Top 10 Most Unwelcome and Show-Destroying Characters
There's a cute name for when certain characters show up and totally ruin a television show with their unholy presence. It is called "jumping the shark" and it can be done many different ways, but this list focuses on those times when a show feels the need to bring a specific type of character in to 'mix things up' but really just creates something horrible and ugly that should never have been given the ability to grace our sets. Sometimes, you learn to tolerate new characters, and they elevate the show to heights you never thought possible. For example, Prentiss and Rossi on "Criminal Minds" being surprisingly superior replacements for Elle and Gideon, or Ziva replacing Kate on NCIS. But sometimes, you just wish they would die horrible on-screen deaths already. Here are some of the worst offenders:
10. Towelie
"South Park" is known for pushing the boundaries of what's appropriate; they're also known for testing the limits of their lofty reputation. Towelie, a cotton towel that smokes pot and does little else, represents both those traits personified. It's difficult to explain to people that the show can actually be pretty smart, because for every one clever, crafted episode that Matt and Trey create, they make two ridiculously stupid, immature ones. They claim Towelie was an experiment of theirs, to see how much merchandise they could market based on sheer stupidity. People have been known to obsess over every new character "South Park" introduces: Mr. Hankey, Timmy, Butters... Towelie was supposed to be ironic because everybody would go out and buy Towelie merchandise and Trey and Matt could just laugh at our dumb asses for buying whatever shit they try to sell us, but I think it failed, because not only do loyal viewers despise Towelie, even the characters point out that Towelie is "the worst character ever." Sorry, "South Park", your experiment failed, and every time you try to revisit it, it just gets sadder and sadder. Please throw Towelie away already.
9. Lilly Foster-Lambert
Somewhere around the sixth season, producers of the 90's sitcom "Step by Step" thought they needed to spice things up a bit, or maybe they thought all the kids were getting too old and weren't cute anymore. Either of those may have been true, but whatever their reasoning was, they went about it all the wrong way by casting this little cherubic nightmare as the first child to link the Foster and Lambert families together. Of course, babies only generate so much comedy, so in true sitcom fashion, Lilly Foster-Lambert was born one season and aged six years the next, despite none of the other children visibly aging along with her. I would have preferred a wailing baby to that obnoxious child, who we were also forced to endure in the late 90's Welch's Grape Juice commercials. I never wanted to punch a child in the face before I started seeing this girl everywhere. If I saw her today, I might still be inclined to punch her in the face. "Step by Step" was mediocre enough on its own, did we really need a cutesy little blonde girl running around taking up all the screen time? She filled the 'Cute Quota', but at the expense of Patrick Duffy's youngest boy, Brendan, previously the baby of the family, who disappeared into oblivion when this bitch showed up! No one ever seemed to notice either! That poor kid, he may not have had a personality apart from 'baby' but he really didn't deserve his fate, and he was much less irritating than that damn Lilly Foster-Lambert.
Sorry kid, you're just not cute anymore. It was a good run though.
8. Abby Lockhart
I debated with whether or not to put Abby on the list, because when she first showed up on "ER", I really liked her, and Maura Tierney is a good actress. But I am willing to put my feelings about the actress aside in order to acknowledge the insufferableness of Abby. Normally I don't care for it when shows introduce female characters solely to be the love interest of a male lead, but I sort of wish they'd gone that route with Abby, because I liked her much better when she was with Carter. The disastrous, ugly, too-embarrassing-to-behold breakup of Abby and Carter was the beginning of the end for me, because they basically bastardized Carter just to make Abby look more sympathetic, going against everything the character was. I guess I'm alright with it, in the end, because I would never wish Abby on Carter permanently, but it was still jarring to feel like I should be hating the sweetest, most loveable character on the show. In the end, I saw Abby for the whiny, self-involved, emotional wreck she was, and I think she's better off with Luka Kovac, who was always hit or miss for me as well. I wish that the show had ended before it ever had a chance to become The Abby Show, but alas, ratings speak volumes, and if you're going to soldier on for another decade, you might as well put your best foot forward, and Maura can act... I just wish she didn't have to be such an obnoxious character.
