Popcultured (2005–2006) User Reviews

This show makes me want to rip my own face off just so I can't watch any more of it

[chelletrudeau · 31 August 2005]

That might be an exaggeration but not by much.

This show is so inconcievably bad that I can not for the life of me figure out how or why it was ever made.

Most of the "jokes" are simply a bunch of talentless inexperienced Toronto comedy hacks reading headlines from the week's pop culture news items and then waiting for us to laugh.

They don't understand the difference between a joke and a "premise". Jokes are supposed to have middle parts and punch lines. A joke is not just something like, "Martha Stewart went shopping for the first time since she was released from prison yesterday, hey Martha - GO TO HELL!" The only funny thing about this show is that it is how bad the writing and performers are.

The other funny thing is all the "celebrity guests" they get. There's a reason most of them are from other shows on the same network, because the network can make them appear. Nobody else would go anywhere near this giant smoking lump of cow pie.

The only real joke is on us because we were tricked into wasting our time to try to watch this humorless corpse and we're the ones who got stuck with the bill to make it! If the government and comedy network are reading this, hey give me a show instead! I can't be worse! Popcultured is so bad it's embarrassing.

What is this?

[johnyjoe · 1/10 · 13 March 2006]

What were they trying to do with this show? It's Canadians talking about the American media. I don't know if anyone realized, but no one in Canada cares about American media, nor do we care for cheap rip-offs of the Daily Show.

Elvira just isn't a good host. She had a pretty funny stand up routine, but that certainly isn't qualification for hosting a satirical show. Also, all of her "crew" can barely act, and none of their material is actually funny. They just spew out information, then add something like "Then I went home and drank soda while watching Survivor." It just isn't funny. In fact, it's really sad that this is probably going to be the end of all their careers.

Before I end this, I would like to add one thing. The Daily Show is not in a genre. You can't copy it. It is its own show, like Reno 911, and anyone trying to spoof the spoof show will get burned, as proved here.

Please god, stop this show and any other show that tries this again.

K.T.

Pop Cultured is Awful!

[canadiancinderella · 19 March 2006]

Pop Cultured is awful. I cannot stand the host Elvira Kurt.

Her delivery is awful. She has no personality.

She can't interview anybody and all the interviews are with people you never heard of. In all the ones I saw it was people I had no idea who they were.

The jokes are the worst. Brain damaged gorillas could write better jokes than in this mess.

Nothing on this show is ever funny.

I hope Pop Cultured gets taken off because it is a complete waste of a half hour of TV when they could put on another Kids In The Hall which is a good show.

Worst Show Ever

[andykatzlove · 7 April 2006]

Popcultured is the worst show ever made in Canada or anywhere else in the world. Everyone hates it so I don't have to explain why I'm saying it sucks everyone knows it just does. I have to write ten lines to count though so.... The guests they had on the show were the worst but the worst was the host. Elvira Kurt made me want to smash my TV in but lucky I could just turn the channel instead cause I like my TV.... sometimes it gives me good shows not Popcultured. The jokes are the worst. But I still have to stop and watch when I click through channels just to see just how bad it is and it was always painfully bad. Popcultured is not anywhere near The Daily Show. There ten lines!

Worst Canadian Television Show Since Mike Bullard!

[ghosthead · 1/10 · 9 July 2005]

This show almost makes you embarrassed for the cast members involved with it. The jokes are horrible, the audience is usually silent apart from a few chuckles here and there, and of course theirs always this one guy who you can here laughing his head off at every god damn horrible joke its kind of funny cause most of the time the rest of the audience is relatively quite and this moron can be heard cracking up to these pathetic jokes Elvira keeps spitting out in her unique awkward way, I have come to the conclusion that this guy is either paid by the show to laugh, or is some homeless dude who's drunk or stoned off his ass and comes in to watch the shows to get off the street for an hour or so, and they only let him in if he promises to laugh.

Anyways, this show is a complete waste of time, I don't like people who compare this show to the daily show, because that would be a huge insult to the Daily show and Jon Stewart, even though its obvious the stupid correspondents on pop cultured are trying to emulate the correspondents on the Daily Show, but they promptly fall flat on their face every time they try. I'm Boycotting this show in protest of the comedy network assuming Canadians are dumb enough to enjoy this piece of crap, and because the Canadian government has given this show close to 1 million dollars in funding of the Canadian tax payers dollars, Screw Pop Cultured and Screw the Comedy Network.

