Regardless of how much you might love a show, there can be a character in it that drives you absolutely insane. Every time they show up on the screen, you want to fast forward through the scene, and every time they talk, you want to backhand them.
This is my top-five list of characters who I dislike enough to actually want them to be harmed. I'm a fairly patient and non-violent person in real life, but I can say with all honestly that if I were to be present in the situations portrayed in their shows, I would have at least yelled at them and possibly done them physical harm.
One caveat and one warning: I realize all these characters are products of writers and the actual actors probably had little say in their lines, but they're the ones I saw say them, so they're the easiest targets. If you haven't finished the listed series, read with caution since major spoilers are present.
Honorable Mention
Lucy is the classic example of a female character who thinks she is more than she actually is. She's the latest love interest/rescue project of the lead of the series, Nucky. He runs the town, and after taking an interest in her, he sweeps her from a life of bad play auditions and one-night stands at the local bars to one of opulence and privilege. She's Nucky's gal, so everyone treats her with the utmost of respect.
After a while of being treated like this, she starts to think she's something pretty special and looks down her nose at the very people she used to get drunk and dance with. At the same time, she treats their servants and other townspeople with disdain when the only notable thing she's done is bang the local gangster. She is so convinced that Nucky will never be satisfied with anyone else that when another woman of relative substance (Margaret) comes into his life and there are signs he's wavering, Lucy confronts Margeret and says something to the effect of "He'll always come back to this" while opening her legs. Classy.
She is the picture of misguided entitlement, convinced that she deserves everything she has while the rest of the world knows she's just one of countless flapper girls who happened to catch someone's eye one night and makes up for her lack of substance with eagerness in the bedroom. This personality combined with the trashiest Jersey accent this side of Snooki combine to make a character whose presence can be unpleasant at best and grating at worst.
I can't put her on the list because 1) she gets her comeuppance when she gets impregnated by a married FBI agent and basically gets put under house arrest until she gives birth and 2) she's stupid enough to elicit pity. Before he breaks up with her, even Nucky is embarrassed by her lack of knowledge and ends up treating her more like a child than a girlfriend in everyday interaction.
I'll say it right out: Tony's mother is probably 70% of the reason I stopped watching this show before finishing the first season. I'll likely go back to it at some point since it's been lauded so highly, but her combination of whining and passive-aggressive guilt-tripping was too much for me to take. She's about as much fun as the picture on the left makes her look; I only saw a little over half of the first season, but she seemed to split her time between being a giant pain in the ass for her son, meddling in the family's business by leaking secrets that could harm those she claims to love, and generally being an annoying old person with help from Uncle Junior.
A quick Google search for her name brings up people who claim she is their most-hated television character, and she's either near or at the top of every Worst Moms lists. In one by Time, they lead her bio with the following:
Some people have no talent for mothering. Others are actively, aggressively bad at it. Into the latter group falls Livia Soprano, mother to New Jersey mobster Tony. She grew up in financial poverty and made sure that each of her children was raised in emotional poverty...
OK, so I'm not the only one. Good.
Side note: I just read that David Chase's mother was named Livia and he based the character on her. If this is true, I truly hope Chase threw her into the worst nursing home he could find and only visited her to regale her with glowing quotes from critics, proof of his ever-expanding bank account, and pictures of all the fantastic places he got to visit, reminding her that she would stay in those walls until she died.
Before I start: yes, the picture to the right is of a middle-aged woman breast feeding her six year old child. So, yeah.
This one is a little different than the rest of the entrants on the list because she is not a major character in the series and has a relatively small amount of screen time. However, in that short time, she managed to drive me crazier than nearly anyone in this series. She is described as fairly unstable and overly emotional in even the best of times, and when she is forced to deal with the realities of the world, she retreats to her nigh-impenetrable castle in the mountains to shut herself off from the rest of reality, sealing her own son to that fate in the process.
