Nickelodeon used to be a cornerstone of life as a kid back in the 1990s and early 2000s. The list of great shows they had was exhaustive. Rugrats, Hey Arnold, Ren & Stimpy, Rocko’s Modern Life, CatDog, Doug, Nick Arcade... the list goes on and on. What really made it so special though was they were specializing in any one type of show. You had comedies, dramas, young kid shows, shows for teenagers, live action, cartoons, game shows, all of them were perfect. If you can think of it, chances are that Nickelodeon had it at one point or another.

But all good things must come to an end. Around the mid-2000s, everything changed for Nick. They closed Nick Studios, canceled all their great game shows, let go of some of their best creators, and replaced it all with sludge. I don’t want this article to sound like an old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn, but the modern-day Nickelodeon truly is home to some of the least good shows on television today.

That’s not to say everything Nick did in the 90s was good, there are a few examples from back then on this list. But the vast majority of programming one could call bad on Nick comes from the mid-2000s and runs up until this day. It’s terrible seeing what’s happening to the once great channel these days, like watching a loved one tear themselves apart, Lisa. Anyway, here’s our list of 25 Nickelodeon shows that fans like me pretend don’t exist.

25 From Babies To Middle School

Via All Grown Up Wiki

All Grown Up was a spin-off of Rugrats, the classic cartoon about a baby and his friends going on all kinds of wild adventures. All Grown Up jumped forward in time over a decade to when those babies were preteens. There was a backdoor pilot for the show in the form of an hour-long Rugrats episode, and it received high ratings. Because of this, Nickelodeon decided to put their full resources into this spin-off, which spelled the end of Rugrats.

All Grown Up wasn’t a great show, especially compared to the show that inspired it. The charm of Rugrats was seeing the babies’ imagination, and how they’d view a simple trip to the grocery store as an Indiana Jones-esque epic trek across the world. Growing them up and making them deal with teenage issues all of a sudden was jarring, and made it feel like every other pre-teen drama show. All Grown Up was canceled after three seasons, and that was the last anyone ever saw of the Rugrats again.

24 Noah Didn't Really Know Best

via: Sitcoms Online

Noah Knows Best is the second shortest running series in Nickelodeon history (#1 is coming up soon on this list), with only eight episodes aired in 2000. The ratings were so low that Nick canceled the show mid-season, with the last five episodes never airing.

Starring Phillip Van Dyke (the second voice actor for Arnold in Hey Arnold!), the show was described as a male version of Clarissa Explains it All. It followed the titular Noah through his daily life as a teenager, dealing with school, his sister, and his parents. But where Clarissa Explains it All was fun and witty, Noah Knows Best was just boring. Much like All Grown Up, it felt like a retread of every other teenage sitcom at the time. Incidentally, Noah Knows Best was the last sitcom filmed in front of a live audience at Nickelodeon Studios.

23 Didn't Shake Things Up Enough

via: tvguide.com

Oh Kel, what happened to you? The once iconic lover of orange soda and slacking off on Kenan & Kel now finds himself leading Game Shakers, a show about a group of kids who make ultra-popular video games.

If you know anything about TV and film depictions of video games and gamer culture, you can already tell how bad this show is.

Game Shakers is about two 14-year-old girls who create a mobile game for their science project (yes, really), and the game becomes super popular, selling millions (yes, really). They then take all the money they've earned and form their own game studio (yes, really), but are threatened with a lawsuit by Kel’s character, “Double G” (yes, really) because they used one of his songs in their game. To avoid a lawsuit, the girls agree to let Double G become an investor in the company (yes, really) and even let his young son, “Triple G” (yes, really), become a consultant (yes, really).

22 Rugrats Can't Catch A Break

via: YouTube

Rugrats: Pre-School Daze takes the honor of being the shortest run TV show in Nickelodeon history with just four episodes being produced and aired. Originally intended to be a full series, Pre-School Daze went on the back-burner in favor of All Grown Up. Nick still worked on the show but didn’t like the direction its art style and animation was going.

And boy, were they right. While Rugrats and All Grown Up shared a similar art style, Pre-School Daze went for something different. Imagine Teen Titans Go! as drawn by a colorblind Newgrounds Flash animator who’s never drawn anything before and you’d only be halfway there. The characters all had creepy giant eyes and big, bright red circles on their cheeks representing blushing. The teacher of this pre-school looked like she’d just spent four years in the trenches at the Somme. It’s a shame, too, because the idea is a lot better than All Grown Up. Put Angelica and Suzy in preschool and see what kind of trouble the two best frenemies can get into.

