The Worst SNL Sketches of All Time: A Poll

A few years ago, I did a poll where readers could vote on the best and worst episodes of SNL of all time.  Despite only getting eleven votes, the results page has become my most frequently accessed post.  Since then, I've been considering doing a poll about individual SNL sketches, but I wanted to come up with something slightly different.  There are so many "greatest SNL sketches" posts on the web, usually with a lot of the same contenders, so I want to focus on the other side. When discussing bad SNL, it's so easy to talk about how bad the show gets from time to time without getting specific, or just mentioning the show's tendency to milk a sketch or character for all it's worth.  This isn't just a "10 most irritating characters" poll: I want specific examples of the most terrible sketches the show's ever brought to a network audience.

My primary focus is going to be a list of the worst individual sketches, but because of the show's reliance (or over-reliance) on recurring material, I'm going to have a separate category for the worst recurring sketches.  I will also allow votes for individual sketches featuring a recurring character, but the main reason for having a separate category for the recurring stuff is because there have been some truly terrible one-offs that the show never felt necessary to bring back.

To have your voice heard, submit your picks using the form at the bottom of this post.  I also prefer if you also give a good rationale behind your choices, so tell me why you thought these sketches were terrible.   You can submit as many or as few choices as you want.  The more people that pick something, the better.

I will keep the voting open until March 1, 2014, at 12:00 am Atlantic time.  Once all the votes are tabulated, I'm going to do a series of weekly posts based on the results; the number will depend on how many votes come in.

EDIT: VOTING HAS NOW ENDED.

Barney Miller

I first got into Barney Miller in my first year of university, when a Canadian cable channel was running the show five times a week.I had no idea they were running it but I flipped onto one of the weaker early episodes once. Eventually I ended up catching better episodes, and after finding more about the show starting watching regularly when they were running season 3.Unfortunately the channel didn't keep with the reruns long enough to get through the entire series run, but by the time they dropped the show in the middle of season 7, this sitcom about the mundane work of plainclothes detectives in Greenwich Village cemented itself on my all-time favorites list.

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