7. Dawn Summers
This may be an unpopular opinion... but I kind of liked Dawn. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was always known for its camp and melodrama, and Joss Whedon has come to be known for his WTF moments in television history. Buffy having a sister was one of the first we were ever exposed to, so it's probably why it comes under the most scrutiny. I didn't mind that Dawn showed up, because it led to a great season finale in the defeat of Glory and the death of Buffy, and I don't mind what she eventually became, which was a considerably stronger person, all for the better because of her sister. But everything in between was just wretched. Dawn was a hot mess, whining, crying, always getting kidnapped because she was doing stupid shit. She even had a bout with kleptomania that was just ridiculously out of place on that show. And everyone always came to her rescue, because she was Dawn. Dawn haters have actually been known to shout "SHUT UP DAWN!" at the screen whenever she appears because everything she says just fucks everything up. I learned this from the Buffy musical tour, and it finally made me realize that Dawn was just wrong on every level. Thankfully, the show was already losing steam from the departure of Angel, Cordelia, Oz, and Faith, not to mention Willow's increasingly darker ways and Xander's increasingly useless ones, so I don't feel like Dawn's entirely to blame, but it sure is nice to have a scapegoat.
6. John Doggett
This is nothing against Robert Patrick, a staple of sci-fi show guest stars, who is always lovely, terrific, and welcome anywhere. I am entirely against Doggett, the piss-poor replacement for the M.I.A. Fox Mulder, who never really filled our beloved believer's shoes. Doggett wasn't Mulder, and the show never claimed him to be. On the contrary, Doggett was intended to fill the 'skeptic' half of the duo while Scully, whose experiences over the past 7 years molded her into a less uptight person, was to take over the 'believer' role. But both lacked the charisma needed for said role, and together they were just a giant pile of boring and don't even get me started on Doggett's other partner, and Scully's eventual replacement, Reyes... What were the producers thinking? X-Files without Mulder OR Scully? Preposterous! Thank God they realized their mistake, brought Mulder back from the dead, and let the finale and the subsequent movie be about our original beloved pair of agents. Doggett was well and good, but he was a foil for Mulder, not Scully, and foils only work when they're both on screen at the same time.
5. Everyone who was ever added to "Sliders"
Look, I'm not going to try and argue that "Sliders" was a precious gem that was tarnished over the years. I may have adored it when I was 10 or 11, but looking back on it now, "Sliders" was kind of shitty right from the start, but it worked somehow. It was campy fun and the cast blended together well and had chemistry despite poor writing. Idealistic and awkward boy genius Quinn Mallory (Jerry O'Connell), plucky girl next door Wade Welles (Sabrina Lloyd), sarcastic but smooth retired R&B singer Rembrandt Brown (Cleavant Derricks) and of course arrogant and patriarchal Professor Maxamillian Arturo (John Rhys-Davies) were the perfect dream team, and on a shallower note, their names were pretty cool too! I wasn't always crazy about Wade, but she served a purpose as the heart of the team, something that was lacking when both Arturo and Wade departed and instead we got cold bitch, Maggie Beckett (Kari Wuhrer). I may not have loved Wade, but I HATED Maggie. She was so affronting and hateful, and replacing one cliche (girl next door) with another (badass butt-kicking hot chick) was NOT an improvement.