Incomprehensibly Bad

[joan6350 · 1/10 · 9 August 2005]

Bert Archer's review in Eye Magazine pretty much hit the nail on the head.

Popcultured is one of those shows that comes along once in a great while that is so incomprehensibly bad, you find yourself waiting for the camera to pan out revealing an appalled Jason Bateman watching it on his set as some sort of clever comment on the state of the TV nation. But no, this is a real show, with stand-up from Elvira Kurt as stale as that joke about her comically foreign mother thinking her daughter's Lebanese she told for the first decade of her career. The show's schtick -- what if the hosts of Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood just snapped one day and said exactly what they were thinking? -- falls flatter than Debra Messing as one unfit comic after another tries to deliver abysmal, uninsightful and fatally unengaged material with the sort of utter absence of screen presence you expect only from German accountants talking about the decline of the euro, and Ben Mulroney. Do these people actually watch TV? An incompetent show written by untalented writers, performed by embarrassingly inept comics. The funniest thing about the premiere episode was their guest, a guy who came in third or fourth in last year's Canadian Idol. Their second guest? Homunculus-about-town Shinan Govani. And that about wraps it up.

Popcultured is the worst show I have ever seen.

Worst show ever.

[dhofmann-2 · 1/10 · 8 March 2007]

When the comedy channel comes out with content like this, it makes me wonder why the Canadian government forces channels to have Canadian content. Because that is the only explanation as to why this show ever existed... As filler to appease the law so the Comedy channel would have "Canadian" shows on.

Frankly the writers are probably the worst in the history of television. If I could send them an open letter, it would beg them to retire immediately and move to Slovenia where the locals might find their off-topic humour funny.

The case is even worse too. Elvira Kurt is painful as the host, standing there saying line one liners and praying for the audience to laugh. She should never return to television in any way shape or form. In fact, she should be the one paddling the boat of writers to Slovenia. The rest of the case should swim alongside it, because they don't even deserve a seat in the boat.

Bad, no name guests, bad questions, bad casting, bad writing. You'd have to live in a box to have let this show run for more than one season, or you really really hate your viewers. Your pick.

If there is divine justice, god will strike down this show.

Horrible!!!

[fembot1002 · 1/10 · 23 November 2009]

Pop Cultured is maybe the worst television show ever made. I am not even exaggerating when I say that it really is possible that this is the worst show that has ever been put on TV. I know that if you went through every show ever made in the world you would probably find some old shows from the 1970s or something made in Croatia with a budget of about five dollars that are maybe even worse but considering the quality of shows we have in North America and the fact there is a real budget, etc, with this show being available in like thirty million homes, then the amount that this show was a total fail really becomes apparent. Those who have seen this show know what I mean. The show hasn't even been on for years, I just signed up for IMDb so I can check out movies etc and yet still here I am, years later, coming to this page, one of the first ten pages I visited after I signed up for this service just to complain about how awful this show was. Worst TV host ever, worst interviews, worst guests, worst sketches, worst on screen talent, worst acting, worst writing, worst directing, worst overall production. It confuses me just trying to figure out how something this bad was even allowed on television in the first place.

Crap Cultured

[jpandemily · 1/10 · 12 July 2009]

In a history of making terrible, terrible, terrible shows Pop Cultured still stands out as maybe the absolute, #1, Very Worst show that the Comedy Network has ever produced and broadcast over the airwaves to an unsuspecting and soon-to-be-very-angry viewing public. Who's idea was this show and either why weren't they publicly flogged for this or if they were flogged for it why wasn't it more public? That is something they should be airing on the comedy network.

Terrible acting, terrible writing, terrible production over all, terrible directing and this is even if they had writers and directors which I wouldn't be surprised if these terrible actors just showed up and made up their terrible jokes on the spot. The host was the worst host I've ever seen and every one of her monologues to start the show were unbelievably painful. Don't get me wrong I watched this show a lot, I hated it with a passion but I watched it a lot because it was like watching a car wreck I couldn't believe this show was being broadcast night after night, and the interviews weren't much better you could practically see in their eyes that every guest was thinking about standing up and walking out and shouting "what the flying hell is wrong with you!!" If it wasn't for other shows that came later like Girls Will Be Girls and Punched Up this show would be a slam dunk for worst Comedy Network show ever. I would say Girls Will Be Girls is the worst of all time, I can't even talk about that show without wanting to destroy something, Pop Cultured is second worst and then who knows, Punched Up, Keys to the VIP, Shakespeare Comedy, there are a lot of bad ones to choose from. Gutter Ball Alley was terrible and so is that new pointless one Hot Box.

