The 15 Dumbest Reality Shows Ever

Reality shows are pretty dumb to begin with. But what are the dumbest reality shows to ever air on television? Her are the bottom 15. Some were so bad they were unwatchable, but others were so stupid they ended up being very entertaining.

#15. The Anna Nicole Show
August 4, 2002 - June 1, 2003 ( 2 seasons 27 episodes )
Network: E!
Most of the reality shows featuring former or minor celebrities are pretty dumb, but the Anna Nicole Show was the dumbest. No disrespect to the late model, but the show was nothing but 30 minutes of watching a spoiled brat high on drugs whining about everything before passing out. The Anna Nicole Show was produced by the E! Channel in 2002 as an attempt to have a hit show other than Howard Stern. But after many celebrities turned E! down on a offer to have a reality show on their channel they finally got a yes from Anna Nicole Smith, 1993's Playboy Playmate of the year and star of the straight to video movies To The Limit and Skyscraper. Anna had put on quite a few pounds since her Playboy days and was no longer being asked to appear in television shows. Marrying a 89 year old oily tycoon in poor health just months before his death and the subsequent court battle over his estate had also given her enough bad publicity to kill off what was left of her modeling career. Her show for E! was one of the worst rated reality shows in the history of television despite the channel spending millions promoting it. No wonder as the show was unwatchable.

#14. Temptation Island
January 10, 2001 - September 29, 2003 ( 3 seasons 26 episodes )
Network: Fox
Here is the premise. Take a devoted couple who are about to get married, stick the girl on an island with a bunch of hunks and her fiance on another island with a bunch of hot bimbos and see if either one cheats. Inevitably one or both of the couple would cheat and during the recap interview there would be a tearful confession followed by the other ready to call it quits. Temptation Island actually got good ratings for it's first season, but it's viewers quickly got bored with seeing basically the same thing every week.

#13. Hole in the Wall
September 7 2008 - March 15 2009 ( 1 season 18 episodes )
Network: Fox
Contestants line up on the edge of a pool. A large wall races towards them with a cutout hole that the contestants have to replicate. If they do so the wall passes by them, and if they do not then they are knocked into the pool. This is actually an import that began as a Japanese game show and has been replicated in many other countries. United States is the country that ultimately rejected it.

#12. Scare Tactics
April 1, 2003 - Present ( 3 seasons 66 episodes )
Network: Sci Fi Channel / SyFy
Much like Candid Camera and Punked! this was another prank show. Unsuspecting victims found themselves in reenactments of scenes from horror and science fiction movies. The problem was that the whole point to having a prank show is for it to be funny. Scare Tactics was not. Yes, you did see some people get the living s scared out of them, but you never got to see the subtle reactions that made shows like Candid Camera funny. Instead you either got someone running away or with a frightened look on their face.

#11. The Surreal Life
January 9, 2003 - May 14, 2006 ( 6 seasons 61 episodes )
Network: WB ( first two seasons ) VH1 ( final four seasons )
Take a group of former celebrities, stick them in the same house and much like on MTV's Real World watch how they interact. The entertainment factor here was watching these celebrities humiliate themselves in this last ditch attempt to hold on to their fame. Amazingly VH1 found no end of B celebrities willing to do this show.

#10. I'm a Celebrity, Get Me out of here!
February 19, 2003 - Present ( 3 seasons 30 episodes )
Networks: ABC ( first season ), NBC
Unlike The Surreal Life, I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! was an actual game show where each night contestants would be voted off. Survivor had the good sense not to do a celebrity version and here is why. I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! is taped in real time and shown live and only lasts a week. Contestants are given cooked meals, sleeping bags and their own toilets and showers. Survivor takes about a month to play, there is very little food and contestants are forced to sleep and bathe in the wild. But even though I'm a Celebrity... offered all the comforts of home and a short schedule contestants still constantly threatened to leave the show, and many did with producers scrambling to find replacement celebrities. Since voting took place by a viewer phone poll the show was a popularity contest where winning had nothing to do with the celebrities being stuck in a jungle.

#9. Fear Factor
June 11, 2001 - September 12, 2006 ( 6 seasons 142 episodes )
Network: NBC
The premise: Contestants were asked to perform a stunt so intense that in theory many would not be able to do it and chicken out. Elimination was decided on which contestants completed the stunt in the least amount of time while those too afraid to do the stunt were automatically eliminated. The contestant to complete the final stunt in the least amount of time wins the game. What was entertaining was how extreme a stunt each contestant was expected to complete, from driving cars off the side of a cliff to swimming underwater through unlit tubes to laying in a coffin filed with insects and rats. At leas one stunt always involved eating some sort of rotten food in the least amount of time.

#8. The Simple Life
December 2, 2003 - August 5, 2007 ( 5 seasons 53 episodes )
Networks: Fox ( first three seasons ), E! ( Last two seasons )
The original concept: send Paris Hilton and her friend Nicole to a farm to live for a week. This was followed by a season of both girls driving across country in a camper and three more seasons of them working for various companies. The common thread in all the seasons was that Paris and Nicole had to work and make money just like a regular working class person. What ended up happening was the girls acting like a female version of Beavis and Butt-Head.