This is bad enough, but she really earns her station on this list when her sister, Catelyn, comes to her in an hour of need, desperately needing Lysa's support in a war with another house. A bad outcome could mean the eradication of Catelyn's entire family, so this is not an inconsequential request. After Catelyn begs for support, Lysa replies that she cannot risk leaving her fortress and basically tosses Catelyn (again, her own sister) out the front door, even threatening her with death when Cat suggests taking Lysa's son to a place where he could be raised like a normal child. Catelyn is forced to fight with the force she has and eventually has her throat slit (literally) by a house who falsely offers the help she needs.
Lysa is basically the embodiment of doting, overly-protective, irrational mothers everywhere. Her life is completely overtaken with the obsession of making sure her child is always safe and never outside of her influence. Anyone who questions her methods or motives in the slightest way is instantly deemed an enemy (even her own sister) and is dealt with in a very harsh manner; their mountain castle has a hole in the floor where her son delights in throwing the people who displease him or her to their deaths.
However, much like Lucy Danzinger above, we are at least treated to a bit of justice with Lysa: she is visited by Petyr, the man who she pined for most of her life. She thought she finally had him to herself, but then saw him getting familiar with another character and confronted him about it. She chose to do it near the hole in the floor where they throw prisoners to execute them, and after building her up with what seems like sweet nothings, he tells her he never really loved her and throws her through the hole to her death. I almost clapped after I finished reading that section.
I like Steve Zahn. He's a funny guy. Good goofy sidekick to Matthew McConaughey's cool guy in Sahara, enjoyably wacky in Strange Wilderness, at least better than Jack Black in Saving Silverman. But this Steve Zahn? I'm not a fan.
First off, I will say that I think I understand what David Simon and the writers of Treme are trying to accomplish with this character. In telling the story of post-Katrina New Orleans, one must include the aimless, drifting, self-inflating pseudo-hipsters in the mix. The people who feed on the laid-back, relaxed atmosphere of the city to justify the stagnation of their lives in the pursuit of an unrealistic, almost childhood fantasy. However, that doesn't mean I have to like those characters.
In the case of Davis, that fantasy is being a significant player/contributor in the local music scene. He starts a few bands (fronting most, of course), runs for local office to promote a song that sophomorically mocks the political establishment of the city/state, and constantly gets fired from his fall back job (radio DJ) because he won't follow even basic instructions from his boss. Even when he does something altruistic like getting a group of older black musicians who got screwed over by managers/recording companies years ago together to put out an album and finally get some money, he pumps family members for the funds (he's constantly broke) and gets pissy when the album's design and release aren't what he wanted.
Davis is the poster child for children of the feel-good parenting strategy: it seems he literally thinks he can do no wrong. He won't admit to a bad decision, blames other individuals or society as a whole for all the bad things that happen to him, rarely regrets actions of his which affect other people, and lives his life with what is really a sad delusion that he has talent. At one point, one of his bands votes to promote another guitar player to lead to replace him. The extended musical scenes (of which there are many in Treme) along with character dialogue leave no doubt that the other player is far superior to Davis. He is crushed and basically leaves in a huff, still convinced he is the better player and the other members of the band are simply missing how great he is.
He later comes to realize the truth, but that example shows how he lives his life: with a maddening self-confidence based on nothing but his own inflated sense of self. I know people like this in real life (the generation after mine seems to be filled with them), and as a person who has worked hard for what he has and is hyper-critical of himself at times, not much drives me crazier that seeing someone like Davis drift through life convinced of a greatness that is only apparent to them.
2. Gob/Lindsay/Lucille Bluth from Arrested Development
I started watching this show after hearing great things from friends about the first couple seasons. "It's so clever," they said. "It's ridiculous, but has enough of a human side to keep you interested." They were right, but they forgot to mention half the characters are huge assholes.
Since Arrested Development was cancelled from network television for low ratings, I'm going to assume a fair number of the (several) people who will read this aren't familiar with the series. In a nutshell, it's the story of a man named Michael (front and center in the picture to the right) dealing with the members of his family during legal troubles with their business. His father is in jail, and only after taking over the company does he realize how dependent the rest of his family members are on illegal contributions from the company.