21 A Powerless Show

via: MovieFone

Tak and the Power of Juju was based on the video game of the same name, which was also produced by Nickelodeon. It lasted only one season in 2007 but was Nick’s first show that was 100% CGI. That’s where things really started heading south for the channel.

Tak and the Power of Juju was about a fictional jungle tribe called the Pupununu, some of whom have magic powers bestowed upon them by Jujus: the magical creatures of the world. Whereas the game was about Tak going on a great adventure to save his people, the TV show was more of a procedural comedy show, featuring two unrelated 11-minute segments. The show received poor ratings and poorer reviews from critics, so it wasn’t picked up beyond the first season’s run. The most that can be said about Tak and the Power of Juju was how uninspired it was, something that would go on to define Nick in the coming years.

20 Not The Same Without The Nostalgia

via: nickelodeon.com

Power Rangers Samurai has been dubbed the worst season of the Power Rangers to date. Whereas the series has always been “so bad it’s good” thanks to its cheesy acting, badly choreographed and edited action, and silly stories, Samurai was just plain bad. The costumes were bad, the plotline was dumb even by Power Rangers standards, the characters were uninteresting, the acting from the main cast was the worst in the series, and the endless string of child actors was unbearable.

Samurai and its second season, Super Samurai, were the first seasons to be aired on Nickelodeon after series producer Haim Saban won the rights to Power Rangers back from Disney. Since then the series has gotten steadily worse with dud after dud like Megaforce, Dino Charge, and now Ninja Steel. Pretty apt considering the show now airs exclusively on Nickelodeon.

19 Flubbing It Up

via: TV Guide

The Brothers Flub was another short-lived cartoon, lasting only one season in 1999. It was about two blue aliens named Guapo and Fraz Flub. They work for RetroGrade Interdimensional Couriers as delivery boys, and each episode revolved around them delivering packages to various planets and meeting all kinds of other weird aliens.

It was basically a more kid-friendly version of Futurama, but not as good.

Critics weren’t a fan either. In their review, the Hollywood Reporter said the show was “a somewhat vacuous effort that lacks the charm and substance of much of Nick's other programming.” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel said it contained “all the noisy hyperactivity of Aaahh!!! Real Monsters and little of the cockeyed charm.” The show had a great premise, good art and animation, and a stellar voice cast. The problem was the plot itself was about as interesting as watching already dried paint just sitting there.

18 No Meat To It

via:https://i.ytimg.com/vi/at5zwPg11D4/maxresdefault.jpg

If The Brothers Flub was a less-good, kid-friendly version of Futurama, then the same can be said of Mr. Meaty’s relation to Beavis and Butthead. The show was about two slacker teens working at a fast food. It had a unique look, using puppets that look they were modeled from clay.

The show was infamous for its potty humor. That’s not necessarily a problem, but it is when the jokes don’t land. For example, in the very first episode, one of the boys, Parker, has bad body odor but the other one, Josh, doesn’t want to tell him because it might upset him. The two later have to share a mascot costume, and Josh is stuck in there with Parker’s awful smell. By all accounts, it was a gross and unfunny show and got more gross and unfunny as it went on. Eventually, Nick had enough of this brand of humor and gave it the ax.

17 Going For A Different Audience

via: Just Watch

Glenn Martin, DDS was another attempt by Nick to appeal to an older audience. It was a stop-motion animation show that aired on Nick at Nite, and even used a laugh track intended to model that of a 1970s sitcom. The show was about Glenn Martin, a dentist, who accidentally burned his home down, so he decided to take his whole family on a trip across the country so they could bond. The show was funded by former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who put allowed Nick to air it rather than a Disney network because of Nick at Nite’s reputation for “nurturing new shows.”

How was the show? Well, the Wikipedia page specifically points out that the family dog has an oversized body part, and one of the most popular images from the show on Google Image Search is of another dog licking itself. What more can anybody say about that?

16 Four Times The Trouble

via: Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn Wiki

Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn is another live-action sitcom about quadruplets. That’s the entire plot summary as far as I or anyone who’s ever watched this show can tell. Yet somehow, it’s still going on to this day. It’s in its fourth season currently, and the titular Nick, Rickathy, Richard, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes are still going on, still refusing to use the Oxford comma.