#7. The Crocodile Hunter
April 5, 1997 - November 22, 2004 ( 5 seasons 55 episodes )
Network: Animal Planet
Australian wildlife expert Steve Irwin and his wife Teri would basically go out into the wild and attempt to touch dangerous animals, telling you all the time how dangerous what they are doing is.

#6. Paris Hilton's My New BFF
September 30, 2008 - Present ( 2 seasons with third planned, 20 episodes )
Network: MTV
A group of contestants compete to be Paris Hilton's new BFF ( Best Friend Forever ) completely ignoring that Paris tends to abandon her BFFs after a week. Paris ran through two BFF in America and has done a couple of versions of this show for foreign television networks.

#5. The Joe Schmo Show
September 2, 2003 - August 10, 2004 ( 2 seasons 18 episodes )
Network: Spike
A reality show where contestants all live together in the same house and each week one is voted off until two are left. Then the contestants voted off come back to vote for who they want to win the grand prize. Sound familiar? Well, there is a catch. All of the contestants are really actors and the show is scripted. Now cast an unsuspecting contestant who thinks the show is real and you have The Joe Schmo Show. I guess the joke here was to trick someone into going through an entire reality show then telling them it was all fake at the end. But if the only reason that this guy auditioned for a reality show in the first place was to get on television and win the grand prize, which is what ends up ultimately happening. So what exactly is the joke? Producers spend most of the series trying to keep the contestant from figuring out the show is a hoax while the actors playing the other contestants go into the confessional and whine about how they feel so guilty about what they are doing to this guy. It all seemed like a lot of hard work for a joke with no actual payoff. For the second season the producers made a fake The Bachelor style game show and after a week the real contestant figured out the show was a hoax thanks to some of the actors ad libbing the wrong lines and accidentally talking about how their managers cast them in the show. Producers admitted to the contestant that the show was fake and paid her a lot of money not to tell the other real contestant about the hoax and to continue pretending to play.

#4. Wipeout
June 24, 2008 - Present ( 3 seasons - 28 aired so far )
Network: ABC
Contestants race through an obstacle course, the ones with the best time moving on to the next round. The obstacles are all but impossible to get past and contestants end up falling off into the mud pit or swimming pool below while commentators ridicule them for even trying. Amazingly no one has been killed playing the game and it has become a popular summer replacement show.

#3. Who Wants To Be A Superhero?
July 27, 2006 - September 6, 2007 ( 2 seasons 14 episodes )
Network:Sci-Fi Channel
Supposedly contestants would dress up as a superhero they created and compete in tasks which determine which hero gets voted off the show each week by judge and host Stan Lee. The prize was that the winner's superhero character would get it's own comic book for Darkhorse and would be in a movie for the Sic-Fi Channel. Lets talk facts here. Thousands of hopefuls auditioned dressed as their superhero creations before the 10 contestants were chosen to participate in the show. Most likely it was during this process that the winner was chosen. Darkhorse and Stan Lee would have been looking for the best idea for a superhero out of those submitted rather than putting out a comic book based on how well a contestant performed during the show. The person who performed the best may have not necessarily created the best superhero. Watching the show it seemed as if the later tasks were created specifically to eliminated targeted contestants. In earlier tasks so many failed that Stan Lee had a wider variety of contestants to eliminate and was not obligated to get rid of the handpicked winner. But in later rounds with fewer contestants eliminations became questionable. As an example, one of the finalists, Lemuria, was eliminated for failing to complete a task where she was asked to sit in a convicts lap. The convict in question refused to allow her to do it and stormed off in anger when Lemurria tried. That same convict later allowed another contestant to complete the task. The problem was the convict was actually character actor Janet Wright. The entire task was not decided on how the contestant performed but on if the actor hired to play the convict decided to allow her to complete the task. When the show concluded viewers were miffed that the winner, a superhero called Feedback, was not given his own movie as promised but instead had a brief cameo in a monster movie. The second season winner is still waiting for his promised movie.

#2. I Survived a Japanese Game Show
June 24, 2008 - Present ( 2 seasons 15 episodes )
Network: ABC
In the first season a group of contestants who signed up for a Big Brother style reality show found out that they would be competing in a Japanese game show. The games were wacky and involved contestants dressing up in costumes.

#1. The Real Gilligan's Island
November 30, 2004 - July 6, 2005 ( 2 seasons 10 episodes )
Network: TBS
The first season of Survivor took place on an island and almost immediately there were jokes comparing it to Gilligan's Island. In 2003 TBS wanted to have their own game show. Realizing they held the intellectual rights to the show Gilligan's Island they decided to create their own version of Survivor. Basically 14 contestants dressed up as characters from Gilligan's Island forming two groups of castaways who competed for immunity. Eventually both groups of castaways were combined as one and competed for individual immunity. If you did not have immunity then you could be voted off the show by other castaways. The only difference between this show and Survivor was that contestants had to look and act like characters from the classic 60's sitcom. TBS decided that the contestants playing Ginger Grant had to be real movie stars. In the first season Nicole Eggert and Rachel Hunter played Ginger while Erika Eleniak and Angie Everheart were in the second season.