As always with this annual list of the year’s worst TV characters, I focused on TV shows that were of a reasonable quality, and it’s only a character or two (or 10) that wasn’t working.
Worst Ending for a Beloved Character: Bosch (Titus Welliver) from “Bosch”…I love this series and am already planning to watch Titus Welliver’s ex-detective in his spin-off series as a private investigator. Still, I doubt long-time fans of “Bosch” were totally pleased with the series finale, which included the titular detective messing up a massive FBI sting investigation into a drug cartel and pissing off everyone in his immediate orbit.
Worst Introduction to a Beloved Character: Joe Pickett (Michael Dorman) on “Joe Pickett”…Mystery readers love C.J. Box’s “game warden,” who’s really a local detective in the modern wilderness of rural Wyoming. However, the series makes the bizarre decision to have Pickett be the worst character in a show named after him–a rare distinction. Part of it is the miscast New Zealand actor Dorman’s unconvincing, charisma-less lead performance (in too many scenes, Dorman alternates between looking constipated or downright strange, his inflections too mannered to pass for the modern “Wild West”). Part of it is that the series doesn’t convincingly explain Pickett’s motivations and rationale throughout the series (does he really care about an “extinct” weasel or is the rodent nuisance just an excuse for him to act like a huge prick? It looks more like the latter). And part of it is that the show’s “villains” are a pair of smooth criminals (David Alan Grier, Paul Sparks) that we actually prefer to Pickett by leaps and bounds. Grier especially makes so much sense, that it’s damn hard to actually want Pickett to succeed.
Worst Kingpin: Benjamin Arellano-Felix (Alfonso Dosal)) in “Narcos”…Really, I hate all of the Arellano-Felix siblings (I borderline clapped when Ramon was killed), but Benjamin is supposed to be the leader, and he’s the one we’re stuck with just a little bit longer in the next season. Truthfully, “Narcos: Mexico” has glacial pacing and a serious charisma void now that Diego Luna’s criminal mastermind has left the series, and none of the remaining, feuding cartel kingpins seems up to the task of carrying a show (like this series’s take on Chapo Guzman, who sometimes comes across like a Latin “Sling Blade”).
Worst Stick-in-the-Mud: Delilah (Tiffany Boone) in “Nine Perfect Strangers”…People need to be perfectly honest with what they’re actually watching a show like this for. They want to see Nicole Kidman’s mysterious guru push the “resort” guests to their maximum limits, and those characters to have psychological breakthroughs that might come at the expense of their sanity. [If we wanted to watch high-maintenance rich people just complain their way through a resort we could check out “White Lotus.”] And so we’re actively rooting against Boone’s Delilah in her one-woman crusade to keep the plot as boring as possible, and to prevent any of Kidman’s wilier moves. Anytime Delilah has a suggestion, I want the show to disregard it; anytime she demands something be done, I’m hoping she’ll be ignored. “Character as impediment to audience joy and plot momentum” is a sure-fire way to make this list.
Worst Argument for the Survival of the Species: “Y: The Last Man”…For once, a bad show was actually cancelled. And maybe that counts as a quasi-miracle in the gluttonous landscape that is (not roaring) 20’s television. I think I’m especially disappointed in the characterization of Yorick. As the only man left in existence, you’d think the series might want to do more than cast a bland actor and make Yorick the dumbest man alive as well; if he barely seems interested in his own survival, why should we be invested in it?
Worst Well-Written Characters: “The White Lotus”…”Lotus” is a series with beautiful scenery, crisp direction, and an intriguing set up; yet none of that really gels because of how little we care for anyone on screen. There’s the misanthropic resort manager, the underdeveloped resort workers (one character goes into labor in the first episode and we never see her again), and the 1% resort guests we’re deliberately not supposed to like: including Connie Britton’s horrible family (complete with the ungrateful best friend of her daughter), a newlywed couple that already seems destined for divorce, and an emotional wreck of a woman who promises the world to a resort worker only to dash her dreams towards the end. All of these people are all-too-recognizable, but a show that is as light on plot as “Lotus” seems to think it’s enough to merely recognize jerks in their everyday awfulness rather than have them do much of anything. [And this is coming from a major fan of Mike White, who explored similar themes of anxiety and privilege in much, much better works like “Enlightenment,” “Beatriz at Dinner,” and “Brad’s Status.”]
