Random Top Ten

Random Top Ten!!

Top Ten TV Characters

(Disclaimer - Not "of all time" - just my favorites)

10. Dr.Perry Cox (Scrubs)
They've done a fine job over the years of not softening him too much, and McGinley is not at all afraid to oversell the assholery.

9. Buffy Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
I love that Whedon took this bubbly teenager and over seven seasons made her bitter and destructive and heroic and faithful all at the same time. Would have been easy to just play up the reluctant hero card over and over, but after a few seasons they mostly moved on from that.

8. George Costanza (Seinfeld)
That scene where George ponders career options ("I could be a sportscaster. I like sports") is one of my favorite scenes ever, and it nails how good a character George is - pathetic and likable and defeated and hopeful all at the same time.

7. Grace Manning (Once and Again)
The teen who did not go on to big Hollywood movies was actually the more interesting character on this all-time great family drama. Grace was insecure, needy, and childish without ever being the predictable TV-version of those things.

6. Tony Soprano (The Sopranos)
The great anti-hero of the TV landscape and the progenitor of a thousand successors to the throne. Such complexity and depth, but never at the expense of the fact that, at his core, he's a selfish, reprehensible thug.

5. Dan Conner (Roseanne)
The second-best TV Dad ever. Goodman's lack of an Emmy during his long run is a crime.

4. Lorelai Gilmore (Gilmore Girls) - The fun-loving, youthful, sassy, immature Mom would have been a pretty unique character all on its own. But that they made her a tad self-destructive with real emotional problems and a nasty core of selfishness made her great.

3. Jed Bartlet (The West Wing)
A fantasy, sure, but so what? A wonderfully balanced, very real-feeling character, with details to his backstory (direct descendant of a Declaration of Independence signer, the Nobel Prize for Economics, the smoking, the lapsed Catholicism) that made him feel like an organic creation, not an assembly of liberal dreams.

2. Dr. Jeffrey Geiger (Chicago Hope)
An egomaniacal bastard of a genius surgeon with out respect for anyone but the patients he can save who's perilous closeness to mental illness reveals itself through anguished singing of showtunes. David Kelly you magnificent bastard!

1. Homer Simpson (The Simpsons)
There's something in Homer for all of us - the doomed dreams, the anger, the childishness, the ineptitude, the propensity towards failure, the buried love for family, the can-do-it spirit in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence - need I go on?

Until Whenever