Awesome Ladies: The End!
So I finally finished out my awesome ladies thingy. Twenty million years later, but better late then never, right? I wrote most of them a while ago and was just being a lazy bum about getting quotes an pictures. It's still just TV ladies, and these are all in one big dump.
Yay for finishing something?
Claudia Jean Cregg
"We have at our disposal a captive audience of schoolchildren. Some of them don't go to the blackboard or raise their hand 'cause they think they're going to be wrong. I think you should say to these kids, "You think you get it wrong sometimes, you should come down here and see how the big boys do it." I think you should tell them you haven't given up hope and that it may turn up, but, in the meantime, you want NASA to put its best people in a room and you want them to start building Galileo 6. Some of them will laugh and most of them won't care but for some, they might honestly see that it's about going to the blackboard and raising your hand. And that's the broader theme."
"In the following days we'll be meeting with the Reverend Al Caldwell, members of Beijing's embassy and INS agents. The President has asked Josh Lyman and Sam Seaborn to run these meetings, so it's entirely possible that by week's end we will have alienated Christians, China and our own government."
"You want to make out with me right now, don't you?"
"You know if I was living in Qumar I wouldn't be allowed to say 'shove it up your ass Toby.' But since I'm not, shove it up your ass Toby."
I was trying not to do more than on lady from a show, but it's impossible here, because I really wanted to include Abbey, but it's impossible to NOT have CJ on an awesome women post. CJ is tough and smart and earnest and funny, endearing and sometimes awkward and vulnerable but ALWAYS kickass and dedicated. She carved out her place in the boys' club of the West Wing and did arguably the hardest and most publicly criticized job, outside of the President himself, and did it with grace and style that no one else could step in and fill even for a day without messing it up. And in the later seasons, she stepped up to fill Leo's shoe's, serving as the President's right hand and serving an essentially thankless duty and doing a damn good job of it, once she found her feet.
CJ is amazing, and I will always want to be her when I grow up.
Favorite Moment: Picking one CJ moment is impossible, but I will always have extra love for her exchange with Josh in "The US Poet Laureate", when she's confronting him about going on the Lemon Lyman's page and threatening to shove a motherboard up his ass. Because it's hilarious, and also because it's Stacey's favorite scene, and I always think of her.
Abbey Bartlet
"The wine is a '95 Old Vine zinfandel from Hog Cellars, which once belonged to King Boudouin of Belgium, and is best sipped while making anagrams out of the phrase, "My husband's an enormous jackass!""
"It's our history. Better or worse, it's our history. We're not going to lock it in the basement or brush it with a new coat of paint. It's our history."
"I haven't come in here because it seems that every time I do there's a new White House Counsel. I think Leo keeps them in the basement like those two ladies in Arsenic and Old Lace."
"When did I stop being "Dr." Bartlet? When in the campaign did I decide that women were gonna like me more if I called myself "Mrs."? When did I decide that women were that stupid?"
Abbey was always one of my favorite parts of the show. I would get genuinely excited when she showed up, and I loved her and Jed's relationship. They were loving and both entirely too smart and they challenged one another. Abbey was a strange mix of idealistic and pragmatic, and I always wished the show had given her more focus outside of Jed, and shown first hand some of her trips and what it's like being a brilliant woman who is nonetheless always going to be overshadowed by her husband's very public role.
Favorite Moment: I'm going to have to go with Abbey, CJ, Donna, and Amy getting drunk in "Dead Irish Writers", though it's hard to choose.
Parker
"Non-sequential serial numbers, my favorite!"
"Place the mask over your mouth and nose and breathe normally. In the event of a water landing your seat cushion can be used as a flotation device. But, let's face it, if this thing goes down in the water, more than likely the impact will kill you. Please take a moment to locate the nearest emergency exits because if this plane's on fire you're gonna wanna get out quick. Jet fuel burns at over 1000 degrees. That's hot, folks!"
"It's like Billy from The Family Circus if Billy was a drunken sex fiend."
While it's Hardison who stole my heart first and foremost in Leverage, Parker is amazing and endearing and strange and a little scary, all at once. She manages to be incredibly dysfunctional and yet completely adorable about it. There's a childlike quality to Parker that could be creepy, but never really is. She's the best thief in the world, and she doesn't even really care about STUFF, she just likes stealing, and money. She doesn't even like spending it, she just likes money. Some of the show's sweetest moments have come through Parker gradually starting to learn how to interact with people through her teammates and their jobs, and the slight softening never really comes at the expense of competence. She remains and awesome and somewhat morally ambiguous thief.
Favorite Moment: While I love earlier seasons best, the moment in "The Studio Job" when Parker walks around trying to be a weird pop star, and then complaining that she wasn't weird enough makes me laugh EVERY TIME.
Angela Montenegro
"Sweetie, this is one of those times when I know *I'm* right, and everyone else is *confused*!"
"You know what you people lack? Whimsy. It's a genuine handicap."
"Just because you have a doctorate now doesn't mean I won't use you as a swizzle stick."
"Ok, you started off in English, but I have no idea where you ended up."
Sometimes, shows put a woman into the "heart of the operation" role, and somehow manage to make me thoroughly and completely dislike them. (Cameron on House is forever my example of this.) They highlight all of the *womanly* feelings and weaknesses and even if the character is established as smart and capable, somehow that all fades away. Angela manages to not do that at all. She is undeniably the heart and emotion of the team, but she's smart, she's sexually confident, she stands up for what she believes is right. She's funny, she's quick, and she's the stabilizing force who counters Bones' (and Zach and to a degree Hodgins) cold logic with empathy and reality without undermining them, or making herself seem illogical. Instead she's learned to bridge the gap between the science-y worlds and her own and Booth's.
Favorite Moment: I'm generally not a fan of the big moments (first kisses, first times, marriages, etc) in TV. They're very rarely ever as epic as the lead up, and I tend to like those things in FIC much more than in canon. But I was a sucker for Angela and Hodgins' jailcell wedding.
