For me if I had to pick a good contender it would be the UK version of The Office.
I know many tend to debate how Ricky Gervais really fell off and how he repugnantly acts like a whiny centrist edgelord but me personally IMO I actually don’t think he was ever funny not even a little.
His big break through television was just so painful to sit through it’s so charismatically boring the characters are completely generic at best (notably Tim) or straight up insufferably unlikable at worst (especially the protagonist David FUCKING Brent) and most importantly the humour is just embarrassing.
Always seemed like The Thick Of It but without the nuisance tongue in cheek and charming satire.
Have a few in mind:
Catcher in the Rye. Holden is insufferable and I found it baffling that adults expected me to relate to him as a teen.
Grease aged very poorly and I do not understand the hype (is it because John Travolta is wearing tight pants?)
Family guy. The ship that launched a thousand cringe as fuck “adult animation” shows. Yes, I’m salty as hell about it.
Catcher in the Rye was always an unforgivable whiney crap-mound of a book. Its notoriety is based on its banning, and the larger issue of whether people should be allowed to read books with swears, misanthropes, and sexual references in them, but there are and were so many better books featuring those things out there.
Family Guy is a fascinating case of a crappy show insisting upon itself so hard that it successfully got itself uncancelled and forced into pop culture as a zombie endlessly repeating itself on the level of its inspiration and closest rival The Simpsons.
I also loathe Grease but its general appeal is pretty easy to explain: it came out in the 1970s as a rose-tinted nostalgia piece for white middle-class boomers who grew up in the 1950s and, as so many people of all ages do, idealized their childhood era as when things were so cool and simple. (Spoiler to folks of all eras: things weren’t actually any simpler when you were young, you were just shielded from more of the bullshit than you are now.) It was the same nostalgia that fueled the runaway success of Happy Days on TV in that era, though at least that show managed to be a functional sitcom with more substance to it than the empty-headed misogyny-flavored story of Grease.
A lot of the hype about Grease is nostalgia, no doubt about that.
But a lot of the rest is that a loooot of the songs are both catchy and very easy to understand. The movie also forms a social dynamic that is easy to understand for kids.
We learned to sing “Summer Nights” in school, and then friends and I would sing the song over and over, adding more and more childish humor that we found hilarious (because…kids). We also instantly got the implied social dynamic (boys just want to get sex, girls want to have mushy romance).
It terrifies me that there are people walking around out there who feel seen by Holden Caulfield.
Or to reference another overrated work: John Galt. Lol
Just a bunch of phoneys.
Family guy has always been bad, I lived through its peak and it was so painful
Oh you think that’s bad? What about the time I fell off of that elephant and broke my ankle in 75 places while a monkey played la cucaracha on a tambourine?
(wince) “aHHHHhhh!..(wince)…Aaaaghh!!.. It’s in my raccoon wounds! :(”