Worst All-Around Cast of Characters: “Clickbait”…We truly feel sorry for Nick, Adrian Grenier’s kidnap-turned-murder-victim, but we don’t really get to know him as well as the rest of this sorry lot. There’s Grenier’s sister (Zoe Kazan), who seems to think charging into a scene like a bull in a china shop is the right way to approach every situation; there’s the lazy detective (Phoenix Raei) who seems five steps behind everyone else; there’s the hideously opportunistic reporter (Abraham Lim) who doesn’t care who he smears as long as he gets someone; Nick’s oblivious “mistress” (Jessica Collins) who has to be asked multiple times if she’s actually met him before she finally connects the dots that there’s a difference between talking on the phone and actually meeting someone; and Nick’s bizarre wife (Betty Gabriel), one of the most poorly written characters of the year. Gabriel’s character seems to get upset at dumb things, but seem weirdly blasé about important things, and is all-too-willing to believe the worst about her husband–for no particular reason–even after he has forgiven her for having an affair with a guy that punched him in the face.
Most Confusing Cast of Characters: “Wheel of Time”…If you put a gun to my head, I could not tell you why some of these characters do what they do, and what they’re doing at any given time. Some of that is the inaccessible high-fantasy world “Time” traps them in (a show like this exists only to show you how good “Game of Thrones” actually was), but some of it is just flavorless acting from an undistinguished cast and generally poor, witless characterizations.
Worst Lovers: “Love Life” season 2…In season 1 of “Love Life,” they took their time revealing Anna Kendrick’s ultimate partner. Unfortunately, “Life” season 2 forces the idea that Jessica Williams is the right one for William Jackson Harper from the first scene of the first episode. [His marriage to a white woman at the time is seen as a temporary roadblock since “Life” doesn’t take interracial relationships seriously anyway.] Not only does this undercut any real suspense, plot momentum, or mystery (since we’re just essentially wasting time until their inevitable “Happily Ever After”), but it also papers over just how awful Williams’s character actually is.
Her character spends the first half of the season leading him on while belittling Harper’s white wife, dating of white women, and then an impregnation of a different white woman; and then the second half of the season jerking him around, cheating on him, dumping him without explaining why, and admitting to cheating on him during the worst, most isolating months of CoVid. And for his part, Harper’s protagonist often comes across as a fussy, joyless egomaniac (only one example: when he first learns he’s gotten Leslie Bibb’s casual fling pregnant, he’s less concerned that he doesn’t want to be a father yet than with how the world will perceive him as the stereotype of a black man who doesn’t want to be a father).
Most Oddly Unsympathetic Lovers: “Trying”…By rights, we should absolutely be rooting for the main couple on Apple’s “Trying.” After all, they’re the protagonists and they’re trying to do something as worthy as adopting a child. And so it’s odd that I have such a disconnect between what I actually feel for them (usually nothing, and sometimes extreme irritation) and what I should be feeling for them. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the central couple of your TV show being this vanilla (and vaguely self-absorbed), but it still feels like something that might’ve made more sense for an NBC comedy in the 90’s (sandwiched between “Seinfeld” and “Friends”) than for an R-rated show on a cutting edge streamer.
For Real, Worst Lovers and Worst All-Around: “You” Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) and Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti)…Joe Goldberg is not a hero. This is worth repeating as many times as it takes to get through since “You” seems confused on this point. Joe is a dangerous, homicidal stalker who endangers or manipulates everyone he comes into contact with. Love Quinn is even more unstable and killed more than one character in “You” season 3 for the faintest of reasons. [Someone sneezes the wrong way? Quinn feels justified in murdering them.] This could be fertile ground to explore what’s actually so dangerous about psychopaths–the way they can justify even cold-blooded murder as them being the real victims–but the show seems to celebrate the dehumanizing gaze of Joe and Quinn by basically agreeing with their judgments of everyone around them.
What’s wrong with “You”‘s third season is how thoroughly the series airbrushes away what creeps its central duo are, hidden beneath a veneer of black comedy and “suburban” angst. Deep down, it seems to insinuate that most of their victims actually really deserve to be punished–this is very different than the way the first season of “You” treated Joe–and that’s a dangerous message for a show about psychopaths to send, especially since there’s probably more than a few psychopaths watching “You.”
YES, all of these are the worst.