TV can be bad and still be good. Dennis Miller made the point once. He said you can be nodding off to Acapulco cliff divers on ESPN2 when, oops, one guy lands just a centimeter short of the water line and whoa, suddenly you're in the upright and locked position.
Hard cheese for the diver, but a lifetime TV moment for you.
Craig Nelson -- a New York writer, not the actor -- seems to be an especially obsessive devotee of bad TV. He might be the only man in America to remember a game show called "It Pays to Be Ignorant" (sample question: "What beverage is made from tea leaves?").
Mr. Nelson has a fat paperback out called "Bad TV" (Delta Paperbacks; $9.95). Or, as he prefers to put it, "BAD TV." Bad TV is just crummy. BAD TV is "something truly amazing, enriching, and compelling; TV so bad, it's in a class all by itself."
The author's memory apparently is selective, or possibly impaired by too much of a bad thing, because he goes on to find hundreds of shows to crowd the BAD class.
For example, Mr. Nelson sifts through three dozen wonderfully dreadful game shows and quiz shows before concluding, quite rightly, that "Queen for a Day" was the BADdest ever. You might recall it from the late '50s and early '60s. Each day, five women wept and competed for the studio audience's vote on who had the worst life. It was not a spoof.
The search for the best of the worst TV dramas takes us through "TV Reader's Digest" (heartwarming stories from the magazine), "Misfits of Science" (including a shrinking black man and a human vegetable), "Nightingales" ("student nurses in Dallas, and the air conditioner's broken") and "Baywatch" (a big ja! from Germany) to Mr. Nelson's all-time pick, Steven Bochco's "Cop Rock."
A reasonable choice, though I wish Mr. Nelson had given just a tad more consideration to the stunning "Tequila & Bonetti," a cop show with a jive-talking, tiny-bladdered dog. Or "Greatest Heroes of the Bible," where you could catch Samson chewing gum.
Made-for-TV movies is a thick category, since there have been only six or seven good ones in TV history. Mr. Nelson ponders the immortal "Beulah Land" and "The Mysterious Island of Beautiful Women" (Amazons named Chocolate, Snow and Bambi) before choosing "Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones" (Jones: "Don't stand in my way as I travel from this miasma of mortal confusion to the path of salvation and righteousness!")
Powers Boothe did win an Emmy for it, though. I like Suzanne Somers in "Zuma Beach," or maybe "Shaka Zulu," for all its impalings. Boom Shaka-locka!
Sitcoms are what's really good about BAD, though. Think of it: "Mister Ed," "The Beverly Hillbillies," "The Brady Bunch." Who, if they're honest about it, wouldn't rather watch a "Gilligan's Island" repeat than a "thirtysomething" rerun?
Mr. Nelson's sitcom nominees include "Mr. Sunshine" (Jeffrey Tambor as a foul-tempered blind man), "Mr. Smith" (a talking orangutan with a genius IQ), "Mixed Nuts" (gaiety in an insane asylum), "She's the Sheriff" (she's still Suzanne Somers) and "The Ugliest Girl in Town" (cross-dressing laughs well ahead of "Bosom Buddies"; a "must-see," says Mr. Nelson).
His winner, if you can call it that, is "My Mother the Car," starring Jerry Van Dyke. Mom was a 1928 Porter kept in the garage. I prefer another Nelson nominee -- "Rollergirls," which lasted four weeks on NBC in 1978. Roller Derby girls, in Pittsburgh, and the air conditioner's broken. The team was the Pittsburgh Pitts. The star was the horsey Rhonda Bates. On the show, she was Mongo. Do you need more?
Mr. Nelson also picks an all-time, all-category, hands-down worst show in TV history. It's David Lynch's "On the Air," which was yanked off the air in a jiffy back in 1992.
My regret is that Super Bowl halftime shows seem to be excluded from "Bad TV."