The 15 most problematic TV shows of the 21st century, from Little Britain to Baby Reindeer, ranked

Television’s past is littered with debris. From the 1970s “comedy” racism of shows such as Love Thy Neighbour to LGBT+ stereotypes including Mr Humphries in Are You Being Served?, it’s easy (if often unfair) to conjure up examples of shows whose implied attitudes are, to put it kindly, “of their time”.

But fast-forward to the Nineties and even much-loved and more recent classics like Friends turn out to be full of moments which would cause many modern viewers to wince. And as for Sky’s jaw-dropping one-episode sitcom Heil Honey I’m Home! – which mined the imagined home life of Mr and Mrs Adolf Hitler for comedy – well, the less said, the better.

TV is often an immediate and reactive medium and much of it isn’t built to last. Which probably explains why so much of it, even since the turn of the century, has aged like fine milk. Here’s a selection of the 21st century’s biggest, nastiest or dumbest clangers to date.

Ahh, America’s Next Top Model. No reality show of the Noughties was quite so good at making absolutely everyone watching – regardless of gender, sexuality, colour or creed – feel like total garbage. Ostensibly a bi-annual search for the most beautiful people in the US, ANTM always had the whiff of a PG-rated snuff film devised by someone with a humiliation kink. We witnessed desperate teenage girls forced to walk down runways while trying to dodge enormous swinging pendulums, and one particular girl forced to pose sexily in a coffin shortly after being told her best friend had died. Television! Let’s never do this again. Adam White

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Chris Morris’s Brass Eye is, in its initial incarnation, a work of borderline genius. But the 2001 paedophilia special was a moment when Morris’s desire to confront cosy sensibilities clashed uncomfortably with his moral compass. As a media satire, it was spectacular. As an act of provocation, it was devastating. And as an exploration of taboos, it was, in the context of its era, genuinely courageous. But with hindsight, the show’s tone – and Morris’s satirical instincts – were too brutal and unsparing for the subject matter in question. At times, the show forgot that the people whose suggestibility it was critiquing were, in addition to being the tabloid media’s target market, also its victims. It’s still funny of course – but in the decades since, the laughs have started to feel more queasy. Phil Harrison

Brendan O’Carroll’s multicamera sitcom is often cited among the worst television shows ever made – certainly, it’s among the very dregs of the barrel when it comes to recent British fare. This in itself has made Mrs Brown’s Boys a contentious talking point among viewers. Throw in the show’s penchant for crude humour, offensive jokes and stereotypes, and an off-camera racist-joke scandal involving the show’s creator-star O’Carroll (who subsequently apologised), and you’re left with one of the more problematic missteps in British TV comedy. Louis Chilton

Rich people visit poor people and pretend to be poor too and muck in with the poor people and in doing so, learn about their incredible, selfless nobility in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds and drop them a few grand and then everyone hugs and cries and they all live happily ever after. This narrative arc is, of course, a slightly reductive description of The Secret Millionaire’s formula. But it’s still basically accurate. Worse still, it feels like there was a real sense of emotional manipulation to this reality series, not to mention a striking reluctance to interrogate a system in which some people work hard and get rich and some people work hard and get nothing. For that reason, the generosity it paraded felt patronising and the catharsis it offered felt fake. PH

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Citizen Khan was lauded as the TV homecoming British Muslims had long been waiting for. Years of relentless media attacks had left the community desperate for some light-hearted observational comedy. Released in 2012, it ran for a full four seasons before it was mercifully cancelled. Created by Adil Ray, the BBC satire follows community leader Mr Khan as he navigates his personal and family life in the Midlands. But the gags fell flat, and it’s not because we’re all straight-faced religious headbangers who can’t take a joke. The show divided audiences both Muslim and non-Muslim. Critique about it being blasphemous got mixed up with backlash about its racialised stereotyping, reinforcing tropes about Muslims. From Mr Khan’s patriarchal ways to his cheapness with money, it felt more like the kind of performance someone ignorant would expect, geared towards an outside audience, rather than a funny caricature of anyone I actually know. Maira Butt

The sketch show created by Keith Lemon comedian Leigh Francis was criticised throughout its time on air (2002-2009) for its racist caricatures, which included the use of blackface. Francis portrayed Black celebrities such as Michael Jackson, singer Craig David and talk show host Trisha Goddard, often using latex masks. Francis apologised for the series in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, stating: “Back then I didn’t think anything about it, people didn’t say anything, I’m not going to blame other people. [...] I just want to apologise, I just want to say sorry for any upset I caused. I guess we’re all on a learning journey.” The series was subsequently removed by Channel 4 from the online streaming catalogue. LC

HBO’s inside-showbiz dramedy Entourage – loosely inspired by the hedonistic friend group of Mark Wahlberg – was a perfectly watchable, well-made series for much of its eight-season run. It was also a hotbed of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and materialism, a show with a gaping moral vacuum at its centre. A-list glamour aside, Entourage was toxic from the get-go – Hollywood superstardom has seldom seemed this seedy. LC