The next new character, Quinn's brother Colin (played by Jerry O'Connell's real-life bro Charlie) was the only one I could stand, and added new dimensions, but then, what fuckery should arise, but BOTH Mallory/O'Connell brothers are axed in one fell swoop, falling into plot-hole-Hell to be replaced with the incredible boring duo, Diana Davis and Mallory. Let me clear one thing up: Diana Davis is an original character (with a personality so vanilla I can't recall a single thing about her), but 'Mallory' was actually supposed to be Quinn Mallory's double from that world, who fused with the Quinn we all knew and loved and, like, absorbed his personality or something. I don't know, it was all convoluted and stupid and was never resolved in a way that restored OUR Quinn, but the long and short of it is that we were supposed to believe they were sort of the same person. Never mind that on every other world, in every other episode, Quinn's doubles were always played by Jerry O'Connell. Fuck continuity, on THIS world, Quinn looks like some other asshole, and all subsequent doubles of "Quinn Mallory" will look that way too. WTF SHOW? Why not just introduce a NEW character with a new complex history instead of just coasting off the one you already created and barely explained? It's bad enough you're trying to hammer out another year with only one remaining original cast member; don't insult us with your fuckery as well. Quinn Mallory is and always will be Jerry O'Connell alone. Accept no substitutes.
IT'S LIKE THEY'RE TWINS!
4. Jonas Quinn
At the end of Stargate SG-1's fifth season, the show left Showtime for Sci Fi, and Michael Shanks, a.k.a. Daniel Jackson, left the show over contract disputes, perhaps thinking that the show wouldn't flourish on a new network and without one of its core characters. This was the biggest mistake the show ever made, as Daniel Jackson was not only the favorite character of the fans, but deeply entrenched in Stargate legacy, having been THE PERSON to figure out how the damn gate worked in the first place. To have SG-1 without Daniel was just blasphemy, but they took their folly one step further by KILLING Daniel and trying to REPLACE him... with this tool.
Jonas Quinn was a moralistic young scientist from another planet, minimally involved in the incident that led to Daniel's demise... He was also THE BIGGEST TOOL ever to grace the gate room, hands down. The writers tried to give Jonas a personality of his own, but they failed miserably. Without Daniel in the picture, the team had a few empty quotas to fill, namely 'Hot Young Guy', 'Idealistic Non-Military Guy', and 'Jack O'Neill Foil,' which Jonas promptly filled. They didn't want to be too obvious or heavy-handed in their attempts to replace the K.I.A. fan favorite, so Jonas fell just short of being a linguist/archaeologist/geek like Daniel. Without these skills to bring to the team, Jonas's only contribution is as a scientist... but there was never any need for one with the much-more-brilliant Sam Carter around. Therefore, JONAS WAS USELESS. I've never seen a character who was a bigger tool than Jonas. And to prove the extent of his tool-ness, Jonas got the boot the moment Daniel Jackson was resurrected and returned to the team, and absolutely no one cared. Thanks for keeping the seat warm, Mr. Quinn, but we all knew you were only a temporary fix. Bye bye, tool. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. Oh, and thanks for making the entire sixth season totally unwatchable with your boring self!
3. Caitlin and Charlie
If my choices for this list have proven anything so far, it's that I tend to HATE it when shows lose their main character and try to soldier on with replacements. Fox Mulder, Quinn Mallory, and Daniel Jackson are all excellent examples, and their ranks are joined by Mike Flaherty of "Spin City." I have to give the show credit for trying; Michael J. Fox had to leave for medical reasons, and everyone else wanted to stay, but instead of shifting focus to any one of the existing characters and giving them room to shine, they brought on Charlie Sheen to fill his shoes and utterly take over the show. But you see, he had help. An infiltrator had already joined their midst in the form of Heather Locklear's 'Caitlin', the coldest, nastiest bitch on the show. I don't know why she was needed in the first place, and I never liked her character at all. I don't understand why she was the new guy one minute, and THE face of "Spin City" the next. I would have preferred that more screen time was given to Carter and Stuart, James, Paulie, Nikki, the mayor, ANYONE but Heather Locklear. Michael J. Fox leaving was the last straw for me. The rest of the cast may have remained the same, but with Caitlin and Charlie dominating every storyline and overshadowing the characters who had been there from the beginning, and with whom they lacked all chemistry, it just wasn't the same show. Thanks, assholes, for ruining a perfectly good sitcom.