Tami Taylor
"It’s becoming a thing. I mean, it’s a thing. And you know what thing it is, it’s that thing that we always knew was going to happen to our little girl. It’s that thing-that thing’s happening now."
"It was medieval; you know it was like the Scarlet Letter or something watching that girl walk across the cafeteria and everybody just glared at her."
"Here's the thing, and I know it's probably not easy to see here in Dillon, but you are at the beginning of your life. A lot of these football heroes around here, they're not gonna get much farther than this. But you're gonna go to some great college and have a career that you love. And I'm telling you right now, women are gonna flock to you. I know it's hard to believe, but that's how it's gonna work. You're a good person and this is just the beginning. I'm right one hundred percent of the time. You can ask my husband."
As I watch the final season of FNL, I'm struck by how there just really is NOT a better marriage on TV than Tami and Eric Taylor. They are real and organic in a way that is so rarely really looked at on TV. And Tami is such a wonderful character on her own. She struggles in the beginning to find a place outside of "Coach's Wife", and as we see her grow into that, we also see her flounder, trying to balance the different parts of her life. She is vibrant and smart and a believable mix of old fashioned and progressive and not quite sure how to balance that. She has a huge, loving heart and wants so badly to help, but sometimes is blinded by her own impressions and privilege, and the show actually shows that, and lets us see her mistakes.
Tami is amazing, and there is nothing on TV that makes me sniffle more than when Tami Taylor is sad. Eric gets the speeches to his teams, but Tami says more with one look that most characters do in an entire episode.
Favorite Moment: I love Tami going to Tyra and helping her clean up after her mother breaks the table, and taking her under her wing. Which for some reason, I can't find which episode that is right now.
Fiona Glenanne
Michael Westen: "Fiona, you were supposed to stop the car, not blow it into the Everglades! What happened to shorting the ignition?"
Fiona Glenanne: "You said disable; it's not going anywhere."
"Well, now you're in Miami. Get yourself a 24-year-old with big fake tits."
Sam Axe: [at a gay bar] "How do you want to handle this?"
Fiona Glenanne: "Well, I think the balls are in your court."
"Nothing turns on a woman so much as when something goes, 'BOOM.'"
Fi is badass. Fi gets shit done. She blows things up and she kicks a lot of ass and she is one lady you really in no way want to be on the wrong side of. While I sometimes have issues with how the show deals with Fi/Michael, Fi does get a lot of opportunity to both kick ass, and be the one doing the rescuing when Michael or Sam get in trouble. I love her moments with Maddie and how awkward Fi can be with moments of emotional depth, and the fact that while she is tough and fearless and hard-noses, she is also frequently genuinely adorable, and not afraid to be so.
Favorite Moment: Fi has a lot of moments of badassery, but there's always something about her shaking the snowglobe Michael gets her in one of the early episodes - and nearly hitting him in the face - that just encapsulates how awesome she is for me. (Also my favorite moment in This Fi Vid of awesomeness.
Dana Whitaker
"Well I'm a 33-year-old producer and for one hour every night, this is my little corner of the world. And nothing screws up here unless I screw it up."
Dana Whitaker: "Isaac's gonna want to show us pictures from his vacation so I'm going to get a welcome back cake and we'll have a little party in his office tomorrow."
Casey McCall: "What kind of cake?"
Dana Whitaker: "What kind of cake?"
Casey McCall: "Yes."
Dana Whitaker: "I don't know Casey - why do you ask?"
Casey McCall: "I'm particular about cake. And I have to say it's been my experience that men buy better cake than women. I've found that women tend to get these yogurt-frosted low-cal things laced with a rum and fruit concoction that make eating cake into something you do to be polite. So that's why I was asking what kind of cake you were planning on getting to celebrate Isaac returning from vacation."
Dana Whitaker: "Wow, I didn't know you felt so strongly about it, but now that I do I guess the answer is - whatever cake I damn please."
"Please lower your voice. I do not want your tawdry tales of office lust infecting my news room."
"The truth is, I have a job that involves me, and stimulates me, and rewards me, and takes up a lot of my time, and I'm not willing to do my job just a little bit. I want to do ALL of it. It's part of me, and I'm different without it. And that is who I am, and that is who you need to love."
Sports Night is one of those shows I came into very late, well after everyone else had seen it. I am not a sports person, so the idea of a sports show based comedy was just sort of meh to me, and thus I ignored it until I begin to see quotes and other people whose tastes I tend to agree with loving on it, and then I gave it a shot. And was of course thrilled I did.
While the Sports night love of my life will always be Dan, there wasn't a single character on there I disliked, and Dana was probably my next favorite. Dana is neurotic, but capable of calm when she needs to be. She's quick enough to not only keep up with the boys, but come out on top a lot of the time. She's funny and sexy and smart and she keeps things running no matter what. I love her friendships with Natalie, and Isaac, and that she knows who she is and stays true to that, even if she wobbles along the way now and then. She's very much a woman in an industry where men are king, and she LOVES her job with all her heart and it shows.
Favorite Moment: The turkey, from "Thespis". I can't help it, the scene makes me laugh.
Veronica Mars
"Tragedy blows through your life like a tornado, uprooting everything, creating chaos. You wait for the dust to settle, and then you choose. You can live in the wreckage and pretend it's still the mansion you remember. Or you can crawl from the rubble and slowly rebuild. Because after disaster strikes, the important thing is that you move on. But if you're like me, you just keep chasing the storm. (pause) The problem with chasing the storm is that it wears you down, breaks your spirit. Even the experts agree, a girl needs closure."
"You know those people who can predict when change is coming in their life? I'm not one of them. Change has a way of just walking up and punching me in the face."
"I'd be the best rich person, seriously. I'd be the perfect combination of frivolous and sensible. Money is so wasted on the wealthy."
