tawdry

Some critics have called Your Fault: London clichéd, unnecessary and "fanfiction-like" - Variety said the first film in the trilogy was "a trashy gimmick" and a "tasteless" adaptation of "tawdry teen literature".

From BBC ● Jun. 17, 2026

The citrus estates began to get carved up in tawdry divorce settlements, battles of wills that captivated the tabloids.

From Slate ● Apr. 20, 2026

Yet “Venetian Vespers,” for all its moodiness, is elegantly compressed—the central drama occupies only a few days—and the conspiracy at its core is convincingly tawdry.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 9, 2025

The writer Morrow Mayo seldom minced words, especially when his subject was the gaudy, tawdry city where he made his home in the 1920s and 1930s.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 10, 2025

Beside such treasures the gloves looked cheap and tawdry.

From "A Dance with Dragons" by George R. R. Martin

I’d give that honor to “The Fifth Step,” which in just 10 pages should scare anyone who’s been paying attention to the true crime stories splashed across the screens of this country’s tawdrier news sources.

From Seattle Times ● May 27, 2024

It’s upscale, informative reality TV, even as it tracks with tawdrier shows.

From Slate ● Aug. 3, 2020

Alongside the scholarly works and memoirs on Bao’s shelves were tawdrier titles, many of them simply compilations of online gossip.

From New York Times ● Apr. 3, 2018

The sport has also found itself at the center of some of Washington's tawdrier influence scandals in recent years, including those Jack Abramoff junkets to Scotland.

From Washington Post ● Apr. 29, 2010

The scaffolding of much highly-prized sentiment would collapse, and the world of poetry and pageantry—particularly that of the tawdrier and more vendible poetry and pageantry—would be poorer by so much.

From An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation by Veblen, Thorstein

It’s quite a life, but the script by Stefani Robinson only cherry-picks the tawdriest bits from his Wikipedia entry for this biopic.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 20, 2023

While every show had its own brand of scandalousness, “Jerry” became the juiciest, the tawdriest, the ultimate lowbrow modern-day freak show.

From New York Times ● Jan. 17, 2018

Though established news organizations may filter out the tawdriest ads, other sites will run them and profit from them.

From Seattle Times ● Dec. 13, 2016

No organization wants to be a minor player in a major story, thus establishing a crude dynamic in which maximum resources are thrown at even the tawdriest detail.

From Time ● Jul. 26, 2010

"Any plan, Phalanstery or Community, call it what you please, founded on self-government, is based on a sham, the tawdriest of shams."

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 48, October, 1861 by Various