2. Connor
In its five-year run, "Angel" made a lot of mistakes with its characters. I'm sure a lot of this can be contributed to Joss Whedon's utter inability to let any of his creations be truly happy, and perhaps this is a sure sign that we were lucky Joss never got a chance to destroy everyone on "Firefly" one by one. No mistake was ever worse than Connor, Angel's son, who marked the beginning of a quick decline in the show's quality. Like Dawn, Connor was a Magical Random Family Member who popped up with little to no explanation necessary (how did two vampires manage to conceive a child? Who knows! Who cares! Angel's a DADDY now!), and also like Dawn (and if you think about it, like Lilly Foster-Lambert!), Connor skipped over that awkward growing up period and went straight into adolescence, thanks to a ridiculously convenient prophecy involving an alternate universe. You really would have thought that Joss had learned his lesson with Dawn but Connor was even worse because Joss didn't even have a game plan prepared for Connor, eventually dumping his ass in the Wormhole of Continuity and rearranging show history so that everyone forgot who Connor was and everything was back to normal. WTF SHOW? Way to create your biggest problem then duck and run when things got too sketchy. You know, I really wanted to like Connor too. I had a giant crush on Vincent Kartheiser ever since that Alaska movie that he was in with Thora Birch when I was 9. But I'm sorry, everything went downhill, starting with Connor. Wesley lost all the foppishness and innocence that made him adorable and beloved and entered the era of 'Dark Wesley', who did not get along with Angel. Wolfram and Hart started playing a central role in screwing with everyone's lives, something that eventually figuratively killed Gunn's character and literally killed Fred's. And worst of all was Cordelia, who ended up screwing both father and son in a disgusting display of character homocide. Ironically, the only person it didn't seem to affect was Angel himself, who let Connor go live an alternate life and remained the only person who remembered his son, and thus never spoke of him again. Way to go, show. Why did you ever introduce that fucking brat in the first place?
1. Maritza Cruz
"Third Watch" was notable for being first show to really succeed at presenting all branches of emergency service personnel: cops, paramedics, and firefighters. By the fourth season, though, they may have started to realize that their strongest components were the cop characters, and the focus really started to shift, as we had way more cops than the other two. I never really minded the other additions; the only one I could not stand was Sgt. Maritza Cruz, a tough, hard-as-nails Latina detective who started out as an undercover cop with sketchy intentions. We were led to believe Cruz was corrupt while she led fan favorite Bosco down an increasingly darker path, both mentoring him and sleeping with him and in the process destroying the best partnership on the show: Bosco and Faith. We thought it would end up that Cruz would go down for her crimes and get the boot, but alas, in some convoluted surprise turning point, it was revealed that Cruz was really working for the good guys all along, and just went about it the wrong way. This would have been fine had it not come to light during a three-way shootout between Bosco, Faith and Cruz that nearly killed Faith and worse, Faith and Bosco's partnership! No skank should ever have come between Bosco and Faith, especially not one as unremorseful and downright evil as Maritza Cruz. The storyline came startlingly close to ruining Maurice Boscorelli for me as well, but thankfully he redeemed himself by aiming for Maritza, not Faith, when it came time to pull the trigger.
But Cruz's involvement didn't stop there--oh no! She stuck around and continued to piss everyone off while still toying with Bosco, who was starting to look more like a tool and less like the strong character he had been. As a result, the show lost a lot of its wonder and hope it presented in early seasons, in exchange for a much grittier vibe that seemed out of place. I never warmed to her, not once, and I saw no evidence that we were supposed to warm to her. It's one thing to have complicated characters, but if they aren't the least bit likeable, why are they getting so much screen time?! The worst offense was that in the show's series finale, it was CRUZ over everyone else who got the heroic death. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm glad the bitch finally bit it and characters I loved and rooted for got to live on, but come on, really? Are we really supposed to care that she FINALLY did something right at the very end? I didn't feel one ounce of sympathy, nor did I buy that she was missed. If they were going for gravity, they really ought to have chosen another character to heroically sacrifice themselves, because Cruz deserved the worst fate imaginable for ruining my show.
