tawdry

This was almost hilariously tawdry, but MI5 was beguiled by Lyalin’s many disclosures about KGB operatives in London, made as a way to prove that he was not faking his defection.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 20, 2026

Kris pops in a disc of “Camp Miasma’s” tawdry 2008 reboot, which cinematographer Eric Yue makes look as flat as the discounted DVD.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 6, 2026

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 whole affair was tawdry, shabby, and cheap—designed to pander to downwardly mobile young men who felt angry at the world.

From Slate ● Jun. 11, 2026

In his last breaths, was he trying to tell me about the death of his adopted family—or admit to some tawdry, decades-long affair?

From "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" by Ransom Riggs

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 Thorstein Veblen

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

Some are well-executed and expensive, others the tawdriest of knockoffs.

From New York Times ● Nov. 21, 2022

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

In one of the tawdriest details that materialized on Monday, Bo appeared to imply that there were romantic flickers between his deputy Wang Lijun and his wife Gu Kailai.

From Time ● Aug. 26, 2013

If eloquence were all figure—even if it were, in any considerable degree, mere figure—then the tawdriest rhetorician would be the greatest orator.

From Western Characters or Types of Border Life in the Western States by F.O.C. Darley