Say what you will about the last seasons of Veronica Mars - and I have - but that first season is television GOLD. Veronica was a smart, sassy girl with her own mind and goals and a story to tell. While the side characters played huge roles in the series, it was very much VERONICA'S show, and she earned it by being a fabulous character. Sassy girl detective might not be a NEW idea, but there are very few characters on TV who've gotten to play the kind of role Veronica did on a prime time TV show. While the show was fun and quick and pretty, it also touched on serious issues, and it didn't demean those issues while talking about them. Veronica was a character you could both empathize with and admire, and I only wish that the later seasons of the show had done better justice to the fantastic character they had in her.
Favorite Moment: Pretty much any moment with Keith and Veronica. Keith=Best TV Daddy Ever. I'm especially fond of the scene in "Mars Vs. Mars" where Veronica gets the ink to the face.
Debra Morgan
"Say one more thing about my brother and I will kick your nuts down your fucking throat."
"You are not allowed to talk about anyone I date as long as you're seeing Little Miss 'Pardon My Tits.' I'm sorry, Dex, but she is gross. And pale, and nobody is pale in Miami. She is obviously a vampire. A gross, English, titty vampire."
"What are we doing home in the middle of the day? She asked, hoping for sex."
Debra is a rare mix of utter balls-out vulgarity and heartbreaking vulnerability. She tries SO hard and on the show, we see her get kicked in the teeth for it again and again, but she keeps going. With Deb, more often than not we, the viewer, see the train wreck coming long before she does, and want to peek through our fingers as it approaches.
But the thing about Deb is that she's GOOD at what she does, she just doesn't always realize it. She's her own biggest advocate, in that she tells everyone else that she CAN do the job, but beneath that, she doesn't always believe it. One of the best parts of her character's progression on the show is watching HER realize it, and her bravado gradually start changing into genuine confidence. Debra has the foulest mouth of any character on the show. She's loud, she's abrasive, and yet she's also the most hopeful and lovable, in her way, and there are many times when I wished the show had more of her point of view as its focus.
Favorite Moment: Most of Deb's momnts are pretty strongly tied to Dexter, but I like when she goes and rescues Anton on her own, in Season 3 (I think.)
Queen Katherine of Aragon
"I know you, you have decided, but it grieves you. Will you destroy your marriage, your country, your soul before God, on the whim of one girl? Because she denies you? Because she tortures you with her refusal? She think she doesn't know exactly what she's doing? She wants me to step aside. Where is my wise husband? Where is he? You are a king, so be one."
"Bring your hundred learned men! I can bring a thousand learned men from all over Europe to prove that I am you wife, I always have been your wife and I always will be!"
"For every scholar that would vote for you, I could find a thousand that would vote for me."
"Let me tell you this. You want me to lie before God, and admit my first marriage was consummated? Well, it was not. You want me to retire, and withdraw my daughter's claim as sole rightful heir to the throne? Well, I shall not. Not in a thousand years. Not if you rack me within an inch of my life. So, I hope you have the belly for a fight, Anne Boleyn, because I'll fight you, every inch of the way."
I'm only doing TV ladies, so this is cheating a bit since Katherine of Aragon was an actual historical figure. BUT I don't care, because she was awesome. While I initially started watching the show for the costume porn, and for Natalie Dormer, Katherine ended up being my favorite of Henry's wives. (Though Anne is a close second, Natalie is just so gorgeously manipulative.)
Favorite Moment: I loved pretty much all of her face offs with Henry, and how even though she was walking that very careful line between her belief that Henry was her husband and God's chosen sovereign, she still wasn't going to just back down when he was being a dick.
Alice
"This reminds me of those church lock-ins I attended as a girl. No necking, children."
"Kate, I know you aren't fond of me, but I'm concerned about your development as a young woman, just like your mother. You're promiscuous. You aren't guarding your flower."
Quotes from this show are way hard to find. USoT is basically a showcase for Toni to be awesome, and Alice is, technically, an alter of Tara. Tara's alters are all distinct personalities, and Alice is essentially the ringleader. She manages the others, and Tara, when Tara's in trouble. Alice is outwardly the perfect model of a 1950's housewife. She cooks, she cleans, she organizes, she's demure and perfectly coifed. But beneath that, Alice is a BADASS. Alice doesn't take shit from anyone, she's ruthlessly snide when she wants to be, and she gets shit done. She's as screwed up as any of the other alters, and Tara, but she hides it behind this cheerful facade that becomes sort of menacing when she's being crossed.
Favorite Moment: In the pilot episode, Alice drags Tara's daughter, Kate, into the ladies room and washes her mouth out with soap. It's deeply screwed up, but it's sort of an excellent introduction to Alice's mix of sunshine sweet and ruthless bitch.
Annie Sawyer
"Annie: Maybe he's had a blow to the head.
George: I'm sorry?
Annie: Happened to my nan. She got hit in the head by a radio-controlled plane at the county fair. From that moment, obsessed with pygmy goats.
George: There wasn't a single bit of that sentence I understood."
"Oh my god. You're Tully's Mini-Me."
"Annie: Just to warn you, if you go in for a hug Mitchell will try to kiss you.
George: My god, I leave you alone for five minutes.
Annie: It's like being attacked by an ironing board.
Mitchell: If I had intended to kiss you I'd have put on some chapstick first"
"There's a question you haven't asked yourself yet. If I exist, what else does? You think you're the big bad wolf. You should see George on a full moon. You think you're a cold-blooded murderer? Mitchell was killing eighty years before you were even born. Don't you get it yet? I'm just the tip of the iceberg. I'm Good Cop."
Annie is flat out adorable. There's more to her and all of that, but the thing that continually strikes me is no matter what happens, no matter how she fumbles or backslides or her awkward moments, Annie is insanely adorable and likable. The show likes to present Mitchell and George as the main storyline and Annie almost as a side storyline, but Annie is the most consistently lovable of the trio.
Annie is a ghost, and thus starts out the show by nature as the most passive, but she out grows that, finding herself, her own powers. She's the glue that keeps their deeply dysfunctional little family unit together, and there's a sweetness and vulnerability to her even when she's at her most badass (and while she gets a lot of damsel moments, Annie also as her share of badassery.)
Favorite Moment: Her showdown with Owen is pretty amazing, but I'm fondest of Annie when she's witty and quick and adorable, like in episode 1.4 when she's telling George what to wear.