And now we get to the characters: Gob (Michael's brother), Lindsay (sister), and Lucille (mother). Like Davis above, they appear to most be intended caricatures, but instead of apathetic slackers, they are rich, spoiled apathetic slackers. Their father has kept them afloat using business funds for years, and the central conflicts of the show are based around their interactions with Michael, who has gone out and made a name for himself away from the family through hard work.
Gob is magician by trade, but runs afoul the local magicians' guild often and doesn't make nearly enough money to support himself. He leeches off Michael and his girlfriend (star of a Mexican soap opera), staying in the family's yacht whenever he is having a "break" and cheating on her. Oddly enough, the laziness and sense of entitlement annoy me more than him cheating on his long-term girlfriend. It's that bad.
Lindsay is the stereotypical female counterpart to Gob: she married a psychiatrist to take care of her, but once he lost his license, they had to move back in with the family. She goes shopping and runs up credit card bills even though she earns no money and contributes nothing of substance to the family, has a history of throwing charity dinners (funded by the family business) for causes she doesn't really believe in, and ignores her daughter to the point of negligence.
As bad as they are, they can't hold a candle to Lucille. The matriarch of the family, she never thinks of anyone but herself. She framed Michael to cover up a car accident she caused, constantly insults her children/grandchildren, complains about losing extravagances like dining club privileges at the country club while her husband is in jail, and purposefully manipulates her children to fight each other to keep them from teaming up against her. And that was just season one.
Along with Livia Soprano, these characters are the only ones on the list who actually made me consider giving up on the shows in which they star.
Yes, this blog post was, in fact, a ruse for me to simply express my loathing for this character. None of my friends have watched Rescue Me, and since the series finale aired almost two years ago, there isn't a lot of buzz, so I haven't had anywhere to vent. Get ready.
I hate Sheila Keefe. I used a lot of negative words and names to describe other characters, but I never actually used the word "hate." I hate Sheila Keefe. She is awful in every aspect of her life: friend, lover, mother, even widow. After about season two of the show, I could feel myself getting angry when she came on screen. All I could think is, "What crazy shit is going to spew out of this woman's mouth in this scene?"
She spends the first few seasons generally being insane and taking advantage of the marital troubles of the main character of the series (Tommy) to bed him and make her feel better about losing her husband, and it only goes downhill from there. She's that odd combination of a character I would despise in real life and one that I think brings down the show she's on. Off the top of my head, here's a list of subplots, themes, or incidents centered at least partly around her:
- She kidnapped Tommy's fourth child to make up for the miscarriage of her own child (of which Tommy was the father). She was going to name the kidnapped baby Elvis.
- On multiple occasions, she drugged Tommy and spiked his non-alcoholic drinks with Viagra so she could have sex with him while he was passed out. He was a recovering alcoholic, and she convinced him he got drunk and blacked out, shaking his confidence in his own sobriety and eventually causing a relapse.
- She temporarily went lesbian after her and Tommy's first fling, eventually ending up with a physically abusive woman. Man, not much in this series made me happier than seeing that woman beat the piss out of Sheila in their foyer.
- During the last drugging/pesudo-rape with Tommy, she knocked over a candle and set the place on fire. Not only could she not grab a glass of water or fire extinguisher to put the fire out, she was too weak to drag him to safety. Her reasonable course of action? Go cry and scream in her car. She eventually called 911.
- When Tommy seems to be getting his drinking under control and things are at least decent with his wife, Sheila offers him the chance to come to her place and have sex/drink without consequence, thinking it will make him look out for her son (now a firefighter as well).
Sheila is a combination of a few of the above characters: she is a megalomaniac at her core, convinced that she and the things she cares about are more important than anything else on the planet. She dotes endlessly on her son, enabling him to waste $60,000+ of college tuition on a degree he never intended to finish and doing his laundry/cooking even after he starts training to be a firefighter, turning him into a huge pussy in the process. Instead of addressing her real psychological problems with a good psychologist and a few years of counseling, she takes the shortcut and lies to multiple docs to double and triple her anti-anxiety/anti-depression meds. Anyone who tries to confront her with the truth is met with immediate anger and defensiveness. She gets millions of dollars in 9/11 widow money and only uses it for selfish purposes, never once considering any real philanthropic donations (the closest was paying for a relative's wedding). She wears skanky, tasteless animal print clothing everywhere, clomping along in her too-high heels like a caricature of a Jersey diva. She uses sex as a weapon and attempts to pull Tommy away from his wife, even though she knows he'll lose access to his kids if he leaves. She is vain, petty, shallow, irresponsible, embarrassingly unintelligent, loud, and brash. However, the worst part is that since she's so outlandish, she brings the overall quality of the show down and makes it less believable.