The whole show really does center around the fact that these four kids don’t like each other, and are constantly fighting and bickering.

Their parents, meanwhile, are completely and utterly helpless when it comes to making them get along. In one episode, Dawn starts keeping a diary, and when the three boys find it and read it, they force them to shave their heads. I know parenting is hard, but what kind of punishment is that?

Ultimately, NRD&D is inoffensive, and that’s its big problem. It’s boring, uninspired, and bland.

15 Four Friends, Boring Adventures

via: Pig Goat Banana Cricket Wiki

Pig Goat Banana Cricket subscribes to the Metal Gear Solid and Horizon Zero Dawn school of naming in which you mash random words together and call it a day. The show itself followed a similar formula, combining the separate stories of four random friends throughout their daily lives, and weaving them together into one narrative episode.

The show exists in a bizarre universe where animals talk, giant monkeys spit snot from their nose, and goats are musicians. One of the creators of the show is Johnny Ryan, creator of Angry Youth Comix. This was a comic strip that was intentionally designed to be as offensive and repulsive as possible. That Nick would pick up a show from him is surprising. That’s why he’s only credited as “J. Ryan” on the show. Initially, the show received strong ratings, but they quickly plummeted. The season 1 finale only had 0.95 million viewers. Because of this, Nickelodeon didn’t pick up the show for further seasons.

14 A Strange Buddy Comedy

via:https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/11/Sanjay-and-craig-silly-quotes-01-e1447106486152.jpg

Sanjay and Craig was another recent cartoon, airing from 2013 to 2016, featuring Sanjay Patel, a 12-year-old boy who has a talking pet snake named Craig. Much of the show’s humor comes from Craig dressing up in various uniforms and nobody realizing he’s a snake.

The show typically centers around Sanjay and Craig getting into and out of trouble, as Sanjay tries to talk to Belle, whom he has a crush on.

The show features the typical over-the-top, absurdist humor popular in cartoons these days, with characters making stupid faces and putting on dumb voices. It also has the typical jokes about bodily functions and farting as you’d expect from these lazy, half-baked kinds of cartoons. One of the episodes also featured bottom transplants! Hilarious!

13 Not Getting Chummy

via: fbandcc.wikia.com

Sometimes terrible TV shows managed to stumble into winning prestigious awards. One such how was Fanboy & Chum Chum, a CG cartoon show that spun-off from a series of shorts on Random! Cartoons. The show follows Fanboy and Chum Chum (yes, those are their real names), two boys who are obsessed with superheroes. The pair are constantly imitating popular heroes, and the show often delves into what it thinks is satire.

It’s hyperbolic to say that one thing represents everything wrong with a certain industry. On the other hand, every rule has an exception, and this show is it. Fanboy & Chum Chum is everything wrong with modern kids cartoons (its characters are the typical loud, annoying, obnoxious brats that are as dumb as a bag of rocks) characteristics of just about every cartoon these days. Still, this abomination won a Daytime Emmy in 2010. Yet everyone seems to hate it, as it has a 3.2 user review rating on IMDB and a 2.6 on TV.com.

12 Not The Sequel We Wanted

via: planetsheen.wikia.com

You remember Jimmy Neutron? You remember Jimmy’s extremely annoying, one-note friend, Sheen? Yeah, well apparently someone thought it would be a good idea to give that character his own show, Planet Sheen. The show follows Sheen trying to get off the planet Zeenu and return home, having accidentally sent himself there when he snuck into Jimmy’s lab and climbed in a rocket, which blasted off and took him with it. Zeenu is home to aliens, many of whom Sheen befriends because they’re just as stupid and annoying as he is.

The show was canceled after one season, and we never find out if Sheen got home or not, which is no great loss.

Interestingly, despite only having one season, the show lasted for over two years, with the first episode airing in October 2010, and the finale going out in November 2012. Surely longtime Sheen fans were devastating by the long, anti-climactic wait.

11 Invading Our TV Screens

via: youtube.com

You know the name of the game now. Rabbids Invasion was a cartoon show about really annoying characters being obnoxious. There are a few wrinkles that make the story behind this cartoon (not the cartoon itself though) more interesting. The first is that it’s based on the Rayman video games. The Rabbids are the annoying bunny-like creators that have completely taken over that franchise now. It was also created and developed by the game’s publisher, Ubisoft, who up until that point had only ever dealt with video games. Thirdly, this was originally co-produced with Aardman, the legendary studio behind Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run.

