2016 was quite the year for flops: “Gods of Egypt.” “Collateral Beauty.” “DirecTV Now.”

Launched with huge fanfare by parent company AT&T on Nov. 30, the new “over the top” service (which invariably appears in marketing as DIRECTV NOW) looked like a tantalizing new alternative for cord-cutters. It promised an almost impossibly good deal by offering a toothsome array of 100 channels for only $35. And if you took that offer, you could add HBO or Cinemax for only $5 each. Moreover, if you paid a month in advance, you’d get a free Amazon Fire TV Stick. Prepay for three months and you’d get a free Apple TV.

“Sign me up!” said I. So I signed me up. And then I laid me down and bemoaned me fate. Every aspect of the service is a total disaster. Something that causes this much misery and frustration is not a good deal at any price. Put it this way: If someone offered you Ebola for $35 a month, would you take it?

To quote Woody Allen, DirecTV Now is a travesty of a mockery of a sham. Deploying it requires the patience of Job, the navigational skill of Sacagawea and the intuitiveness of the Amazing Kreskin.

DirecTV Now isn’t yet available on a Roku, though it will be soon. So I’m using the Amazon Fire TV Stick that AT&T sent me. The gadget works smoothly enough and doesn’t (unlike the Roku stick) need to be rebooted often. But it’s less intuitive to use, and because it’s made by Amazon, it relentlessly and tiresomely pushes Amazon offerings on you. If you’re the type of person who has “BEZOS” tattooed on your inner thigh, you’ll be fine with it. For everyone else, it’s the tech version of living in Pyongyang.

Nevertheless, you can easily call up various apps like Netflix, Hulu or indeed DirecTV Now on the stick. The latter is heavily oriented toward live programming: It’s like flipping on a cable box. You’re back on the last channel you were watching.

In theory, anyway. In practice, the service is plagued with bugs and random outages and sudden crashes, and this is after it’s been up and running for six weeks. Coaxing it to work is like being a cowboy whipping an old mule in a 1940s Western. The mule will go to work when it’s good and ready, so keep your pants on, buster.

The channels are listed alphabetically with a programming grid superimposed on the screen, so you can see the current listings or scroll ahead to what’s on in the future. But since I never watch live TV except for sports and awards shows, this feature is of much less interest to me than the much-ballyhooed “72-hour rewind” function that DirecTV Now boasted would allow you to back up and watch anything that aired in the last three days.

Which isn’t a lot, actually, but here’s the thing: The 72-hour rewind was only on a few channels when I signed up for DirecTV Now in December, and even in those cases, it tended to just go back more like 16 hours. Now it has disappeared from the app.

So DirecTV Now, when it works, mainly means watching live TV and sitting through commercials. There is another option: going to the “shows” or “movies” tab on the app. This is useful if you want to catch up with previous episodes of the new network TV shows (except the CBS ones). But you are still forced to sit through the commercials. No thanks. There is also a “movies” tab which is mainly another entry, for HBO subscribers, to the same titles accessible through the HBO Go tab. It also offers many FXM titles, but those are infected with advertising. The main movies I’m interested in, the ones from the TCM library, aren’t offered; the only way to see them is live.

When I used DirecTV Now’s main competitor, Sling TV, there were always 40 or so TCM movies being offered on demand, though they would appear and disappear unpredictably. Other on-demand titles were much easier to find, sorted neatly by network instead of by DirecTV Now’s strange topic categories like “Made You Think.” Hitting on episodes of “The Walking Dead,” you get offered Season 7 (the current one) and . . . Season 3? Random. Then, when you click on Season 3, the only shows offered are Episodes 14 and 15. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

I just tried to turn on TCM again. “This channel is not included in your package.” Oh really? TCM is in fact the principal reason I signed up for that package. It’s like that time David Letterman pretended to be a McDonald’s worker and started telling customers, “I’m sorry, we’re completely out of hamburgers.” Now it’s asking for my password. I type in the requested info (“YOU$UCK”) and I get “This video failed to load. Restart the app and launch your content again. Or search for Error 40 in the Help Center. (QP1402).”

I can’t wait to go back to Sling. I paid for 30 days of DirecTV Now, so I’m determined to get my money’s worth. But on Day 31, I’ll be Slinging my DirecTV Now subscription in the garbage.

An AT&T spokesperson said, “With any new technology there are going to be fixes that need to be made. While we understand we still have work to do, overall feedback on DIRECTV NOW has been very positive. We’re continuously updating the app to provide a better experience for customers. We encourage customers to keep the app updated.”