Hate for Sheila is not nearly as rampant as some of the other characters on the list, mainly because Rescue Me isn't nearly as popular of a show as The Sopranos or Boardwalk Empire. But here are a couple quotes from random blogs/forums:
I do not condone violence towards women. Not even raising of the voice, buuuuuuuuut! There is a single woman who I would bludgeon to death... Sheila Keefe from Rescue Me...
...And throughout all these delightful developments, Sheila has been a screaming, crying, drinking, cursing, lying, cheating, miserable harpy. All of which I could handle if she was entertaining. She’s not. She’s just loud and mean and repetitive. She’s been screaming the same five things at Tommy the entire show, and now she’s transferred all of her neurosis onto screaming because her only son is a firefighter, the occupation that (let’s not forget) killed her husband. While I can understand where she’s coming from with all of this, I’m not enjoying it. She’s just a manic pain in the ass and every scene she’s in makes me want to scratch my eyes out with broken glass...
This show is a fairly complex look at familial relationships, both regarding blood relatives and the few occupations where coworkers basically become family (firefighters, cops, etc.). While seasons three and four are almost universally reviled (and for good reason), the rest of the show features some high-level writing and good acting. Through almost 100 episodes (nearly 70 hours of actual show), the most excited I got was when it seemed like Sheila died in the last episode of season four. Conversely, the most aggravated I got was when it was revealed in the first episode of season five she wasn't really dead, but instead crazier than ever and richer to boot. The fact that those were the most emotional moments for me in a show based around 9/11, alcoholism, divorce, and dying firefighters shows just how much I hate this character.
So that's my list. I'm sure I missed a few and there will be future additions, but these were the ones that came easily to mind. There aren't enough people who read this blog to have a real discussion, but feel free to agree/disagree/suggest more characters below.
Hate for Sheila is not nearly as rampant as some of the other characters on the list, mainly because Rescue Me isn't nearly as popular of a show as The Sopranos or Boardwalk Empire. But here are a couple quotes from random blogs/forums:
I do not condone violence towards women. Not even raising of the voice, buuuuuuuuut! There is a single woman who I would bludgeon to death... Sheila Keefe from Rescue Me...
...And throughout all these delightful developments, Sheila has been a screaming, crying, drinking, cursing, lying, cheating, miserable harpy. All of which I could handle if she was entertaining. She’s not. She’s just loud and mean and repetitive. She’s been screaming the same five things at Tommy the entire show, and now she’s transferred all of her neurosis onto screaming because her only son is a firefighter, the occupation that (let’s not forget) killed her husband. While I can understand where she’s coming from with all of this, I’m not enjoying it. She’s just a manic pain in the ass and every scene she’s in makes me want to scratch my eyes out with broken glass...
This show is a fairly complex look at familial relationships, both regarding blood relatives and the few occupations where coworkers basically become family (firefighters, cops, etc.). While seasons three and four are almost universally reviled (and for good reason), the rest of the show features some high-level writing and good acting. Through almost 100 episodes (nearly 70 hours of actual show), the most excited I got was when it seemed like Sheila died in the last episode of season four. Conversely, the most aggravated I got was when it was revealed in the first episode of season five she wasn't really dead, but instead crazier than ever and richer to boot. The fact that those were the most emotional moments for me in a show based around 9/11, alcoholism, divorce, and dying firefighters shows just how much I hate this character.
So that's my list. I'm sure I missed a few and there will be future additions, but these were the ones that came easily to mind. There aren't enough people who read this blog to have a real discussion, but feel free to agree/disagree/suggest more characters below.
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