week while they recovered. The winner got all the surgeries they wanted. I actually watched this show, as well, and while it was wildly problematic, it has a super satisfying finale. Basically, the show's villain goes up against a fan favorite, and it turns out their judges are all the eliminated all hate the villain. It's an extremely satisfying moment of comeuppance. Suggested by yellowcamisole1 HBO's Luck also aired a full season before its cancellation. The show, which was about horse racing, had actually already filmed the first two episodes of the second season when it was canceled after the third horse death on set. Concerns about mistreatment of the horses and dangerous conditions had been present since the series's start, and after three deaths, the outcry proved too much. The 1960s variety show Turn-On didn't even make it through a single episode before it was pulled off the air; it was pulled after only 11 minutes. The experimental show blended (often offensive and raunchy) sketches, stop motion, animation, puppets, and synthesizer clicking — and audiences were not a fan. After one too many phoned-in complaints from miffed audience members, an ABC affiliate in Cleveland quickly cut the airing, infamously telling ABC, "If your naughty little boys have to write dirty words on the walls, please don't use our walls." Other affiliates followed suit, and the show was canceled, with an already-filmed second episode never making it to air. In case you're wondering how it was sketches involved blackface, KKK members in the audience, and a Star of David telling a Christian monk, "We'll forget about Auschwitz if you reduce the charges to manslaughter!" Other sketches joked about foot fetishists, birth control, the upsides of domestic violence, and a woman offering sexual favors to a firing squad about to kill her. Remember, this was 1969 — most of this stuff would be seen as inappropriate for prime-time TV even today. I'm sure you've heard of America's Funniest Home Videos, and you probably wouldn't be surprised to learn there was an Australian version — but you've likely never heard of its spinoff, Australia's Naughtiest Home Videos. The show followed the same format as Australia's Funniest Home Videos, except that all the videos were a little (okay, a lot) more explicit. The show only aired one episode*, which was cut off a little over half an hour into the episode, after the network head, Kerry Packer, called and demanded the broadcast be stopped. There is a note at the start of the show that claims it'll only be a single episode, but when the show finally aired in its entirety, it's referred to as the "first episode"...either way, it was cut off before it was finished in its original airing! One of the videos, just so you can get an idea, showed a man lifting a weight with his penis. Videos After Dark tried the same thing in America. While the first episode did air in full, it was quickly canceled — apparently, American audiences weren't any more forgiving than Australian ones. The 2000s were the decade of the dating show, and not every show was a winner. For example, Playing It Straight followed a woman named Jackie who dated 14 men — only five of whom were straight. Jackie's goal was to end up choosing one of the straight men (in which case they'd split $1 million) — if she chose one of the gay men, he would win all the money. Critics found the show offensive, and the show stopped airing after three episodes, with the official reason being bad ratings — but Jackie herself said she thought "something deeper" was going on. The ratings for the premiere had been good. It was originally assumed the show would come back in the summer, but it never happened — though eventually, you could buy the episodes online. A more popular dating show from the 2000s, Rock of Love, produced a ton of spin-offs, including one named Megan Wants a Millionaire, which centered on Megan Hauserman's search for a rich husband following a stint on a number of VH1 reality shows. However, only three episodes aired before the show was canceled. Why? Because one contestant, Ryan Jenkins (who was later revealed to have placed third in the show), turned out to be a murderer. After he left the show, he married Jasmine Fiore, then killed her a few months later. He then died by suicide a few days after her body was found. It also turned out Jenkins had actually been convicted of assault prior to his appearance on the show, which the producers had not known. Jenkins had also already filmed for Season 3 of the spinoff I Love Money, a competition show featuring cast members from multiple VH1 shows. He actually won — the season never made it to air due to Fiore's murder. Suggested by silverballoondog Many reality shows center on lifestyles that may be unfamiliar to viewers — like the 2015 show, Neighbors with Benefits, which followed swingers in Ohio. The show was canceled after only two episodes, likely because of backlash from viewers, critics, and the community depicted in the show. Another controversial reality show from a bit farther back was called Who's Your Daddy?. In the show, TJ Myers, who had been adopted as a baby, tried to guess who her birth father was out of a number of different men — if she guessed correctly, she'd get $100,000. The show faced a lot of backlash from adoption agencies, who found it exploitative and trivializing of adopted people's experiences, calling it appalling and destructive. The Chop: Britain's Top Woodworker might have seemed to be an innocuous woodworking show from its title, but it made waves when viewers seemed to recognize racist tattoos on one cast member's face — including an 88, which is widely considered to mean "Heil Hitler." Darren Lumsden denied this, but the show was still canceled, with A&E UK releasing a statement saying, "A contestant's tattoos included symbols that could be connected to far-right ideologies and could cause offence; we sincerely apologise for that and we are sorry that our processes did not prompt further investigation at an earlier stage." One of the most infamous sitcoms of all time is Heil Honey, I'm Home! which portrayed Hitler and Eva Braun living next to a Jewish family in the suburbs. Unsurprisingly, the British show was super controversial, and only aired one episode (in the '90s), though seven had been filmed. Suggested by Alex F A more recent controversial sitcom is Work It, a 2012 comedy about two men who dress as women in order to get jobs after they're laid off. GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign were so against it that they actually took out an ad in Variety against the show. The show — which had also been panned by critics — was canceled after two episodes had aired. The Dana Carvey Show made waves in its very first episode when it began with a sketch depicting then-president Bill Clinton breastfeeding babies, puppies, and kittens. In just the first few minutes, millions of viewers changed the channel or turned off the TV. The show never recovered these viewers, and it was ultimately canceled after seven episodes. You can watch the sketch here. ESPN took a chance in 2017 by green-lighting the late-night show Barstool Van Talk. Starring Barstool's Dan "Big Cat" Katz and PFT Commenter, the show featured various ESPN and SportsCenter personalities as guests. The controversy came from Barstool's history of misogyny, with NFL reporter Sam Ponder calling ESPN out for giving Barstool a larger platform. After the first episode, ESPN president John Skipper canceled the show, stating, "While we had approval on the content of the show, I erred in assuming we could distance our efforts from the Barstool site and its content." You can watch the episode here. And finally, we can't entirely blame this one on controversy, but the controversial medical drama, Wonderland, was canceled after only two episodes in 2000, and backlash seemed at least partly to blame. The show, which depicted a psych ward, was criticized by the National Alliance on Mental Illness for portraying patients in psych wards as "killers, crazies, and freaks." However, since it also aired at the same time as ER, the network may simply have felt it was going up against too much competition. What controversial TV show can you not believe made it to air? Let us know in the comments below!
