“Burn it down.  Burn it all down.”

~Stan Lee

With the release of Batman v Superman: The Wrath of the Film Critic behind us, and America’s superhero movie craze either ramping up or slowly devouring itself from both ends, depending on who you ask, there’s been a lot of reflection of our comic book culture lately.

And those of you who have been to a movie theater since, oh, let’s say 1997 have probably noticed that, no matter what your opinion on the current state of comic book media is, comic books are pretty big right now.

Well, not the books themselves, the only people that read comics are still the same two friends of yours that have very strong opinions about Ben Reilly’s denim choices, but the stories and the characters and especially the heroes from comic books are impossible to avoid. Hell, Marvel tossed together a $60 million movie about an obscure antihero created in 1991 and filled it with swearing and Ryan Reynolds fighting in a burning building completely nude  and they still managed to crack $700 million worldwide.

And why’s that? Well, yes, the naked Ryan Reynolds does help a bit there, but mainly it’s that superhero movies are almost impossible to fuck up, unless you’re trying to convince people to care about the Fantastic Four.

We might forget, in all our Iron Man marathons and turning-on-subtitles-whenever-Bane-speaks-in-The-Dark-Knight-Rises nights, that this wasn’t always the case. Comic book adaptations were not the cash cows they are now, in fact they generally could be considered risky projects.

That especially applies to TV shows. While the current crop of Marvel and DC influenced television programs are pretty solid, especially with what Netflix is doing to Marvel characters we’ve either not heard of or tried to forget, the history of America trying to put superheroes on the airwaves has often been…well, let’s just say not so heroic. Let’s say bad.  Let’s say laughably bad.

Here are some bad TV shows.

Hilariously Bad Comic Book TV Shows

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