The Comedy Network needs to fire everyone who is responsible for these shows if they haven't already because the average person could make a better and funnier show in their basement taping it with their cell phone and I am not kidding.

One of the worst shows ever.

[fembot1003 · 1/10 · 14 October 2010]

Popcultured is easily one of the worst shows ever, at least one of the worst I have ever seen. The show was hosted by a woman who had no idea what she was doing, the interviews were always so painful that you could tell by watching that the people being interviewed had no idea what they were getting into and were completely unimpressed by the interviewer. The questions and answers were always awkward and that was just one segment of the show. The host opened with a monologue that was always terrible with pauses for laughs on the punch lines and the laughs just never came, it was so terrible I actually feel bad for this host. The writing was obviously terrible with no laughs to be had anywhere. The entire cast was terrible at what they were doing and all the segments were always awful. I can not understand how a show this bad in all it's forms could ever be made and put on TV and they didn't even cancel it for months and months. What a horrible show this was, I doubt it can ever be topped for worst show I have ever seen.

Ouch!

[siavash_khavarnejad · 1/10 · 13 August 2013]

I have never read such scathing reviews in my life. Except for maybe The Being Frank Show with Frank D'Angelo. Unfortunately both shows deserve it. Popcultured was a really awful show from start to finish. Bad host, bad writing, bad jokes, bad interviews with bad guests, bad looking set, bad cast, there must have been zero directors and writers for a show to somehow manage to go this badly. Sorry to say but I don't have much else to say and apparently IMDb says I have to write ten lines for my review, so here are a couple more lines and I will try again. Nope still not enough, what else can I possibly say about a show where I've already said it's just about the worst show ever? No point saying not to watch it since it's already off the air and all the tapes would have been tossed out by now. This show Popcultured was horrible!!

The Level of Hate for This Show is Astounding!

[csiddall-886-958084 · 1/10 · 1 January 2014]

Don't get me wrong I am not saying that the show was good or that any of this hate was or is not deserved, in fact I am saying the opposite. This show was so mind blowing bad in every possible way that it astounds every single one of my senses that this horrible show somehow actually made it through every level of TV production on a professional TV channel and actually made it to broadcast and stayed on TV. Popcultured is head and shoulders above or maybe I should say head and shoulders below every other awful TV show I have ever seen in my life. There are a lot of bad shows but Popcultured was such a train wreck in every possible way that it manages to make those shows look good. Here is hoping that the unfunny and terrible host on this show will never NEVER work in television again! I feel sick in my stomach just remembering how bad this show was.

So bad you have to leave your house and punch somebody!

[megancedwards · 3 August 2005]

I guess you already guessed my opinion on Popcultured is that it does not belong on TV.

To let you know who I am before reading the review I am 50+ and live in Toronto. I have 4 kids including 2 teens and 2 grandkids. I am retired and watch a lot of TV and mostly the comedy channel which is the channel that airs Popcultured.

I have seen a lot of Canadian comedy shows but Popcultured is definitely the worst I have ever seen. The Trouble With Tracy was really bad and Mike Bullard was so horrible I never thought it could be bested but Popcultured is far and above the worst show (worst COMEDY show) I have ever seen in my entire life. In my opinion.

The writing is so bad it borders "unbelievable". IT's like there is nobody there who is responsible for reading over the jokes or watching them before they get put on TV, like the writers just write the first thing that comes to mind and hand it in. The jokes seem to always seem either old and maybe even borrowed or stolen. Otherwise they are just plain bad!! The worst thing though has to be Elvira the host. She has no talent for hosting and no talent for comedy either so how does she get to host a comedy show? As a host she has no idea what she is doing or how to talk to the audience or interview guests.

The production values are also bad but I guess that most Canadian shows are like that nowadays. It doesn't take a lot to see that the show is also taken from The Daily Show.

The people being interviewed are also terrible and almost always it is somebody I haven't ever heard of anyway.

The other people on the show are also just annoying and don't belong on TV in my opinion. I haven't laughed once watching this show.

The director is terrible! It has to be at least a large part the fault of the director that everybody on the show is so bad and that the material is so bad that they put on TV.