Nicolette Grant
"Wayne Henrickson: He was really scary, mom
Nicolette Grant: All Baptists are, honey."
"Understand that there is nothing I wouldn't do to be a part of my family Margene. NOTHING!"
"We have to be realistic. You can't keep a secret like me and you're not a good liar like Barb."
"Nicki: [about Barb] Do you think she's happy for me? About the baby?
Margie: Of course. She loves babies. Sometimes I think she wishes my boys were hers.
Nicki: Sometimes I think they wish the same thing."
"Nicki: I love you, Bill.
Bill: I love you, too.
Nicki: How much?
Bill: I say it's astronomical, beyond all measure.
Nicki: I have $58,000 in debt."
"That frightens me. I don't know that a marriage based on love can go the distance. The secret holiness of the institution. The sanctity of marriage. Without it, it's just random couplings, with no purpose or stick-to-it-iveness. How will we survive the bad times on just love?"
Nicki is so deeply, irrevocably damaged. Her entire family are, and Nicki and Albie are the two we're shown the most to demonstrate just how FAR their damage goes. Nicki is irrational, insane, obsessive, narrow-minded, and she is AWESOME in her extremely screwed up way.
The thing about Big Love that I will never, EVER understand is the show's continuing assumption that the audience was watching and rooting for Bill as a hero. No one I know who watched the show watched for Bill. Everyone watched for the women, IN SPITE of Bill. And while I love pretty much all of the women, Nicki was always my favorite. She was more or less shamelessly unlikable, but she did so in a way that somehow turned into this starkly broken lovableness. Nicki always gave the impression that if she ever threw off the oppression of her upbringing, and se her mind to doing something, she'd be pretty unstoppable, but she would always be in her own way.
Favorite Moment: I love Nicki's judgmental, harsh moments because she delivers them so, so well, but I think as a character, Nicki climbing up on the roof and declaring something that wasn't inherently selfish, in Block Party", might have been one of her first real growth steps.
Debbie Novotny
"And one more thing. The next time you talk to me like that. I'm going to rip you a new butthole so big, you're gonna be able to take a cannon up your ass."
"You know, there were people, when they found out that Michael was gay, who said, and did, the cruelest things. Friends, neighbors, family. My own goddamn sister wouldn't even let her kids come over here. She was afraid Michael was going to molest them or something. Because that's the way people are. They're ignorant and they're scared. And there's nothing you can do, except educate 'em or shoot 'em. Me, I joined P-FLAG, 'cause I figured it was more practical than shooting 'em."
"A word of advice, my sweet Emmett. Mourn the losses, because they're many; but celebrate the victories, because they're few"
"You get my tits in a knot, sunshine, and you're gonna be in deep shit! Excuse me."
Vic: "I thought I'd make a turducken."
Michael: "A what?"
Vic: "Turducken. You take chicken, you stuff it up a duck, then stuff that up a turkey."
Debbie: "Kind of like a three-way, but with poultry!"
In a show that was pretty overwhelmingly about the men, there were some women, and they were all pretty wonderful in their way, even when they were screwed up. Mel and Linds, the lone lesbian couple featured, irritated me, I admit. I always felt badly for that, but my problem was that I felt they were REALLY BAD FOR EACH OTHER, and that they were both much better people when they weren't together. So while I liked them separately, I didn't really like them as a couple. (YMMV of course.)
Deb, however, I always loved, even when she was overbearing or doing things I thought were not right. Deb was loving and controlling and an Italian mom (something I'm pretty familiar with, even if it's through my extended family, not my own mom.) She's insanely nosy, incredibly giving. She's a bold broad in the best sense of the word, and I love her for it. Deb will do anything for those she loves, and she's got a huge heart, and loves a lot of people. Even when they're acting like assholes, Db will always, always be there for her boys and girls.
Favorite Moment: Debbie and Vic are pretty much always love together, but I really liked when she first speaks to Justin's Mom, in season one, about what it's like to have a gay son.
Lisa Cuddy
"House doesn't have Asperger's. The diagnosis is much simpler. He's a jerk."
Dr. James Wilson: "You slept with House. He asked permission before taking my bagel. Took the case without a fight. Honored the parents request for an MRI."
Dr. Lisa Cuddy: "Yes, those were my terms for sleeping with him."
Dr. James Wilson: "He's in a good mood."
Dr. Lisa Cuddy: "Sex with me would explain that. But it doesn't explain why I'm not curled up in a ball weeping in shame. I did not sleep with House."
"I'm your doctor. You've been good to me and good to this hospital, of course I care, but I don't see how this conversation could end well for me. Either your wife is having an affair, or she's not having an affair, and you're coming here because you rightly think I should fire him. But I can't, even if it costs me your money. The son-on-a-bitch is the best doctor we have."
Dr. Gregory House: "You want something, I want something. We compromise. It's the grown-up way to resolve our differen... "
Dr. Lisa Cuddy: "There already *is* a mechanism for that, it's called the employer/employee relationship. I get what I want - and you don't."
Dr. Lisa Cuddy: [about Amber] "Are you sure she doesn't just want to drag you back to her lair, hang you upside down, and lay her eggs inside of you?"
Dr. James Wilson: "Excellent disguise, House."
"When I hired you, I knew you were insane. I will continue to try and stop you from doing insane things, but once they're done, trying to convince an insane person not to do insane things is, in itself, insane. So when I hired you, I also set aside fifty thousand a year for legal expenses. So far, you've come in under budget."
House is a show built on a formula, and it very rarely deviates for long from it. Character growth is usually reset every season to keep things within the status quo. Cuddy is one of the few characters who has been allowed to grow. It's not always a positive growth, or a well-written one even, but she had one. She started OUT being the only one with any nominal control over House. She's smart, she's tough, she's hot, and she's insanely young to be in her position, so she must have been driven and determined, all of which are good things to be. She went on to be a mother, and while I felt the show didn't do her justice when it came to her motivations for doing so, she's now balancing a career she's not giving up with a baby, and the show does at least attempt to show that a working single mother with a nanny can still be a wonderful mother. (Too often shows fall into the idea that you can either be a stay at home mom, and thus out of touch/old fashioned, or a working mother and thus career driven and emotionally crippled. There's many degrees between those two extremes, and it's nice to see SOMEONE make some attempt at showing that, however flawed the attempt.)