10. Towelie
"South Park" is known for pushing the boundaries of what's appropriate; they're also known for testing the limits of their lofty reputation. Towelie, a cotton towel that smokes pot and does little else, represents both those traits personified. It's difficult to explain to people that the show can actually be pretty smart, because for every one clever, crafted episode that Matt and Trey create, they make two ridiculously stupid, immature ones. They claim Towelie was an experiment of theirs, to see how much merchandise they could market based on sheer stupidity. People have been known to obsess over every new character "South Park" introduces: Mr. Hankey, Timmy, Butters... Towelie was supposed to be ironic because everybody would go out and buy Towelie merchandise and Trey and Matt could just laugh at our dumb asses for buying whatever shit they try to sell us, but I think it failed, because not only do loyal viewers despise Towelie, even the characters point out that Towelie is "the worst character ever." Sorry, "South Park", your experiment failed, and every time you try to revisit it, it just gets sadder and sadder. Please throw Towelie away already.
9. Lilly Foster-Lambert
Somewhere around the sixth season, producers of the 90's sitcom "Step by Step" thought they needed to spice things up a bit, or maybe they thought all the kids were getting too old and weren't cute anymore. Either of those may have been true, but whatever their reasoning was, they went about it all the wrong way by casting this little cherubic nightmare as the first child to link the Foster and Lambert families together. Of course, babies only generate so much comedy, so in true sitcom fashion, Lilly Foster-Lambert was born one season and aged six years the next, despite none of the other children visibly aging along with her. I would have preferred a wailing baby to that obnoxious child, who we were also forced to endure in the late 90's Welch's Grape Juice commercials. I never wanted to punch a child in the face before I started seeing this girl everywhere. If I saw her today, I might still be inclined to punch her in the face. "Step by Step" was mediocre enough on its own, did we really need a cutesy little blonde girl running around taking up all the screen time? She filled the 'Cute Quota', but at the expense of Patrick Duffy's youngest boy, Brendan, previously the baby of the family, who disappeared into oblivion when this bitch showed up! No one ever seemed to notice either! That poor kid, he may not have had a personality apart from 'baby' but he really didn't deserve his fate, and he was much less irritating than that damn Lilly Foster-Lambert.
Sorry kid, you're just not cute anymore. It was a good run though.
8. Abby Lockhart
I debated with whether or not to put Abby on the list, because when she first showed up on "ER", I really liked her, and Maura Tierney is a good actress. But I am willing to put my feelings about the actress aside in order to acknowledge the insufferableness of Abby. Normally I don't care for it when shows introduce female characters solely to be the love interest of a male lead, but I sort of wish they'd gone that route with Abby, because I liked her much better when she was with Carter. The disastrous, ugly, too-embarrassing-to-behold breakup of Abby and Carter was the beginning of the end for me, because they basically bastardized Carter just to make Abby look more sympathetic, going against everything the character was. I guess I'm alright with it, in the end, because I would never wish Abby on Carter permanently, but it was still jarring to feel like I should be hating the sweetest, most loveable character on the show. In the end, I saw Abby for the whiny, self-involved, emotional wreck she was, and I think she's better off with Luka Kovac, who was always hit or miss for me as well. I wish that the show had ended before it ever had a chance to become The Abby Show, but alas, ratings speak volumes, and if you're going to soldier on for another decade, you might as well put your best foot forward, and Maura can act... I just wish she didn't have to be such an obnoxious character.