This show is bad in every possible way in my mind which is the only way how it is worse than other such horrible shows as Mike Bullard and Trouble With Tracey.

If you want to watch something funny then watch the real The Daily Show or turn the channel when Popcultured is on or put in a tape or just turn off the TV and read the paper and make up your own jokes.

Should not have existed

[emailjohn500 · 1/10 · 8 May 2011]

The show pop cultured should never have existed because there is no way anybody making any creative decisionsshould have looked at the idea for this show and said hey this looks like a good idea let's go ahead and make this show. And even hey if that didn't happen then when they were actually taping it they should have said no this show is too terrible to actually make and put on TV so let's pull the plug but they didn't do that either because this is a Canadian TV show and they don't care if it's any good at all just like everything else on this pathetic comedy network, so they made it anyway. Even after it was on nobody said gee this show is so bad and so completely hated by everyone who has seen it that we should just give up and let it die but they still didn't, and that is what is wrong with Canadian TV.

Literally the Worst

[tiagoabreu2007 · 1/10 · 4 April 2018]

People always tend to jump to saying, This is the worst show ever!, whenever they see a show or movie they hate. But obviously not every bad show or movie is actually the worst ever, there can only be only one officially Worst Ever show and in this case it literally is true.

This literally is the worst television show ever made, of all time, hands down, no arguments, it is a home run and a slam dunk. Nothing before during or after Pop Cultured even approaches this level of completely inept television production.

The host was incomparably bad. Unfunny, uncomfortable and unlikable.

The writing and jokes were terrible. Literally as bad or worse than if the network had walked into a grade three English class and said, Hey kids write us some jokes to say on TV tonight!

The direction, the cast, absolutely everything about this show was done as poorly as you could expect. Not one single thing on this show even came within a billion parceks of being what one could consider Good or even Average.

Need more evidence? This show has a rating of 1.0 out of ten. Just to remind you on IMDb you are not allowed to give a rating of 0.0 out of ten so 1.0 is literally the worst rating you can give. That worst possible rating is the AVERAGE RATING OF EVERY VIEWER who has rated this show. I just checked with my IMDb Pro account and there are only two shows all time, in any language and in any country, that have a rating of 1.0 out of ten. The other show has a hand full of ratings but Pop Cultured has hundreds of ratings. Talk to any Canadian person who ever saw this show what they think of Pop Cultured and you will not find one single person who will say the show was anything better than total garbage.

I once talked to a cast member of this show who was a comedian and surprisingly a good one, I mentioned I was surprised how good they were because I had only seen them on this show before and it did not make them look very good (pretty rude of me I know it just slipped out, They really were very funny!)... this person APOLOGIZED to me and was obviously very embarrassed about being on this show. How bad was this show that a main cast member on it would act like that and hate to be reminded that it even existed?

The show was canceled and never rerun and will never be rerun again unless someone makes a documentary about how unbelievably awful it was.

So the next time someone says to you, Hey don't watch the new Transformers movie, etc, etc, do not believe them. Tell them, It is not true, I know it is not true because Pop Cultured existed and it is the absolute literally worst television show ever made.

Pop Cultured, the only show with a Perfect rating of 1.0 out of ten on IMDb!

Poop

[mccready-906-458193 · 1/10 · 14 July 2018]

This show was poop, poop, P-O-O-P POOP! It is like it crawled straight out of a toilet and onto our TVs.

This was torture!!

[kimcoxmonm · 1/10 · 15 December 2021]

I love reading IMDB reviews on the most horrible stuff ever put to the big and small screen. I read all the reviews because I have never seen anything yet where ALL the ratings were "1" or nothing.

I hoped to find an episode on YouTube and I was successful. First off, we have some incredibly horrendous programming and movies being cranked out in the U. S.. It's rather embarrassing with all of the reality shows and crap TV shows and reboots/remakes of everything. (Yes, you Disney, with Home Sweet Home Alone). Popcultured was right up there. If it were made now, Netflix would have probably have bought the rights to produce it.

I watched Episode 63 (at least that many made it to air, huh) and what is sad is that a few things actually made me snicker but the delivery was awful. I did laugh at the bit about the porn star running for Governor of Washington and then having to go to court. The woman was scary and too dumb to live. I have never heard of Elvira Hurt but if she is a comedian, she should have memorized her monologue instead of reading from a cue card. Her voice and cadence were that of a discount Ellen DeGeneres and I'm not a fan of hers either.