I also like that she can and has gotten the best of House now and then, since really Cuddy and Wilson are the only ones who ever get anything over on him. The nature of the character is that he usually always figures it out, but they're the only ons who present a real challenge.
Favorite Moment: While there are many Cuddy smack down moments and awesome banter, the show is usually House's showcase, and his show, so she tens to be dependent on him, which is sometimes a shame but the nature of the beast. I love her speech about setting aside a lawsuit budget for House, but one of my favorite Cuddy moments is one where she doesn't even say anything, and we just see her folded into a chair, looking tiny and tired at the end of "Wilson's Heart". I think my favorite though is in "Skin Deep", when House asks her for a morphine shot, and she slips him a placebo to prove her point. Sometimes, Cuddy plays hardball too.
Blair Waldorf
"Haven't you heard? I'm the crazy bitch around here."
"Not everyone can be. Since we're not friends anymore let me speak frankly, you're not that smart. You lack focus and discipline. Charm is all well and good but in the real world knowledge is power. You wouldn't make it past the first round of admissions at Yale no matter how hard you tried. Have fun in Providence."
"A hot lifeguard is like kleenex, use once and throw away!"
Blair Waldorf: "Blair Waldorf is not indebted to anyone. No matter how much I appreciate what you did."
Vanessa Abrams: "You're welcome... I guess?"
Blair Waldorf: "Good. Now this transaction is finished. And I'm free to return to disliking you.
I really have no viable leg to stand on in defending my love of this show. It's trashy, it's over the top, and apparently the consent issues that existed in the pilot get worse later on. (I haven't seen the full run, but the issues didn't bother me because the pilot was considered outside of show canon as parts were recast and things were changed around.) AND YET I LOVE IT. And Blair is like 80% of the reason why.
Blair is a bitch, and she's GOOD at it, but she's also heartbreakingly vulnerable at times. She's the poor little rich girl, and yet at times you feel so strongly for her as the runner up - always in Serena's shadow. Blair was the Queen Bee, she was the uber bitch, she was rich, she was respected, and she had everything. But the things she most wanted, she tended to lose out on. The future she planned for herself went up in smoke, and that was everything to Blair. What I love about her though, is she recovers, and she moves on, and Blair might have been handed a winning hand of cards to being with, but the girl will WORK for what she wants.
And I admit, there is nothing in this world that is more fun than Blair in full on bitch mode, scheming to get her way.
Favorite Moment: I will forever love Blair pulling on over on Georgina and sending her off to boot camp (side note: I also love Georgina), but the moment when I really realized how much I loved Blair was when she undermined her own plans to defend Eric in season one. . . which I think was in "All About My Brother", but my google-fu is failing me to find out for sure..
Louise McCloud
"You're a long way from Virginia, Kid"
"Rachel: Where'd you get the idea men and women are all that different?
Lou: Well, in the shower, for one place."
"Jimmy: "A girl?"
Lou: "Something wrong with that?"
Jimmy: "Only thing wrong with it is that I didn't say it sooner. I'm telling you Lou, it's a relief because the way you and the Kid been looking at each other all this time, I even caught myself looking at you like that a ccouple of times."
Lou: "Like what?"
Jimmy: "Mmm, You know."
Lou: "No, Jimmy I don't know.""
I admit, Lou wasn't my favorite. I liked her a lot, but I got very tired of her romance with Kid. But this was my first TV fandom, other than cartoons, and Lou was there in the thick of things, doing all the stuff the boys did. She was competent and snarky and awesome, even if the storylines of the time sometimes dragged her down to romantic-interest levels that she didn't deserve. She was loyal and brave and took care of her brother and her sister, and never backed down from something she believed in.
Favorite Moment: I love the pilot, where she jumps on a horse and shows that she can outride most of the boys, right off.
Honorable Mention
Tyra Collete - I didn't want to do more than one Friday Night Lights lady too, but Tyra is amazing. She was strong and vulnerable and gorgeous and insecure and smart but knew so little about herself, and I love that she pulled herself up and did what she set out to do, no matter how she screwed up along the way. I loved her relationship with Tami, and with Julie, and that we saw her and her mother at the Father/Daughter dance. Tyra is amazing.
She-Ra - Arguably my first fandom, along with He-Man. She-Ra was campy and candy-colored and full of unicorns and sparkles an things that girls are supposed to like. . . but along with that, this was a WHOLE WORLD where really, it was all about the ladies. Most of the rebellion was led by ladies, and they were all smart and powerful. Most of the main villains were women too, and there was never any implication that I remember that they should be weaker than the guys. Bo, the only real rebellion dude, took his orders from Glimmer and the rest, and Adora was Hordak's Force Captain before she even had super powers. And She-Ra was She-Ra. She could kick EVERYONE's ass, including He-Man when i came down to it.
Maddie Westen - Maddie didn't make it largely because Deb from Queer As Folk did, and Maddie is sort of a very similar character. Both awesome, kick ass moms with sons named Michael. But Maddie steps up under pressure, doesn't take crap from ANYONE, and is kind of amazing all on her own. Burn Notice is a show where I kind of love all the main cast, but I adore when Maddie and Fi bond, or Maddie's friendship with Sam. (I might ship them a wee bit.)
There's a lot of ladies that I love but didn't include here. Like Santana or Britt from Glee, or Jal from Skins, or El from White Collar, or a million others, just because I either thought of them later, or I just didn't feel like I know them as well as the ladies I did use. This does not mean I lack love though!
Downside of doing this meme is wanting to rewatch SO MANY THINGS when I have way too much new stuff to watch as it is.