7. Dawn Summers
This may be an unpopular opinion... but I kind of liked Dawn. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was always known for its camp and melodrama, and Joss Whedon has come to be known for his WTF moments in television history. Buffy having a sister was one of the first we were ever exposed to, so it's probably why it comes under the most scrutiny. I didn't mind that Dawn showed up, because it led to a great season finale in the defeat of Glory and the death of Buffy, and I don't mind what she eventually became, which was a considerably stronger person, all for the better because of her sister. But everything in between was just wretched. Dawn was a hot mess, whining, crying, always getting kidnapped because she was doing stupid shit. She even had a bout with kleptomania that was just ridiculously out of place on that show. And everyone always came to her rescue, because she was Dawn. Dawn haters have actually been known to shout "SHUT UP DAWN!" at the screen whenever she appears because everything she says just fucks everything up. I learned this from the Buffy musical tour, and it finally made me realize that Dawn was just wrong on every level. Thankfully, the show was already losing steam from the departure of Angel, Cordelia, Oz, and Faith, not to mention Willow's increasingly darker ways and Xander's increasingly useless ones, so I don't feel like Dawn's entirely to blame, but it sure is nice to have a scapegoat.
6. John Doggett
This is nothing against Robert Patrick, a staple of sci-fi show guest stars, who is always lovely, terrific, and welcome anywhere. I am entirely against Doggett, the piss-poor replacement for the M.I.A. Fox Mulder, who never really filled our beloved believer's shoes. Doggett wasn't Mulder, and the show never claimed him to be. On the contrary, Doggett was intended to fill the 'skeptic' half of the duo while Scully, whose experiences over the past 7 years molded her into a less uptight person, was to take over the 'believer' role. But both lacked the charisma needed for said role, and together they were just a giant pile of boring and don't even get me started on Doggett's other partner, and Scully's eventual replacement, Reyes... What were the producers thinking? X-Files without Mulder OR Scully? Preposterous! Thank God they realized their mistake, brought Mulder back from the dead, and let the finale and the subsequent movie be about our original beloved pair of agents. Doggett was well and good, but he was a foil for Mulder, not Scully, and foils only work when they're both on screen at the same time.
5. Everyone who was ever added to "Sliders"
Look, I'm not going to try and argue that "Sliders" was a precious gem that was tarnished over the years. I may have adored it when I was 10 or 11, but looking back on it now, "Sliders" was kind of shitty right from the start, but it worked somehow. It was campy fun and the cast blended together well and had chemistry despite poor writing. Idealistic and awkward boy genius Quinn Mallory (Jerry O'Connell), plucky girl next door Wade Welles (Sabrina Lloyd), sarcastic but smooth retired R&B singer Rembrandt Brown (Cleavant Derricks) and of course arrogant and patriarchal Professor Maxamillian Arturo (John Rhys-Davies) were the perfect dream team, and on a shallower note, their names were pretty cool too! I wasn't always crazy about Wade, but she served a purpose as the heart of the team, something that was lacking when both Arturo and Wade departed and instead we got cold bitch, Maggie Beckett (Kari Wuhrer). I may not have loved Wade, but I HATED Maggie. She was so affronting and hateful, and replacing one cliche (girl next door) with another (badass butt-kicking hot chick) was NOT an improvement.
The next new character, Quinn's brother Colin (played by Jerry O'Connell's real-life bro Charlie) was the only one I could stand, and added new dimensions, but then, what fuckery should arise, but BOTH Mallory/O'Connell brothers are axed in one fell swoop, falling into plot-hole-Hell to be replaced with the incredible boring duo, Diana Davis and Mallory. Let me clear one thing up: Diana Davis is an original character (with a personality so vanilla I can't recall a single thing about her), but 'Mallory' was actually supposed to be Quinn Mallory's double from that world, who fused with the Quinn we all knew and loved and, like, absorbed his personality or something. I don't know, it was all convoluted and stupid and was never resolved in a way that restored OUR Quinn, but the long and short of it is that we were supposed to believe they were sort of the same person. Never mind that on every other world, in every other episode, Quinn's doubles were always played by Jerry O'Connell. Fuck continuity, on THIS world, Quinn looks like some other asshole, and all subsequent doubles of "Quinn Mallory" will look that way too. WTF SHOW? Why not just introduce a NEW character with a new complex history instead of just coasting off the one you already created and barely explained? It's bad enough you're trying to hammer out another year with only one remaining original cast member; don't insult us with your fuckery as well. Quinn Mallory is and always will be Jerry O'Connell alone. Accept no substitutes.
