5 ’80s and ’90s Sitcoms Too Strange to Last, Ranked

Published Sep 27, 2026, 11:21 AM EDT

Chris is a UK-based film and TV writer, editor and occasional filmmaker. For more than a decade, he has written news, reviews and features covering movies, television and pop culture. He has also made short films and worked in video production, giving him experience on both sides of the screen. Chris runs the We Love Movies More Than You TikTok channel and has a particular interest in overlooked and short-lived TV shows.

The ’80s and ’90s were packed with sitcoms that helped shape the formula for making long-running TV hits. As such, networks tried endless configurations around families, workplace shenanigans, and groups of friends trying to figure out adulthood. Then, every so often, a stranger idea would break out with shows like Alf, Out of This World, and the underrated Herman’s Head all finding success.

While some sitcoms from this era missed the mark by trying too hard to replicate what worked elsewhere, that’s not the case for the short-lived sitcoms on this list. All of them tried something very different, perhaps too different for mainstream audiences. Even the involvement of legendary filmmakers Wes Craven and David Lynch couldn’t stop these sitcoms from being too strange to last.

5 'The People Next Door' (1989)

Image via CBS

Best known for being a titan of the horror genre, Wes Craven took an unusual career detour by co-creating this surreal sitcom. Jeffrey Jones stars as Walter Kellogg, a widowed cartoonist and clearly a fan of Gary Larson’s The Far Side, who can make his imagination appear in the real world. As he prepares to remarry, Walter finds it harder to keep his imagination from spilling out, much to his children's annoyance. That’s far from the weirdest thing to air on TV in the 1980s, but everything about The People Next Door is tonally off from the start.

The whole thing comes across as though Walter is having a breakdown. His mood swings wildly, and there's a constant underlying menace that almost feels deliberate. It would be wonderful to believe Craven knowingly made a subversive sitcom, but he was filming Shocker, so he wasn’t massively involved in The People Next Door. The show likely turned out so strange because CBS hired writers Steve and Madeline Sunshine (Webster) to make it more network-friendly. It has the rhythm, setup, and look of a sitcom, but nothing about it works together. Even comedy veterans Leslie Jordan, Mary Gross, and Christina Pickles did little to help the jokes land. Only five of the ten produced episodes aired, and Craven’s brief dalliance with sitcoms was over, but he returned to the suburbs for his next horror movie, The People Under the Stairs.

4 'The Charmings' (1987-1988)

Image via ABC

Once Upon a Time and Enchanted successfully brought fairy tale characters into the modern world, but Robert Sternin and Prudence Fraser’s The Charmings helped pave the way. After sleeping for a thousand years, Snow White, Prince Charming (Christopher Rich), and the rest of their household now live a suburban life in 1980s America. Aiming for a classic fish-out-of-water setup with added magic, the show struggles to know what to do with its characters once the initial culture shock wears off.

The Charmings is the only show on this list with a second season, which might not be saying much as it only lasted 21 episodes. But it does highlight that there was mileage in the idea. For all its flaws, it is fun at times, albeit in small doses. From the cheesy opening titles to a few too many jokes about poisoned apples, the limits of The Charmings’ audience appeal and storytelling quickly become apparent. Everybody involved makes a valiant effort to just go with the silliness, with Judy Parfitt as wicked stepmother Lillian and Paul Winfield as the Magic Mirror bringing some needed comic energy. Yet it just can’t shake off the community theater sketch-show vibe or the confused expressions of the cast. The Charmings isn’t the best fantasy comedy, but it’s up there with the strangest.

3 'What a Dummy' (1990)

Image via IMDB

At first glance, What a Dummy has the plot of a cursed-object horror movie. A suburban family inherits a living ventriloquist’s dummy named Buzz from their great-uncle Jackie. Instead of immediately throwing Buzz into the nearest fire, they let him become part of the household. No explanation for how or why he is alive is given, and he’s just accepted as an eccentric family member who makes bad jokes.

Ventriloquist dummies are creepy, and that’s a fact. So it makes little sense why anybody thought it would be a good idea to make one the star of a sitcom. The main thing that makes What a Dummy so strange is how much it asks the audience to treat something otherworldly as normal. That worked for Alf because he had charm, wit, and clearly explained he was an alien. Here, Buzz is just a wisecracking character who happens to be a living dummy who occasionally falls out with the eldest son, Tucker (Stephen Dorff). Unlike the other shows on this list, What a Dummy was made for syndication, running for 24 baffling and lightly unsettling episodes. Thankfully, the show was canceled after one season, and Buzz was put back in his trunk indefinitely.

2 'Woops!' (1992)

Image via Fox

Created by Gary Jacobs (Empty Nest) and executive produced by Paul Junger Witt (The Golden Girls), Woops! begins shortly after a nuclear weapon is accidentally launched and wipes out most of the human race. A small, mismatched group of survivors, including Mark (Evan Handler), a teacher and the show's narrator, band together to make a new home on a farm. That's an extreme start for any TV show, so a post-apocalyptic sitcom was always going to be a tough sell.

The survivors face an uncertain world filled with mutated spiders, a giant turkey, and hallucinogenic berries. One episode takes an unexpected turn with Mark concerned that he’s become impotent. Inexplicably, this all happens in the same fever dream of a sitcom that tries hard to be both a satire and broad roommate comedy, but it's far too bleak to be comfortable viewing. The near-perfect sitcom The Last Man on Earth eventually found the comedy in the end of humanity. So maybe Woops! was ahead of its time, but audiences in 1992 didn't get the joke, and Fox pulled the show before airing the final three episodes.

1 'On The Air' (1992)

Image via ABC

A sitcom from Twin Peaks creators David Lynch and Mark Frost was always going to be an acquired taste, and by all reasonable logic, On the Air shouldn’t exist. Their first proper comedy is set in the 1950s behind the scenes of The Lester Guy Show, a questionably staffed televised variety show where just about everything goes wrong and nobody seems to know what they’re doing. The premise might be full of sitcom potential, but the joyfully surreal execution is the opposite of network-friendly in the best possible way.

Featuring Ian Buchanan, Nancye Ferguson, and Miguel Ferrer, the pilot episode fared surprisingly well for a Saturday slot in the summer. Sadly, audiences didn’t tune back in for episode two, and ABC canceled On the Air after only three of the seven completed episodes were shown. It was undeniably odd. The characters are exaggerated, pauses in dialogue are frequently too long, and sound cues are jarringly off. The creators made such a precise farcical comedy that does everything possible to subvert the traditional sitcom format. Lynch invites the audience to see the stupidity of making television while painting studio heads as screaming maniacs. On the Air was too strange to last, but the reasons it didn't work for ABC are exactly why it should be treasured.

On the Air

• 

  Angelo Badalamenti

  Piano Player

• Carolyn Lowery

  Chorus Girl

• Ian Buchanan

  Lester Guy

• Tracey Walter

  'Blinky' Watts