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Claudia Jean Cregg
"We have at our disposal a captive audience of schoolchildren. Some of them don't go to the blackboard or raise their hand 'cause they think they're going to be wrong. I think you should say to these kids, "You think you get it wrong sometimes, you should come down here and see how the big boys do it." I think you should tell them you haven't given up hope and that it may turn up, but, in the meantime, you want NASA to put its best people in a room and you want them to start building Galileo 6. Some of them will laugh and most of them won't care but for some, they might honestly see that it's about going to the blackboard and raising your hand. And that's the broader theme."
"In the following days we'll be meeting with the Reverend Al Caldwell, members of Beijing's embassy and INS agents. The President has asked Josh Lyman and Sam Seaborn to run these meetings, so it's entirely possible that by week's end we will have alienated Christians, China and our own government."
"You want to make out with me right now, don't you?"
"You know if I was living in Qumar I wouldn't be allowed to say 'shove it up your ass Toby.' But since I'm not, shove it up your ass Toby."
I was trying not to do more than on lady from a show, but it's impossible here, because I really wanted to include Abbey, but it's impossible to NOT have CJ on an awesome women post. CJ is tough and smart and earnest and funny, endearing and sometimes awkward and vulnerable but ALWAYS kickass and dedicated. She carved out her place in the boys' club of the West Wing and did arguably the hardest and most publicly criticized job, outside of the President himself, and did it with grace and style that no one else could step in and fill even for a day without messing it up. And in the later seasons, she stepped up to fill Leo's shoe's, serving as the President's right hand and serving an essentially thankless duty and doing a damn good job of it, once she found her feet.
CJ is amazing, and I will always want to be her when I grow up.
Favorite Moment: Picking one CJ moment is impossible, but I will always have extra love for her exchange with Josh in "The US Poet Laureate", when she's confronting him about going on the Lemon Lyman's page and threatening to shove a motherboard up his ass. Because it's hilarious, and also because it's Stacey's favorite scene, and I always think of her.
Abbey Bartlet
"The wine is a '95 Old Vine zinfandel from Hog Cellars, which once belonged to King Boudouin of Belgium, and is best sipped while making anagrams out of the phrase, "My husband's an enormous jackass!""
"It's our history. Better or worse, it's our history. We're not going to lock it in the basement or brush it with a new coat of paint. It's our history."
"I haven't come in here because it seems that every time I do there's a new White House Counsel. I think Leo keeps them in the basement like those two ladies in Arsenic and Old Lace."
"When did I stop being "Dr." Bartlet? When in the campaign did I decide that women were gonna like me more if I called myself "Mrs."? When did I decide that women were that stupid?"
Abbey was always one of my favorite parts of the show. I would get genuinely excited when she showed up, and I loved her and Jed's relationship. They were loving and both entirely too smart and they challenged one another. Abbey was a strange mix of idealistic and pragmatic, and I always wished the show had given her more focus outside of Jed, and shown first hand some of her trips and what it's like being a brilliant woman who is nonetheless always going to be overshadowed by her husband's very public role.
Favorite Moment: I'm going to have to go with Abbey, CJ, Donna, and Amy getting drunk in "Dead Irish Writers", though it's hard to choose.
Parker
"Non-sequential serial numbers, my favorite!"
"Place the mask over your mouth and nose and breathe normally. In the event of a water landing your seat cushion can be used as a flotation device. But, let's face it, if this thing goes down in the water, more than likely the impact will kill you. Please take a moment to locate the nearest emergency exits because if this plane's on fire you're gonna wanna get out quick. Jet fuel burns at over 1000 degrees. That's hot, folks!"
"It's like Billy from The Family Circus if Billy was a drunken sex fiend."
While it's Hardison who stole my heart first and foremost in Leverage, Parker is amazing and endearing and strange and a little scary, all at once. She manages to be incredibly dysfunctional and yet completely adorable about it. There's a childlike quality to Parker that could be creepy, but never really is. She's the best thief in the world, and she doesn't even really care about STUFF, she just likes stealing, and money. She doesn't even like spending it, she just likes money. Some of the show's sweetest moments have come through Parker gradually starting to learn how to interact with people through her teammates and their jobs, and the slight softening never really comes at the expense of competence. She remains and awesome and somewhat morally ambiguous thief.
Favorite Moment: While I love earlier seasons best, the moment in "The Studio Job" when Parker walks around trying to be a weird pop star, and then complaining that she wasn't weird enough makes me laugh EVERY TIME.
Angela Montenegro
"Sweetie, this is one of those times when I know *I'm* right, and everyone else is *confused*!"
"You know what you people lack? Whimsy. It's a genuine handicap."
"Just because you have a doctorate now doesn't mean I won't use you as a swizzle stick."
"Ok, you started off in English, but I have no idea where you ended up."
Sometimes, shows put a woman into the "heart of the operation" role, and somehow manage to make me thoroughly and completely dislike them. (Cameron on House is forever my example of this.) They highlight all of the *womanly* feelings and weaknesses and even if the character is established as smart and capable, somehow that all fades away. Angela manages to not do that at all. She is undeniably the heart and emotion of the team, but she's smart, she's sexually confident, she stands up for what she believes is right. She's funny, she's quick, and she's the stabilizing force who counters Bones' (and Zach and to a degree Hodgins) cold logic with empathy and reality without undermining them, or making herself seem illogical. Instead she's learned to bridge the gap between the science-y worlds and her own and Booth's.
Favorite Moment: I'm generally not a fan of the big moments (first kisses, first times, marriages, etc) in TV. They're very rarely ever as epic as the lead up, and I tend to like those things in FIC much more than in canon. But I was a sucker for Angela and Hodgins' jailcell wedding.
Tami Taylor
"It’s becoming a thing. I mean, it’s a thing. And you know what thing it is, it’s that thing that we always knew was going to happen to our little girl. It’s that thing-that thing’s happening now."
"It was medieval; you know it was like the Scarlet Letter or something watching that girl walk across the cafeteria and everybody just glared at her."