IT'S LIKE THEY'RE TWINS!
4. Jonas Quinn
At the end of Stargate SG-1's fifth season, the show left Showtime for Sci Fi, and Michael Shanks, a.k.a. Daniel Jackson, left the show over contract disputes, perhaps thinking that the show wouldn't flourish on a new network and without one of its core characters. This was the biggest mistake the show ever made, as Daniel Jackson was not only the favorite character of the fans, but deeply entrenched in Stargate legacy, having been THE PERSON to figure out how the damn gate worked in the first place. To have SG-1 without Daniel was just blasphemy, but they took their folly one step further by KILLING Daniel and trying to REPLACE him... with this tool.
Jonas Quinn was a moralistic young scientist from another planet, minimally involved in the incident that led to Daniel's demise... He was also THE BIGGEST TOOL ever to grace the gate room, hands down. The writers tried to give Jonas a personality of his own, but they failed miserably. Without Daniel in the picture, the team had a few empty quotas to fill, namely 'Hot Young Guy', 'Idealistic Non-Military Guy', and 'Jack O'Neill Foil,' which Jonas promptly filled. They didn't want to be too obvious or heavy-handed in their attempts to replace the K.I.A. fan favorite, so Jonas fell just short of being a linguist/archaeologist/geek like Daniel. Without these skills to bring to the team, Jonas's only contribution is as a scientist... but there was never any need for one with the much-more-brilliant Sam Carter around. Therefore, JONAS WAS USELESS. I've never seen a character who was a bigger tool than Jonas. And to prove the extent of his tool-ness, Jonas got the boot the moment Daniel Jackson was resurrected and returned to the team, and absolutely no one cared. Thanks for keeping the seat warm, Mr. Quinn, but we all knew you were only a temporary fix. Bye bye, tool. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. Oh, and thanks for making the entire sixth season totally unwatchable with your boring self!
3. Caitlin and Charlie
If my choices for this list have proven anything so far, it's that I tend to HATE it when shows lose their main character and try to soldier on with replacements. Fox Mulder, Quinn Mallory, and Daniel Jackson are all excellent examples, and their ranks are joined by Mike Flaherty of "Spin City." I have to give the show credit for trying; Michael J. Fox had to leave for medical reasons, and everyone else wanted to stay, but instead of shifting focus to any one of the existing characters and giving them room to shine, they brought on Charlie Sheen to fill his shoes and utterly take over the show. But you see, he had help. An infiltrator had already joined their midst in the form of Heather Locklear's 'Caitlin', the coldest, nastiest bitch on the show. I don't know why she was needed in the first place, and I never liked her character at all. I don't understand why she was the new guy one minute, and THE face of "Spin City" the next. I would have preferred that more screen time was given to Carter and Stuart, James, Paulie, Nikki, the mayor, ANYONE but Heather Locklear. Michael J. Fox leaving was the last straw for me. The rest of the cast may have remained the same, but with Caitlin and Charlie dominating every storyline and overshadowing the characters who had been there from the beginning, and with whom they lacked all chemistry, it just wasn't the same show. Thanks, assholes, for ruining a perfectly good sitcom.
