Monkeypunch's Top 50 Favorite TV Characters

42. Al Bundy (Married...With Children)


Poor Al Bundy (Ed O'Neil)...Former high school football star Al only wants the simple things in life: A cold beer, John Wayne movies, and a copy of Playboy. Instead, he's saddled with a lazy, materialistic wife, two ungrateful children, yuppie neighbors who hate him, and a low paying job selling women's shoes. Al can't win, he's not very smart, he lives on the fumes of his past glories, and suffers endless indignities while trying to provide for his family who resent the hell out of him. Ed O'Neil is hilarious as the sexist, ignorant, loud mouthed Bundy, he's the best thing about in this pitch black satire of 1980's sitcoms.

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You ran out after eight. Hoping you can finish this, MP.

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it was 3am here. I fell asleep. Starting up again now!

41. The Smoking Man (The X-Files)


The Smoking Man, portrayed by William B Davis, started out as a background character on the X-Files, a guy who you wouldn't even notice, but as the series progressed he became a shadowy antagonist to Mulder and Scully, a man in black who buried everything they discovered in an attempt to hide a vast conspiracy. But what is so great about this character is that he believed that he was right, and in a way, maybe he was. The way he saw it, if people learned that aliens were coming to colonize the earth, it would all fall apart, the world would be plunged into chaos. By keeping it secret, he was trying to stall the inevitable, and he was working on ways to help humanity behind the backs of his superiors. Of course, he also assassinated JFK and Martin Luther King, so he's still a very bad man indeed. But that's what makes him so great.

40. George Costanza (Seinfeld)


George Costanza (Jason Alexander) is a truly terrible human being. I can't think of a single redeeming quality that he had. He was petty, shallow, vindictive, amoral to a frightening degree, and quite possibly a budding sociopath. The real ending of Seinfeld should have been George just going Michael Douglas in Falling Down on Manhattan. It would have made perfect sense. You would never want to know such a man in real life, but on TV, you gotta love him. All the best bits on Seinfeld, for me, were about George. A poor sad sack who truly deserved all the bad luck he ever got, and one of the funniest characters ever on TV.

I almost bought the Funko Pop! of him a few days ago.

39. Dobie Gillis (The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis)


Dobie Gillis (Dwayne Hickman) was a groundbreaking character, in a way. Without him, we wouldn't have had characters like Ferris Bueller. But unlike Bueller, Dobie wasn't cool or popular or even all that bright. Dobie was a lovesick teenager who forever pined for a girl he couldn't have, fought with his cooler, richer rivals, worked for his sarcastic father at a family owned grocery store, and got by with a little help from his misfit friends, beatnik Maynard G. Krebs and tomboyish Zelda Gilroy. Dobie was a cleverly written character, a likable everyman who just couldn't catch a break, and his show seems to have been mostly (and unfairly) forgotten.

I had no idea this existed, and now I want it.

I saw it at a Barnes & Noble book store, but it's available on Amazon too.

I've recently started collecting these Pop! figures, and this one is definitely on my list. (I bought the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man instead.)

38. Pam Poovey (Archer)


Pam started out as a mousy HR rep who talked to people using a dolphin puppet, and was the butt of a lot of jokes in season one of FX's spy spoof Archer, but as time went on her character deepened...and got weirder, and more awesome. Pam is a force of nature. She's hilarious and just a bit frightening, whether she's doing paperwork, sleeping with yakuzas, doing enough coke to kill a horse, or competing in underground MMA tournaments. She's strangely sexy, too. But then maybe that's just me.

37. Roger Sterling (Mad Men)


Roger Sterling (John Slattery) is an alcoholic and a womanizer, and is more than a little attached to his mother. Despite all this, he is fascinating, funny, and one of my favorites on Mad Men. Roger continually seeks help with his problems, even going to see a therapist, but his I don't give a crap attitude sinks that more often than not. He can't stop making cheap jokes in a therapy session, for example. I do think that deep down, Roger tries hard to be a good person, like when he offers to support the child he had with Joan during an affair, and he does seem to really care for his daughter and possibly still loves his first wife, even though he knows that that ship has sailed. Like most Mad Men characters, he exists in a moral grey area, and the show doesn't pass judgement on him. He gets a lot of funny lines and some fascinating storylines, so along with two other Mad Men characters (who rate higher up on here), he gets on this list.

Love Pam.

I love Roger. He's one of the best characters in Mad Men.

36. Earl Hickey (My Name is Earl)


I suppose it's becoming a theme that I enjoy morally questionable characters, but Earl Hickey (Jason Lee) was a former petty criminal trying to make amends for his past life of (stupid) crime. Earl wasn't really bad as much as he was dumb, thoughtless, and looking for the easy path in life, but after being hit by a car directly after winning the lottery, Earl decided he would have to atone for his past sins by making a list of everyone he'd ever wronged. And a long list it was. Armed with a childlike (and not entirely correct) belief in Karma, Earl was a charming, low key guy who genuinely cared for his friends and family, and had a sort of Of Mice and Men thing going with his dim-witted brother, Randy. The show (mostly) stayed away from ridiculing him and instead created a memorable, sympathetic character who I enjoyed watching every week.

Loved Darlene and Roseanne and no argument regarding the final season, trainwreck is putting it nicely.