"Here's the thing, and I know it's probably not easy to see here in Dillon, but you are at the beginning of your life. A lot of these football heroes around here, they're not gonna get much farther than this. But you're gonna go to some great college and have a career that you love. And I'm telling you right now, women are gonna flock to you. I know it's hard to believe, but that's how it's gonna work. You're a good person and this is just the beginning. I'm right one hundred percent of the time. You can ask my husband."
As I watch the final season of FNL, I'm struck by how there just really is NOT a better marriage on TV than Tami and Eric Taylor. They are real and organic in a way that is so rarely really looked at on TV. And Tami is such a wonderful character on her own. She struggles in the beginning to find a place outside of "Coach's Wife", and as we see her grow into that, we also see her flounder, trying to balance the different parts of her life. She is vibrant and smart and a believable mix of old fashioned and progressive and not quite sure how to balance that. She has a huge, loving heart and wants so badly to help, but sometimes is blinded by her own impressions and privilege, and the show actually shows that, and lets us see her mistakes.
Tami is amazing, and there is nothing on TV that makes me sniffle more than when Tami Taylor is sad. Eric gets the speeches to his teams, but Tami says more with one look that most characters do in an entire episode.
Favorite Moment: I love Tami going to Tyra and helping her clean up after her mother breaks the table, and taking her under her wing. Which for some reason, I can't find which episode that is right now.
Fiona Glenanne
Michael Westen: "Fiona, you were supposed to stop the car, not blow it into the Everglades! What happened to shorting the ignition?"
Fiona Glenanne: "You said disable; it's not going anywhere."
"Well, now you're in Miami. Get yourself a 24-year-old with big fake tits."
Sam Axe: [at a gay bar] "How do you want to handle this?"
Fiona Glenanne: "Well, I think the balls are in your court."
"Nothing turns on a woman so much as when something goes, 'BOOM.'"
Fi is badass. Fi gets shit done. She blows things up and she kicks a lot of ass and she is one lady you really in no way want to be on the wrong side of. While I sometimes have issues with how the show deals with Fi/Michael, Fi does get a lot of opportunity to both kick ass, and be the one doing the rescuing when Michael or Sam get in trouble. I love her moments with Maddie and how awkward Fi can be with moments of emotional depth, and the fact that while she is tough and fearless and hard-noses, she is also frequently genuinely adorable, and not afraid to be so.
Favorite Moment: Fi has a lot of moments of badassery, but there's always something about her shaking the snowglobe Michael gets her in one of the early episodes - and nearly hitting him in the face - that just encapsulates how awesome she is for me. (Also my favorite moment in This Fi Vid of awesomeness.
Dana Whitaker
"Well I'm a 33-year-old producer and for one hour every night, this is my little corner of the world. And nothing screws up here unless I screw it up."
Dana Whitaker: "Isaac's gonna want to show us pictures from his vacation so I'm going to get a welcome back cake and we'll have a little party in his office tomorrow."
Casey McCall: "What kind of cake?"
Dana Whitaker: "What kind of cake?"
Casey McCall: "Yes."
Dana Whitaker: "I don't know Casey - why do you ask?"
Casey McCall: "I'm particular about cake. And I have to say it's been my experience that men buy better cake than women. I've found that women tend to get these yogurt-frosted low-cal things laced with a rum and fruit concoction that make eating cake into something you do to be polite. So that's why I was asking what kind of cake you were planning on getting to celebrate Isaac returning from vacation."
Dana Whitaker: "Wow, I didn't know you felt so strongly about it, but now that I do I guess the answer is - whatever cake I damn please."
"Please lower your voice. I do not want your tawdry tales of office lust infecting my news room."
"The truth is, I have a job that involves me, and stimulates me, and rewards me, and takes up a lot of my time, and I'm not willing to do my job just a little bit. I want to do ALL of it. It's part of me, and I'm different without it. And that is who I am, and that is who you need to love."
Sports Night is one of those shows I came into very late, well after everyone else had seen it. I am not a sports person, so the idea of a sports show based comedy was just sort of meh to me, and thus I ignored it until I begin to see quotes and other people whose tastes I tend to agree with loving on it, and then I gave it a shot. And was of course thrilled I did.
While the Sports night love of my life will always be Dan, there wasn't a single character on there I disliked, and Dana was probably my next favorite. Dana is neurotic, but capable of calm when she needs to be. She's quick enough to not only keep up with the boys, but come out on top a lot of the time. She's funny and sexy and smart and she keeps things running no matter what. I love her friendships with Natalie, and Isaac, and that she knows who she is and stays true to that, even if she wobbles along the way now and then. She's very much a woman in an industry where men are king, and she LOVES her job with all her heart and it shows.
Favorite Moment: The turkey, from "Thespis". I can't help it, the scene makes me laugh.
Veronica Mars
"Tragedy blows through your life like a tornado, uprooting everything, creating chaos. You wait for the dust to settle, and then you choose. You can live in the wreckage and pretend it's still the mansion you remember. Or you can crawl from the rubble and slowly rebuild. Because after disaster strikes, the important thing is that you move on. But if you're like me, you just keep chasing the storm. (pause) The problem with chasing the storm is that it wears you down, breaks your spirit. Even the experts agree, a girl needs closure."
"You know those people who can predict when change is coming in their life? I'm not one of them. Change has a way of just walking up and punching me in the face."
"I'd be the best rich person, seriously. I'd be the perfect combination of frivolous and sensible. Money is so wasted on the wealthy."
Say what you will about the last seasons of Veronica Mars - and I have - but that first season is television GOLD. Veronica was a smart, sassy girl with her own mind and goals and a story to tell. While the side characters played huge roles in the series, it was very much VERONICA'S show, and she earned it by being a fabulous character. Sassy girl detective might not be a NEW idea, but there are very few characters on TV who've gotten to play the kind of role Veronica did on a prime time TV show. While the show was fun and quick and pretty, it also touched on serious issues, and it didn't demean those issues while talking about them. Veronica was a character you could both empathize with and admire, and I only wish that the later seasons of the show had done better justice to the fantastic character they had in her.
