The Ten Best TV Characters of the Year

Last week we dealt with the worst, and now it’s time to face the best. I had to weed out several favorites who have made the list in multiple year’s past (like Parks and Rec’s great Leslie Knope) because their characters weren’t spun off in nearly enough new directions. I wanted to make way for all the great new characters of the year, and it wasn’t easy since so many great shows (Fringe, 30 Rock, Southland, Eastbound and Down, Futurama, Enlightened, and of course Breaking Bad) had their final seasons this year. These are, in my humble opinion, the ten best TV characters of the year…[FYI, I haven’t seen “Orphan Black” but I have seen pretty much every other show that would be considered for a list like this. It’s not a mistake that Sons of Anarchy or Game of Thrones or American Horror Story or TWD or any other character from your favorite show has been omitted, but you can trust that they were considered.]

Runner-Up: The women on “Masters of Sex.” Although none of the men are all that compelling, I think this show has a gallery of interesting female characters, in addition to the pioneering Virginia (the great Lizzy Caplan), there’s Bill’s surprisingly open-minded mother, Juliette Nicholson’s outwardly frosty but inwardly scared doctor, the paradoxically deep sunniness of Libby (she could almost be the anti-Betty Draper), and Allison Janney’s yearning provost’s wife.

Most Painful Hangings: The Killing’s Ray Seward (played by Peter Sarsgaard) was wrongfully hung for a murder he didn’t commit without getting to say goodbye to his son. And Homeland’s Nicolas Brody couldn’t cheat death once again in the third-season finale when he was hung in the most painful way possible. I was sorry to see these two compellingly shifty characters go, but even more sorry to see the way they went. Devastating end for two great characters.

 

10. The Core Characters of Southland…Although I never cared for Shawn Hatosy’s character, I will deeply miss Regina King’s tough but vulnerable detective Lydia, Benjamin McKenzie’s gradually-corrupting hotshot beat cop, and Michael Cudlitz’s infinitely complicated veteran cop John Cooper (gay but a bully, on painkillers but giving advice, his whole life the job but left bleeding out after being shot by cops in the final scene of the series). All of them deserve so much more credit than they ever got.

9. Raymond “Red” Reddington (James Spader) on The Blacklist…I can’t tell if there’s really anything to Red or if it’s just the relish that James Spader plays him with. Luckily, the character is supposed to be mysterious and morally ambiguous so it all works in his favor. What really made me want to include Red were the final three episodes of the year (murdering Lizzy’s father in one while desperately trying to save her life in the other), and particularly the terrific monologue he had about all the things he was going to do again before he died.

8. Sloane Sabbath (Olivia Munn) on The Newsroom…I know this will be the biggest head scratcher of the bunch, but Sloane really does deserve to be here. She could have been just a stock “tough professional woman” on TV (where women are too often pigeonholed into types, even flattering ones), but Sloane is vulnerable, romantic, neurotic, hilarious, and none of it compromises her ruthless intelligence. [See, women can be more than one thing. I know it’s a novel idea, but…] She can cry when an ex releases nude pictures of her to the tabloids, and then (believably) show up to his office and punch him.

7. Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern) on Enlightened…I know that Amy absolutely drives some people nuts, and I’ll confess that she’s annoying as hell in certain moments, but part of what made Enlightened work so well is its deep humanity that said anyone is worth saving and deserves a chance. And Amy is that anyone. She’s a paradoxically selfish crusader, who is struggling to do good in the world even in a world that doesn’t value that. Her big tell-off moment to the CEO of her evil corporation was one of the most beautiful moments of TV this year.

6. Kai Proctor (Ulrich Thomsen) on Banshee…This admittedly pulpy show does what all great B movies used to do: creates memorable characters. This entire list could be filled with this show’s characters like the transvestite Asian computer hacker or the Ukranian mob princess who’s pretending to be a suburban housewife or the recently released ex-con who assumes the identity of a murdered sheriff. However, the best of the bunch is Kai Proctor, an Amish cast-out who becomes a disciplined and merciless crime boss. You feel: the heartbreak when he tries to talk to family members who won’t even acknowledge him, creeped out by his weird relationship with his cast-out niece, and excited when he takes on various enemies including the heirs of a Native American casino.

5. Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) on Justified…Is there any doubt that this is now Boyd’s show more than Raylan’s? It takes a special kind of “villain” to overshadow the hero of a show, and make him more likable, and Boyd is that villain. This past season saw him cast as a scrambling bandit trying to stay one step ahead of more established criminals, and also as the most unlikely romantic hero of the year. It’s brutal to see his love Ava arrested in front of him right before he gets the prime criminal empire he’s been gunning towards all season.

4. Claudia (Margo Martindale) and “Elizabeth Jennings” (Keri Russell) on The Americans…Two generations of female Soviet spies made for some terrific sparing sessions. Their scenes together bristled with tension, but, of course, they were unique and captivating individuals in their own right. The steely Elizabeth has been deep cover as an American so long it seems to be messing with her tightly-wound circuitry, and Claudia is a deceptively warm operator who can tell you a story of love even as she’s watching you bleed out over a neck wound she inflicted.

3. Kenny Powers (Danny McBride) on Eastbound and Down…McBride has done something special by taking the antiheroes that cable dramas have thrived on over the years, and transporting that type of character to a comedy. Kenny is a selfish, offensively vain jerk who spends more time self-sabotaging than doing anything lovable, and yet I really liked him anyway. It’s a testament to how skillfully McBride can play existential depression and amorality (nope, it’s not an Ingmar Bergman film, but a raunchy South Carolina-set comedy in the sports world) that you can always see that the only person Kenny is really hurting is himself, and the vulnerability behind even his most heinous temper tantrums. The art of rage and thrill of bad behavior is hard for a comedy to pull off, but he does so.

2. Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelson) on Hannibal…How could I forget the best psychological cat and mouse game since Walter White bested Gus Fring? [And if that’s not a big enough hint towards the number 1 title holder, I don’t know what is.] The most surprising thing about Hannibal is how thoroughly it reinvents a character we’d all grown tired of (Hannibal Rising did me in), and how (astonishingly) it makes a lesser-loved character just as interesting. Will Graham’s psychologically unbalanced hero can relate to killers so well because he might very well turn out to be one, and his psychiatrist, Hannibal’s submerged villain, is only too happy to tilt him into that direction. There’s something deeply unsettling about a psychiatrist trying his best to make his patient worse, and of a hero everyone thinks is a killer while a real killer pretends to be a savior.

1. Walter White (Bryan Cranston) on Breaking Bad…Hats off to the master. He’s won this list three years in a row (I’ve only been doing it for three) and more than deserves to be here. It’s gratifying that everyone loves Breaking Bad now that I’ve been screaming at them to watch it for five years, but I’ll always appreciate the knowledge that everyone can now partake in the epic journey of Walter White from schlub everyman to calculating meth lord. Walter discovered that he belonged in that criminal underworld a lot more than he did his “regular” life, and this season was all about revealing that to everyone around him. They were disgusted, but I can’t be totally alone in being glad that Walter got the (relative) happy ending that some people don’t think he deserved. The fact that so many seemed to want him to suffer more greatly for his crimes (give us our pound of flesh!) probably says more about them than it does this character.