The cartoon wasn’t really about much of anything and had no real plot. Instead, it focused on the Rabbids exploring Earth and interacting with people they saw in “hilarious” ways. Somehow, likely because they had one of the biggest video game companies in the world behind it, it lasted three seasons, from 2013 to 2017.

10 Living Up To Their Name

via: YouTube

Butt-Ugly Martians is not only a charming name, but it was also a short-lived cartoon in 2001. Created by Emmy and BAFTA-winning producer Mike Young, the show focused on three ugly aliens cosplaying as Power Rangers who were sent to invade Earth. When they get there, they fall in love with it and decide not to dominate humanity, but to live among it, and merely pretend like they’ve conquered the world to their boss.

True to the show’s name, it was ugly. Its horrible early 2000s CGI is a big reason why the show was so despised by Nickelodeon fans. Not only that, but the whole show felt cheap. The music was bad, the voice acting was bad, and the whole thing was just an attempt to sell toys and the bizarrely excessive three different video games that came from the show’s single season.

9 Like A Spiritual Sequel To Fred

via: Marvin Marvin Wiki

Marvin Marvin is another TV show about aliens, though this one got around the ugly look by making it a sitcom. And, let’s not beat around the busy here, this is a show starring Lucas Cruikshank, but you might know him better as Fred.

Fred was a character he played that started on YouTube, but somehow got three movies out of it and two TV shows.

The Fred character was gotten rid of completely, replaced by Marvin Marvin, an alien sent to Earth as a result of a war on his home planet. But Marvin is no Superman; instead, he’s an annoying brat. As you would imagine, the show is about Marvin trying to engrain himself to human and American society, but failing to grasp basic concepts. The show was canceled after one season, and Lucas Cruikshank stopped working for Nick after.

8 No Thunder, Only Rain

via: thundermans.wikia.com

The Thundermans is yet another attempt at a kid-friendly sitcom about a family of superheroes. If you’re starting to notice a pattern with a lot of these shows, that’s reusing the same formula over and over again is cheaper and easier than coming up with new concepts, even if it sacrifices quality. That’s why The Thundermans isn’t very good.

There is a bit of an interesting twist, in that the parent’s daughter wants to be a hero, while their younger son wants to be a supervillain. But, this being a kid show, it never goes anywhere. The worst he ever does is put a whoopee cushion in someone’s seat or listens to Nickelback, and he’s always beaten over the head with that episode’s moral lesson by the end.

7 Jack Black, He Ain't

via: Bustle

What happens when you take a 15 year old movie starring Jack Black and Sarah Silverman, make it a kid-friendly TV show, and get rid of Black and Silverman? You don’t have to look far beyond the promotional shots of the show to see exactly what this version of School of Rock is all about.

Children making cringe-worthy music, and adults desperately trying to look and act like their bigger, Hollywood counterparts.

I don’t know if this makes the show better or worse, but there’s no original music here. It’s all covers of popular songs. As AV Club calls the show’s attempt at musical stylings "Kidz Bop versions of songs you know and maybe love." Yeah, maybe don’t make a show about kids in a band if you can’t find kids who can sing. Or actors who aren’t great trying to do “hokey secondhand Jack Black impressions,” as the AV Club calls it.

6 Love, Angel, Music, Baby

via: family.ca

Kuu Kuu Harajuku was created by Gwen Stefani, and based on her Harajuku Lovers fragrance line. The show is part of an ongoing attempt by Stefani at trying to tap into Japanese culture with her performances. The show is about a group of teenage pop singers in what’s basically an idol band called HJ5, and their attempt at trying to become more popular in a fictionalized version of Tokyo called Harajuku City. There’s not a whole lot going on with this show, with each episode typically focusing on the four band members and their managers having to overcome various obstacles that are trying to prevent them from performing.

One of the first things you’ll notice about this show is how ugly it is. It looks like some cheap Flash animations you would have found on Newgrounds in 2005. Much like Rugrats: Pre-School Daze, none of the alleged human characters look like humans, but rather freakishly twisted Bratz dolls that came to life deep within a Claire’s store that was burning down.