I LOVED--like fanatically-obsessed-crazy loved--LOST, but Jack & Kate were the most boring characters of the bunch. I liked Locke, Sayid, Ben, Hurley, etc, but the Jack/Kate/Sawyer triangle was the most annoying, dull and downright frustrating part of the show. Sawyer at least had some very funny lines. Jack & Kate---no. They were just annoying and whiny.
I uh, really liked Jack for his philosophical debates with Locke and how the show unravelled him over the years. My favourite Lost episode is the Season 3 finale and it's great seeing him as this drug addicted loser post-Island. Sawyer on the other hand, completes his entire character arc 13 episodes in to Season 1 and does nothing but crack one-liners for the next 5 years. No idea how anybody could find his story more interesting.
Oh, thank you. I'm glad someone out there agrees with me - on both counts. I'll never understand the Jack / Kate loathing, though. Just as I'll never understand why people like a cretinous, selfish, arsehole of a character like Sawyer. But to each their own.
I also preferred Sinclair. Michael O'Hare had no baggage as an actor the way Boxleitner did, and he helped usher us into the B5 world without thinking of Tron or Scarecrow & Mrs. King. Then again, B5 kind of became known for taking typecast actors and giving them something new to do, like Walter Koenig with Bester.
Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior... I liked all the supporting characters but thought that Forest Whitaker's character was awful.
I mostly hate him because he's just a rude person. Some crazy stuff happens, his friends ask him what's going on and what does he say? "It's not important." Every. Single. Time. As if his companions weren't worth discussing important island mythology stuff with. It baffles me that they actually put up with that behavior for 5 seasons. His obsession with wanting to fix everything on his own didn't help much either.
That wasn't really Jack being rude. That was him doing what every single character on the island did: avoid having conversations that would impart actual, useful,information and clear up various mysteries and misunderstandings that the producers wanted to stretch out until the finale.
No, it still is rude behavior. Yeah, a lot of characters did that, which is why i initially said I hate most of the main characters on that show. But Jack definitely takes the cake in that.
Is it bad that all this talk of Ally McSqueal has got the Single Female Lawyer song running around on a loop in my head?
Great, now I've got the "Single Female Lawyer" song stuck in my head. I love M*A*S*H (never mind that it ended two years before I was born) but Hawkeye is one of my least favorite characters. He used to be my favorite, but the more I've watched the show, I've come to realize that I like Klinger, Potter, Winchester, Radar, and Mulcahy a lot more. I guess eleven years' worth of episodes is just too much Hawkeye for me. As far as Star Trek series go, I'd have to say Sisko is my least favorite character on DS9. It's not that I dislike him; I'm just kind of... indifferent toward him. He had some good moments, but I'd rather watch an episode that focused on, well, any other character.
We liked Whitney, but hated the Whitney character. But we kept watching, because we liked the other characters. I'm glad we did, because this show has really had continuity and character growth--with actual stated (not over-stated) reasons for the growth! Whitney's annoying habits and character were slowly explained, a bit, and slowly modified, a bit, with understanding reasons. Same thing with the other characters. And I like that. No suddenly s/he is acting different because it's needed for that week's plot. And I love the new bartender. A good addition and very well-acted. It's a refreshing change in a tv show. I mean, I liked Friends, but the characters, for all that happened to them (marriages, divorces, etc), didn't change all that much. Monica wondered for years why guys she slept with on the first date weren't interested in a serious relationship. Ross and Rachel took how many years (?) to finally start addressing their feelings in a semi-mature manner. While it IS funny, it can get a bit boring. BTW, I wrote a paper in college "Examination of the Narrative Structure of a Coming of Age Television Show," focusing on Joan of Arcadia and comparing it to both Wonder Years and Seventh Heaven. Got an "A,"
actually the friends characters did change a bit: monica got derangedly obsessive compulsive, ross got patheticly useless, joey got even more stupid, pheobe got bitchier, though chandler stayed pretty much the same and rachel... uh, got straighter hair?
^Heh. When I was in college, I took an anthropology course and the professor was a bit looney. I had to wrote a paper on some part of the current culture, so I did a paper on the socio-anthropological importance of "The A-Team." I got an A and I even got it published in the college journal. The sad part is that I completely BSed my way through it and just wrote what I knew the professor wanted to hear. I really didn't believe a word of it; I just knew it was the sort of thing that she would really be into. I even linked the "The A-Team" to policy decisions in the US bombing of Libya.
Buffy wasn't ANYWHERE nearly bad as Tom Welling playing Clark Kent on Smallville; at least, Buffy had a lot to deal with. Clark Kent couldn't have been as beset with being the Man of Steel as Buffy was being the Slayer at 16-21 to be as angsty as shown in Smallville, yet, there he was being Mr. Angst for ten seasons. That's why I never watched that POS show, and would rather see the Man Of Steel movie (or any of the animated DTV movies put out by Warner Premiere with Superman in it.) The better show about young professionals was not Friends but Living Single. Too bad it never really caught the public's attention like Friends did. As for characters I hate that are the main star of the show, I'd have to go with the one and only Wily Gilligan from Gilligan's Island, and Dobie Gillis from The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis.
Ooh, now I'm curious. I never cared at all for 7th Heaven - too treacly at best, too preachy at worst - but really liked Joan of Arcadia (well, the first season is all I've seen). I've actually been rewatching it, too.
I focused on JoA, using a single episode as an example of my thesis (how the episode's lesson is taught to the characters and viewers), then did the comparison. Seventh Heaven did not fare well, more as the show went on then in its early years. Wonder Years compared better. I said both of these basically straight out stated the lesson while JoA did more showing it than stating it. It wasn't a bad paper.