Better late than never, right? We may be a full month into 2024, but I’ve done a countdown of the best and worst TV characters of the year ever since Alabama Liberal’s inception (many, many years ago), and it’d be a shame to miss it now. After all, I watched several lousy TV characters last year, so why not talk about them?
Shocking dishonorable mention: Sam (Bridget Everett) on “Somebody Somewhere”…I know it’s blasphemy to admit this, but the second season of “Somebody” is not good, and that’s startling for me to admit since the first season made my “10 Best of the Year” list only a year ago. Yet the second season feels aimless, as we mostly just watch Sam goof around with her best friends in a way that rarely translates to an interesting or funny time for the audience.
Worse, when her friend Joel commits the slightest omission later in the season, Sam abruptly turns on him in a way that feels petty at best, and perhaps like she’s a lousy friend who doesn’t want Joel to have much of a life outside of her.
10. Big Fred (W. Earl Brown) on “Hello Tomorrow”…I love Brown (“Deadwood,” “Justified”), but his undercooked character on “Tomorrow” has absolutely nothing to do but menace Hank Azaria and monotonously threaten him over money that’s due. It’s a reminder that even the most interesting character actors can be stuck with roles that nobody could make anything but a drag.
9. Genevieve Cotard (Britne Oldford) on “Dead Ringers”…In the decade-plus I’ve been doing this “worst” countdown, I don’t think there’s been even a handful of black female characters included. Frankly, you have to be really unappealing to make it on here if you look like Genevieve, so perhaps it’s not exactly progress that a show like “Ringers” decided to make their sour, narcissistic girlfriend character a black woman. Genevieve is not only one-dimensional and uninteresting, but she’s clearly the “foil” in the relationship between the two twins that are the only characters on screen we really give a damn about it.
8. Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) on “You”…I’ve given up trying to convince people how bad this show actually is, and how it strains credibility to the breaking point that Joe hasn’t been found out by now. In season 4, they introduce a slight-variation on his usual murderous behavior by making him more fully crazy–but consequence free–than ever. Setting Joe up as the villain he’s always been for the show’s final season may be the only thing keeping him from the “bottom 3” this year.
7. Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers) on “Star Trek: Picard”…The third and final season of “Picard” wasn’t bad overall, but it always felt like a waste of screen time whenever Jack showed up to work out his daddy issues with his loooooong lost papa Picard. Crusher is meant to be the “young gun” that Picard passes the torch to, but instead comes off as petulant, incompetent, and morally unworthy to take the mantle of leadership from Jean Luc. Tellingly, most of the series most emotional moments had nothing to do with Picard’s reconnection with Jack, but him hanging out with his old crew, who can summon pathos, nostalgia, and gravitas with a mere slowing down of a line reading.
6. Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) on “The Diplomat”…Not since “The Killing” finally ended have we had such a wide gulf between how a female character is hyped and how they’re actually presented. [In “Killing,” Linden routinely struggled with even the most basic of police procedures, but we were told constantly she was a genius-level detective.] We’re told Kate is the best diplomat on the scene, but what we’re shown is scene after scene of her tearing into a room like a wolverine, and pissing off almost every character in the vicinity; the infantilization climaxes with her literally punching her husband while making frustrated noises like a kid. To say this is a Netflix fever dream of how diplomacy works would be an understatement.
5. Henry Pollard (Adam Scott) on “Party Down”…Scott is effortless in this role, and so it really is just the fact that it’s physically painful to watch Pollard repeatedly turn down meaningful progress. By the end of “Down”‘s reboot season, I wanted no more of this looooong gone crew, and the misanthropic writing staff’s cruel-God mentality towards them (nearly all characters are severely thwarted from career advancement or even emotional advancement in most cases). When Pollard eventually turns down a hand-gifted role in a major franchise, you might scream “Come on!” And by then it’s clear the characters are just doing whatever they have to do for the writers to keep them in place more than anything they would actually do.
4. Frederick “Freddy” Crane (Jack Cutmore-Scott) on “Frasier”…The reboot of “Frasier” centered around flipping the dynamic of the first “Frasier”‘s early seasons, by having Frasier be the disapproving father towards his son who eventually lives with him. It’s deeply unsatisfying since “Freddy” is a boring, unfunny character and the British Cutmore-Scott often looks lost in the Bostonian part–displaying little comedic timing or relaxed speech, and no real affinity for anything but his character’s unnecessary bitterness. Most of the audience might wish they had a father as wealthy, famous, psychologically astute, tasteful, or interesting as Frasier Crane, and it’s not easy to sympathize with Freddy’s queasy aversion to him.
3. Jack Danvers (Jodi Balfour) and Nate (Nick Mohammed) on “Ted Lasso”…With these two “Lasso” characters we can begin to see where season 3 zigged where it should’ve zagged and became the least beloved season by a mile. With Balfour’s Jack, it’s just a completely unnecessary character jammed into the already-bloated final season so Juno Temple’s Keeley could have something to do for a few episodes. Bringing in Jack and pretending we gave a damn felt like an indecisive way to stall the Keeley-Roy Kent-Jamie Tartt love triangle, which never gets a resolution at all.
Then there’s Nate. At the end of season 2, Nate was set up to be the villain of season 3, which could’ve been a tantalizing arc as Lasso’s ex-protege becomes the series’s last villain. However, “Dark Nate” was never given much to do, and the entire thing was abandoned without much noise or drama. You might’ve been thinking “There’s time for an entire subplot with Jack, but not Ted confronting Nate nor Nate quitting Rupert on screen? I feel a little ripped off.”
2. Vera Parini (Bellamy Young) on “The Other Black Girl”…This character is a great example of where the TV show went wrong in adapting a far-superior novel. In the book, Vera isn’t humiliatingly fired in a public setting as a face-saving move for the company, nor is she the sacrificial Karen to the white male Gods of publishing. And she damn sure isn’t a quasi-ally sidekick eventually helping the black female protagonist expose the truth. By making these large changes to the most powerful white female character in the book, it inadvertently presents white women as being just as victimized by the cabal in the book.
1. Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook) on “Succession”…Sarah Snook’s performance is quite good, but I’m still a little mystified as to why she’s winning so many awards for a role that appears to be made up on the fly (although it’s equally weird that Kieran Culkin keeps winning Best Actor when he’s a supporting actor to Jeremey Strong and Brian Cox). At the end of season 3, Shiv was dead against her father Logan selling the company, but by the mid-point of season 4, she’s a willing assistant to losing her family’s company forever. The about-face doesn’t really make sense except to tell us that Shiv would rather screw over her brothers than be a consistent character. By the end of the series, she seems comfortable kamikazing her own interests as long as Kendall doesn’t get a top spot he’d been working towards for decades.