The 6 Worst Attempts To Turn Human Misery Into Entertainment

CBS had effectively created a nonviolent version of the Hunger Games, where instead of mercilessly killing your adversary for entertainment, you're adding a bit of psychological torture to their already-significant problems. This shit sandwich is topped off at the end by the narrator talking about how these families will learn it's not about money, but the journey ... If by "journey," they mean throwing someone a magic bag of money, making them feel like all their problems are solved, and then telling them only a total dick would solve their own problems with a magic bag of money. That's definitely a journey, but the kind the Devil or Willy Wonka would take you on, not a cute prime-time game show.

Thankfully, the show did not make it beyond its original episode order. News agencies picked up on the Category 8 ethics shitstorm that was about to hit CBS, and audiences turned on the show before it even aired. America's reaction was reassuring, even if it doesn't bode well for seeing a real-life Running Man in our lifetime.

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Yet a Czech company did in fact come up with the brilliant idea of creating an escape room set in a WWII-era concentration camp. That's right, now you can, for fun, experience what it was like for people to be herded like cattle toward their unspeakable deaths, only with puzzles. It's reprehensible, right? Well, Dostan Se Ven, the architect behind the most despicable attempt at making $15 of all time, played the ignorance card when people suggested a holocaust party game was in poor taste. He thought breaking codes in a simulated human oven might help educate! Like a museum! If only those poor souls at Auschwitz knew to turn the lights off to read the glow-in-the-dark ink on their name tags to get the combination for the pink lockbox.

Details on what this monstrosity would include in its gameplay have been scarce, but it was confirmed that part of the "game" would involve you taking "the shower." Which means, Jesus fuck, part of the team-building party activity would have simulated being murdered by Hitler in a poison gas room. How do you look a person in the eye after something like that? If you told someone you spent the night hitting cats with sticks to record samples for a song in support of Jared Fogle, it would be less repulsive than saying, "My work friends and I played Holocaust. I died from Zyklon B, but I was the one who thought to turn the dead baby over to find the last word puzzle, so we won with seconds to spare!"

And while we're on the Holocaust ...

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Ms. Navka created this dance for a Russian reality TV show called Ice Age, which is presumably about participants making up routines based on humanity's worst tragedies. It's more than likely her competitors were about to conduct their rendition of "Rape of Nanking on Ice" or "Spanish Flu Foxtrot." You'd think that this display would be penalized in some way by the judges of the competition, but when we said it was not well-received earlier, we meant it wasn't well-received outside of Russian reality shows. On the show itself, the pair received a perfect score ...

Still, it was denounced by the media, celebrities, most non-Nazi Twitter users (a larger number than you'd think), and it even got to the point where a whole country took a stand against it when Israel made a public statement expressing their disapproval. We're thinking that this is about as wrong as an ice skating routine can go.

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This horrible mistake of an idea is presented as an "autopsy" in which Professor Richard Shepherd, a respected British physician, degrades his reputation by sitting in a forensics lab set and discussing Williams' death. His monologues are cut with scenes of Poudensan reenacting Williams' last hours and interviews with people who sort of knew Williams. For instance, they got mental health insights from an entertainment reporter who wrote about him, and the owner of a toy store he used to go into. Believe it or not, their insight into why Robin Williams did what he did were not very profound. The program produced no new information on Williams' suicide, and seemed to be catering to people who wanted the closest thing they could get to a celebrity killing himself on-screen. It was made by and for ghouls.

When news broke that the show was being filmed, Williams' friends, family, and fans launched a social media campaign protesting it. "This is so WRONG! REALLY, REALLY WRONG!!!" Williams' friend Debi Durst posted, and we can't disagree. Those protests were ignored and the special was broadcast anyway. It turns out you can put insensitive, terrible, ill-advised garbage on TV even when everyone is asking you not to! A friend of Williams' family said that something like this only sets back their slow healing, but he was only repeating the same thing basic human decency was saying already.

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Scientist Enrico Fermi is portrayed as the living, breathing incarnation of every Italian stereotype, up to and including being an insatiable womanizer. He even gets a whole song in which he lecherously praises the country he emigrated to called "America Amore." Why? Because they needed a comic relief character. When your play ends with literal mountains of dead people, it helps to lighten things up with a "Joey" or a "Woody." At one point, a female scientist asks "How do you say I'm sorry to the whole world?" Which is something the playwrights should have asked themselves, but which also demonstrates how they know the subject is too monstrous to be undone with a few words. A few songs and a wacky horny character, though? That might do it!

Appropriately, the musical ends on a truly bizarre note: A Japanese newlywed couple are in their home when the bomb explodes with a blinding flash of light. And in one of musical theater's least tasteful and imaginative uses of metaphor, Szilard bursts through their screen doors and kills them. This is followed by a final scene of Szilard sharing a bottle of wine with the other Manhattan Project scientists as they calmly discuss the moral consequences of what they've done. That kind of difference in tone describes the entire show in a nutshell, making it the perfect scene to end on. It really is a work of mad stupidity.

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Yet somehow, it's the ending that is the most deranged and insulting part. Not only is the sinking of the Titanic actually caused by a fiendish plot between the whaler, the sharks, and a dimwitted dog-faced octopus, but then everyone aboard the Titanic -- even the people who died during the crash and were left behind -- escape and come back to life thanks to the whales. Are these words making sense? It feels like none of these words should be in this order.

The movie has been received poorly, enjoying a comfortable slot in IMDB's 25 worst movies of all time, and being a constant target for mockery and derision by internet comedians to this day. This very second, some might say! But in spite of being the kind of horrific mistake that makes people start new lives under assumed identities, the movie got a sequel five years later, called In Search Of The Titanic, which featured immortal Atlanteans, talking dolls and screwdrivers, evil rats, and a dog with a laser gun. And they don't even find the fucking Titanic in the movie.

Fantasize about going back in time and giving Titanic survivors these sweet floating pizza rafts like the hero you are deep inside!

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