New York Post
05-06-2025
- Science
- New York Post
Dead Sea Scrolls much older than previously thought, AI-based study finds
Many of the Dead Sea Scrolls are much older than academics previously thought, with some dating back to the time of their ancient authorship, a new study claims. Scientists from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands utilized artificial intelligence to examine the handwriting of the ancient fragments and claim they derived more accurate dates for some writings, including the Book of Daniel, according to a paper published in Plos One. A part of the Isaiah Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, is seen inside the vault of the Shrine of the Book building at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Getty Images The aptly named AI program 'Enoch' was fed a plethora of already dated ancient texts from modern-day Israel and the West Bank that also had radiocarbon dates — then used machine learning to study the handwriting progressions of 135 Dead Sea Scroll fragments. Advertisement The study claimed that the fragment of the Book of Daniel 8-11, which was thought to be dated to 160s BC, could be as old as 230 BC, which overlaps with the period in which the biblical book was authored. 'With the Enoch tool we have opened a new door into the ancient world, like a time machine, that allows us to study the hands that wrote the Bible,' the study's authors wrote in a statement, Eureka Alert reported. 'Especially now that we have established, for the first time, that two biblical scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed authors,' the statement continued. Advertisement A 2,000-year-old fragment from the Dead Sea Scrolls on display at The Jewish Museum in New York City in 2008. Getty Images Researchers also claim that fragments written in Herodian Aramaic and Hasmonaean Hebrew — considered to have emerged in the First and Second centuries BC — are actually older than initially thought and provide a new lens for the presumed proliferation of writing during that era. These new dating claims result in 'a new chronology of the scrolls and the re-dating of ancient Jewish key texts that contribute to current debates on Jewish and Christian origins,' the study stated. Advertisement The Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered in 1943 by two Bedouin shepherds who found them secreted in caves in the Qumran section of Israel near the Dead Sea and are the oldest known fragments of Jewish manuscripts written in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic and Aramaic dating back to the Third and Second century BC. Scholars attribute the trove of religious manuscripts to the Essens, who were Jewish sectarians at the turn of the first millennium.
The Independent
14-02-2025
- Science
- The Independent
Sir Isaac Newton letter from 1704 predicts when world will end – and it's not far away
Renowned scientist Sir Isaac Newton predicted when the world would end in a letter dating back more than 300 years ago. A letter from the famous mathematician and physicist - who was best known for formulating the laws of gravity - revealed he believed the world would end in 2060, as he scrawled the warning above a series of mathematical calculations in 1704. Also a theologian, Sir Isaac based his predictions for the end of the world on his Protestant interpretation of the Bible. Sir Isaac calculated the year in question using maths and dates in biblical history to land on the prophesied apocalypse, which he put in the middle of the 21st century. He used the days numbered 1260, 1290 and 2300 in the Book of Daniel and Revelations, which mark the end and beginning of certain important moments in the apocalypse. However, he interpreted these days as years. Studying history, he settled on 800AD as the date the abandonment of the church formally began - the year the Holy Roman Empire was founded. He then calculated the world would reset 1,260 years after its founding. He predicted the end would be marked by plagues and war, as he wrote in the 1704 letter: 'And the days of short lived Beasts being put for the years of lived [sic] kingdoms, the period of 1260 days, if dated from the complete conquest of the three kings AC 800, will end AC 2060.' Sir Isaac caveated his prophecy: 'It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner. 'This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail.' Professor Stephen Snobelen, from the history of science and technology department at the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, said Sir Isaac was 'wary of prophetic date-setting' and 'worried that the failure of fallible human predictions based on divine prophecy would bring the Bible into disrepute'. Prof Snobelen said in his Statement on the Date 2060 that Sir Isaac didn't believe the world would end in a literal sense. He added: 'For Newton, 2060 AD would be more like a new beginning. It would be the end of an old age, and the beginning of a new era - the era Jews refer to the Messianic age and the era premillenarian Christians term the Millennium or Kingdom of God.'
