Vote for the Best Show to Hate-Watch!
The Yahooies!, Yahoo TV’s awards for the best of the 2014-15 TV season including summer shows, continues today with a category honoring those series that we watch despite the fact that they routinely frustrate us. Or, in some cases, because of it. Twitter feeds don’t write themselves, people.
And the nominees for Best Show to Hate-Watch are…
Nashville
With a core cast this large — and they don’t even all fit in this photo — it’s inevitable that at least one storyline will move a little too slowly for your liking, that you’ll find it difficult to warm to a character you were set up to hate (as well as to Scarlett’s hair extensions), and that you’ll agree with fellow fan and Yahoo TV Critic-at-Large Ken Tucker’s 7 Lessons ‘Nashville’ Could Learn From ‘Empire.’ But just like Ken, you’ll never not watch Nashville. — Mandi Bierly
The Newsroom
As compulsively watchable as early seasons of The West Wing and as spectacularly off-key as the infamous Gilbert & Sullivan spoof on Studio 60, Aaron Sorkin’s three-season HBO series was wrong-headed in almost every respect, which was precisely why it proved so addictive. Just when you thought Sorkin couldn’t pen a more thuddingly obvious line of dialogue or cringe-inducing female stereotype, he went and topped himself. The Newsroom encapsulates all of Sorkin’s worst tendencies, thus making it the best one to hate-watch. — Ethan Alter
Scandal
Unlike the show itself, this explanation is quite simple: Scandal just keeps getting more and more ridiculous. But, if we don’t watch it — live, on Thursday nights, even — we’ve definitely missed something. Facebook and Twitter make sure we know it, tapping into our deep-seeded TV FOMO. We can’t not watch Olivia go around and around again with Fitz, we must know the depth of Papa Pope’s evil, and we need to see Jake do… whatever it is he’s doing. We might not like it, but, if we don’t watch, who knows what could happen? Huck might come after us! — Breanne L. Heldman
The Slap
You didn’t have to be a Brooklynite to love hate-watching The Slap… but it helped. All of the borough’s worst people were spotlighted in this eight-episode drama series, from passive-aggressive do-gooders and narcissistic artist types to spoiled elementary school brats and their hypersensitive mothers. Tuning into the series was just like people-watching in a Park Slope coffee shop: hilarious and enraging. — EA
True Detective Season 2
I went into Season 2 of True Detective with sky-high expectations; in fact, the first season was my favorite TV show of last year. But the sluggish, morose season premiere brought those expectations crashing back down to Earth, and the dozens of confusing false leads that followed (for a mystery I wasn’t even all that interested in solving) just confirmed: The only reason to stick with this show was to giggle at all the ridiculous things coming out of Vince Vaughn’s mouth. — Dave Nemetz
Zoo
Like Nashville and True Detective, the CBS summer series is also a contender in our Most Unintentionally Funny Scene Yahooie! category. But once you accept the madness — a French woman being oblivious to a bear stalking her in her kitchen, classic action-film dialogue delivered before an insane death, science that seems either too simple or too complicated — it’s actually something you look forward to. — MB
Winners will be revealed the week of Sept. 14. There’s still time to vote for more Yahooies! categories, including Most Shocking Moment, Most Memorable Line, Most GIF-able Moment, Best Sight Gag, and Best #FoodPorn.