For the most part, this workplace dweeb-com remains a very funny, tonally precise comedy classic, which arguably launched the careers of Katherine Parkinson, Chris O’Dowd and Richard Ayoade and cemented the reputation of creator Graham Linehan as a leading light in TV comedy. But there is one episode which, with the benefit of hindsight, feels like a tough watch. Douglas’s breakup with a transgender woman upon learning of her gender identity (an incident followed by a spectacular fight) has a distinctly less savoury look given Linehan’s subsequent years, which have seen the Irish writer engage in what many have characterised as a campaign of transphobic rhetoric. (He has described himself as a “gender critical activist”.) It’s not that The IT Crowd is no longer funny, just that the context surrounding its creator has changed more radically than anyone could have imagined. PH

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The Idol, HBO’s music industry drama starring Lily-Rose Depp as a troubled pop star, was shrouded in murk even before its release. It was optimistically oversold as HBO’s next Euphoria, and had a shiny veneer thanks to the involvement of hitmaker The Weeknd, who co-wrote and starred in the series as a sordid cult leader. But things came tumbling down when early episodes of the series underwent a series of reshoots. An investigation saw 13 unnamed sources from the production claim that set conditions were chaotic and that the inclusion of several sex scenes made them uncomfortable (HBO later admitted that the production of early episodes did not meet certain unspecified standards). Critics labelled it “sexist”, “torture porn” and “one of the worst TV shows of the year” – largely due to the uncomfortable dynamic between Depp and The Weeknd’s characters. The latter’s acting skills were singled out and eviscerated by reviewers. It’s no surprise HBO cancelled it after one season. The only saving grace was the soundtrack – it was actually pretty catchy. Ellie Muir

Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson – vapid savant of the YouTube algorithm and totemic household name for anyone under the age of 25 – was always going to attract a fair amount of criticism for Beast Games. His Squid Games-esque Prime Video series saw 1,000 contestants battle for a prize pool of $5m (£3.94m), supposedly the biggest game show prize ever, through a series of “nail-biting, physical, mental, and social challenges”. Before the series even aired, however, a number of contestants filed a lawsuit against the show, alleging, among other things, that the production had failed to pay them correctly, failed to provide meal breaks, rest breaks and basic hygiene access, and exposed them to “dangerous circumstances and conditions as a condition of their employment”. Donaldson has claimed that the accusations were “blown out of proportion”, stating that a formal review of the production process had been launched. LC

The production company behind Benefits Street were also the people responsible for the bunting-strewn celebration of “Keep Calm and Carry On” twee-core The Great British Bake Off. And it all makes sense really. While Bake Off is a celebration of Britain in all of its idealised, village fete, crumpets for tea loveliness, Benefits Street was its negative mirror image – a grimly orchestrated demonisation of the poor and vulnerable; seeking out and foregrounding the most feckless, semi-criminal and disreputable inhabitants of James Turner Street in Birmingham while largely refusing to address the systemic neglect underpinning their dysfunction. Dropping during the ugly, divisive austerity era, it seemed perfectly designed to underpin the implicit agenda of its time: do these people really deserve society’s help? PH

One of the best pieces of television on this list, comedian Richard Gadd’s Netflix miniseries Baby Reindeer was an occasionally funny, often harrowing look at trauma, abuse and obsession, drawing on Gadd’s own experiences with a stalker. Baby Reindeer was inherently messy – both ethically and thematically, in a way that actually made the series a lot more interesting. But after the woman who alleged to have inspired the stalker character (“Martha”) went public, objecting to the way she claims the show presented her, Netflix was hit with a multi-million-pound lawsuit. A spokesperson for Netflix said: “We intend to defend this matter vigorously and to stand by Richard Gadd's right to tell his story.” LC

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This 2004 Sky One dating show saw a group of British lads vie for the affections of one woman, à la The Bachelorette. The “twist”, though, was that the woman, Brazilian model Miriam Rivera, was transgender – and the six male contestants were only informed about this at the end of the series. The whole affair was grossly insensitive, transphobic and unethical; the male contestants issued a lawsuit that was eventually settled out of court. Rivera, meanwhile, was the victim of unconscionable torment from the tabloid press, and died by suicide in 2019. LC

With hindsight, Matt Lucas and David Walliams’s sketch show now feels less like a TV comedy and more like a living, breathing illustration of why “wokeness” was a necessary corrective to, well, whatever the hell that was – namely two white, privately educated men joining forces to black up, make fun of teenage single mothers on council estates, dick around in wheelchairs and generally parade their privilege like it was going out of fashion. Which, thankfully, it was. Although sadly, the pair’s dodgy follow-up sitcom Come Fly with Me suggested few lessons had been learned. PH

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Duty of care? That stuff’s for losers. Surrounded by hulking security guards (who were the only thing standing between him and the smack in the chops he so richly deserved) and backed up by a production team who, according to a Channel 4 documentary, were encouraged to prime their already volatile guests for maximum hysteria, Jeremy Kyle was a ringmaster, presiding over the early 21st century’s small-screen version of bear-baiting. To watch clips from The Jeremy Kyle Show now (you’ll have to go to YouTube as ITV has clearly tried to bury it) is to be astounded that this deranged cocktail of voyeurism, class-based disdain and unadulterated public bullying was ever allowed on air. And yet it ran for 17 series and was cancelled only after the suspected suicide of a participant. A vision of dystopia orchestrated for daytime TV, helping no one, belittling everyone. Most of all, its viewers. PH