2. Connor
In its five-year run, "Angel" made a lot of mistakes with its characters. I'm sure a lot of this can be contributed to Joss Whedon's utter inability to let any of his creations be truly happy, and perhaps this is a sure sign that we were lucky Joss never got a chance to destroy everyone on "Firefly" one by one. No mistake was ever worse than Connor, Angel's son, who marked the beginning of a quick decline in the show's quality. Like Dawn, Connor was a Magical Random Family Member who popped up with little to no explanation necessary (how did two vampires manage to conceive a child? Who knows! Who cares! Angel's a DADDY now!), and also like Dawn (and if you think about it, like Lilly Foster-Lambert!), Connor skipped over that awkward growing up period and went straight into adolescence, thanks to a ridiculously convenient prophecy involving an alternate universe. You really would have thought that Joss had learned his lesson with Dawn but Connor was even worse because Joss didn't even have a game plan prepared for Connor, eventually dumping his ass in the Wormhole of Continuity and rearranging show history so that everyone forgot who Connor was and everything was back to normal. WTF SHOW? Way to create your biggest problem then duck and run when things got too sketchy. You know, I really wanted to like Connor too. I had a giant crush on Vincent Kartheiser ever since that Alaska movie that he was in with Thora Birch when I was 9. But I'm sorry, everything went downhill, starting with Connor. Wesley lost all the foppishness and innocence that made him adorable and beloved and entered the era of 'Dark Wesley', who did not get along with Angel. Wolfram and Hart started playing a central role in screwing with everyone's lives, something that eventually figuratively killed Gunn's character and literally killed Fred's. And worst of all was Cordelia, who ended up screwing both father and son in a disgusting display of character homocide. Ironically, the only person it didn't seem to affect was Angel himself, who let Connor go live an alternate life and remained the only person who remembered his son, and thus never spoke of him again. Way to go, show. Why did you ever introduce that fucking brat in the first place?
1. Maritza Cruz
"Third Watch" was notable for being first show to really succeed at presenting all branches of emergency service personnel: cops, paramedics, and firefighters. By the fourth season, though, they may have started to realize that their strongest components were the cop characters, and the focus really started to shift, as we had way more cops than the other two. I never really minded the other additions; the only one I could not stand was Sgt. Maritza Cruz, a tough, hard-as-nails Latina detective who started out as an undercover cop with sketchy intentions. We were led to believe Cruz was corrupt while she led fan favorite Bosco down an increasingly darker path, both mentoring him and sleeping with him and in the process destroying the best partnership on the show: Bosco and Faith. We thought it would end up that Cruz would go down for her crimes and get the boot, but alas, in some convoluted surprise turning point, it was revealed that Cruz was really working for the good guys all along, and just went about it the wrong way. This would have been fine had it not come to light during a three-way shootout between Bosco, Faith and Cruz that nearly killed Faith and worse, Faith and Bosco's partnership! No skank should ever have come between Bosco and Faith, especially not one as unremorseful and downright evil as Maritza Cruz. The storyline came startlingly close to ruining Maurice Boscorelli for me as well, but thankfully he redeemed himself by aiming for Maritza, not Faith, when it came time to pull the trigger.
But Cruz's involvement didn't stop there--oh no! She stuck around and continued to piss everyone off while still toying with Bosco, who was starting to look more like a tool and less like the strong character he had been. As a result, the show lost a lot of its wonder and hope it presented in early seasons, in exchange for a much grittier vibe that seemed out of place. I never warmed to her, not once, and I saw no evidence that we were supposed to warm to her. It's one thing to have complicated characters, but if they aren't the least bit likeable, why are they getting so much screen time?! The worst offense was that in the show's series finale, it was CRUZ over everyone else who got the heroic death. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm glad the bitch finally bit it and characters I loved and rooted for got to live on, but come on, really? Are we really supposed to care that she FINALLY did something right at the very end? I didn't feel one ounce of sympathy, nor did I buy that she was missed. If they were going for gravity, they really ought to have chosen another character to heroically sacrifice themselves, because Cruz deserved the worst fate imaginable for ruining my show.