Elvira interviewed Leonard Maltin. She kept talking over him and asked the dumbest questions. He was engaging enough to make it tolerable. They talked about the litany of bad movies that year, in hindsight they get that honor for the worst show. Humor in Hindsight!!

Every segment had a person who was worse than the previous. The correspondant dressed as an egg at a horror convention was insufferable. Then, of all people, she had to talk with Crispin Glover. Yikes!! That man is in his own orbit.

The two "battle of the..." sequences were cringy. The content was actually kind of funny but the voiceover was not.

The nail-in-the-coffin was the guy who talked about gadgets. Obviously reading from cue cards and a voice all over the place.

I like Canada as a country so I will bow my head in sympathy for you for having to claim that mess!

Popcultured is like your TV is vomiting.

[hindenburger-1 · 11 August 2005]

If you haven't read the Eye Mag review of Popcultured that somebody posted here you should. Because that really sums up how awful Popcultured with Elvira Kurt is.

I can't begin to believe how anybody could put this show together and think it was a good idea. What was the hiring process for the people on the show? None of them belong on TV and the writers (I think the same people) obviously can't write a joke to save their life so with no talent at all why do they have a TV show to call their very own? Do they have pictures of government officials murdering babies or something? Bribery must have something to do with it. Otherwise these people would all be at home in their basement where they belong, doing anything other than telling bad jokes on TV.

Not only did some idiot think up this show but they went all the way through shooting it. Then they put it on TV and even though everybody hates it they still are not just broadcasting this awful show but they are making new ones! The Comedy Network has proved time and again that they don't care about what their viewers want to see and they don't care how bad their shows are.

If that's their attitude they should just be forced to air reruns of Kids in the Hall and American shows that don't suck so much.

Might just be the worst TV show in the history of the medium.

[KingHater · 30 November 2006]

It truly boggles the mind how a series of such a glaring, utterly confounding lack of quality on pretty much every imaginable level ever made it to air. Because you'd think that at some point during the whole extensive process of casting, writing, designing, filming, editing, etc., some brave soul in an even moderately influential position at the network would have had the wisdom/wherewithal to just say,

"Wow, you know guys, I have this inescapable feeling that we might be officially making the worst thing ever here, and while I realize there will be some financial repercussions, we should just cut our losses and bury this monstrosity immediately and never utter another single word about it, ever. Fill its would-be time slot with 'Kids In The Hall' reruns and nobody will notice a thing." But no. Instead of anyone blessing the Canadian TV landscape with this burst of very apparent rational logic, the Comedy Network chose to give this "series" - term used loosely - what was undoubtedly a massively unwatched season (or was it two? If so, MY GOD.)

Is this an example of the dark downside of government-subsidized programming, or is it the Comedy Network's fault? After wincing my way through episode after episode of samples of their other "Original Programming" I'm leaning toward blaming the network. Fully. I mean, have you seen "Girls Will Be Girls"? "Keys To The VIP"? Seriously, whoever's responsible for giving the go-ahead to this succession of non-properties should just not be working in comedy. Period. They shouldn't even be in the same building.

Quite possibly the worst series in the history of television.

[jason_coolidge3000 · 6 July 2005]

Popcultured is completely inept in every possible way. The host, Elvira Kurt, is uninteresting and not at all funny. Her supporting cast, a group of (for the most part very young) Toronto comedians have a very hard time understanding the difference between "acting" and "yelling while making exaggerated hand gestures".

I've lived in Canada most my life and as a lover of comedy I am a loyal Comedy Network viewer but they are starting to get on my last nerve. I thought they were scraping the bottom of the barrel when they put that hack Mike Bullard on the air for years but they seem to have even topped that with this awful excuse for a show. With Popcultured they have proved once again that the only decent shows they have the ability to air are reruns of shows from BBC and CTV (the Canadian public network).

The performers are all terribly untalented and flat but even they can't be blamed entirely. The writing on the show is just as bad. Actually it is absolutely atrocious! Most of the jokes are well past their "best before dates" and are so predictable that it hurts watching the untalented cast go through the motions to deliver them.

Where did they find this people and why did they give them a show? The interviews are equally painful and feature unknown b-level Canadian "celebrities" who for some reason have nothing better to do.

The show does have some slick visuals and a nice set but no amount of production value can make up for how pitiful the performing and writing is.

Like I said it's a terrible train wreck of a show but if you see it on the tube check it out. Who can resist such a train wreck as this!