Favorite Moment: Pretty much any moment with Keith and Veronica. Keith=Best TV Daddy Ever. I'm especially fond of the scene in "Mars Vs. Mars" where Veronica gets the ink to the face.
Debra Morgan
"Say one more thing about my brother and I will kick your nuts down your fucking throat."
"You are not allowed to talk about anyone I date as long as you're seeing Little Miss 'Pardon My Tits.' I'm sorry, Dex, but she is gross. And pale, and nobody is pale in Miami. She is obviously a vampire. A gross, English, titty vampire."
"What are we doing home in the middle of the day? She asked, hoping for sex."
Debra is a rare mix of utter balls-out vulgarity and heartbreaking vulnerability. She tries SO hard and on the show, we see her get kicked in the teeth for it again and again, but she keeps going. With Deb, more often than not we, the viewer, see the train wreck coming long before she does, and want to peek through our fingers as it approaches.
But the thing about Deb is that she's GOOD at what she does, she just doesn't always realize it. She's her own biggest advocate, in that she tells everyone else that she CAN do the job, but beneath that, she doesn't always believe it. One of the best parts of her character's progression on the show is watching HER realize it, and her bravado gradually start changing into genuine confidence. Debra has the foulest mouth of any character on the show. She's loud, she's abrasive, and yet she's also the most hopeful and lovable, in her way, and there are many times when I wished the show had more of her point of view as its focus.
Favorite Moment: Most of Deb's momnts are pretty strongly tied to Dexter, but I like when she goes and rescues Anton on her own, in Season 3 (I think.)
Queen Katherine of Aragon
"I know you, you have decided, but it grieves you. Will you destroy your marriage, your country, your soul before God, on the whim of one girl? Because she denies you? Because she tortures you with her refusal? She think she doesn't know exactly what she's doing? She wants me to step aside. Where is my wise husband? Where is he? You are a king, so be one."
"Bring your hundred learned men! I can bring a thousand learned men from all over Europe to prove that I am you wife, I always have been your wife and I always will be!"
"For every scholar that would vote for you, I could find a thousand that would vote for me."
"Let me tell you this. You want me to lie before God, and admit my first marriage was consummated? Well, it was not. You want me to retire, and withdraw my daughter's claim as sole rightful heir to the throne? Well, I shall not. Not in a thousand years. Not if you rack me within an inch of my life. So, I hope you have the belly for a fight, Anne Boleyn, because I'll fight you, every inch of the way."
I'm only doing TV ladies, so this is cheating a bit since Katherine of Aragon was an actual historical figure. BUT I don't care, because she was awesome. While I initially started watching the show for the costume porn, and for Natalie Dormer, Katherine ended up being my favorite of Henry's wives. (Though Anne is a close second, Natalie is just so gorgeously manipulative.)
Favorite Moment: I loved pretty much all of her face offs with Henry, and how even though she was walking that very careful line between her belief that Henry was her husband and God's chosen sovereign, she still wasn't going to just back down when he was being a dick.
Alice
"This reminds me of those church lock-ins I attended as a girl. No necking, children."
"Kate, I know you aren't fond of me, but I'm concerned about your development as a young woman, just like your mother. You're promiscuous. You aren't guarding your flower."
Quotes from this show are way hard to find. USoT is basically a showcase for Toni to be awesome, and Alice is, technically, an alter of Tara. Tara's alters are all distinct personalities, and Alice is essentially the ringleader. She manages the others, and Tara, when Tara's in trouble. Alice is outwardly the perfect model of a 1950's housewife. She cooks, she cleans, she organizes, she's demure and perfectly coifed. But beneath that, Alice is a BADASS. Alice doesn't take shit from anyone, she's ruthlessly snide when she wants to be, and she gets shit done. She's as screwed up as any of the other alters, and Tara, but she hides it behind this cheerful facade that becomes sort of menacing when she's being crossed.
Favorite Moment: In the pilot episode, Alice drags Tara's daughter, Kate, into the ladies room and washes her mouth out with soap. It's deeply screwed up, but it's sort of an excellent introduction to Alice's mix of sunshine sweet and ruthless bitch.
Annie Sawyer
"Annie: Maybe he's had a blow to the head.
George: I'm sorry?
Annie: Happened to my nan. She got hit in the head by a radio-controlled plane at the county fair. From that moment, obsessed with pygmy goats.
George: There wasn't a single bit of that sentence I understood."
"Oh my god. You're Tully's Mini-Me."
"Annie: Just to warn you, if you go in for a hug Mitchell will try to kiss you.
George: My god, I leave you alone for five minutes.
Annie: It's like being attacked by an ironing board.
Mitchell: If I had intended to kiss you I'd have put on some chapstick first"
"There's a question you haven't asked yourself yet. If I exist, what else does? You think you're the big bad wolf. You should see George on a full moon. You think you're a cold-blooded murderer? Mitchell was killing eighty years before you were even born. Don't you get it yet? I'm just the tip of the iceberg. I'm Good Cop."
Annie is flat out adorable. There's more to her and all of that, but the thing that continually strikes me is no matter what happens, no matter how she fumbles or backslides or her awkward moments, Annie is insanely adorable and likable. The show likes to present Mitchell and George as the main storyline and Annie almost as a side storyline, but Annie is the most consistently lovable of the trio.
Annie is a ghost, and thus starts out the show by nature as the most passive, but she out grows that, finding herself, her own powers. She's the glue that keeps their deeply dysfunctional little family unit together, and there's a sweetness and vulnerability to her even when she's at her most badass (and while she gets a lot of damsel moments, Annie also as her share of badassery.)
Favorite Moment: Her showdown with Owen is pretty amazing, but I'm fondest of Annie when she's witty and quick and adorable, like in episode 1.4 when she's telling George what to wear.
Nicolette Grant
"Wayne Henrickson: He was really scary, mom
Nicolette Grant: All Baptists are, honey."
"Understand that there is nothing I wouldn't do to be a part of my family Margene. NOTHING!"
"We have to be realistic. You can't keep a secret like me and you're not a good liar like Barb."
"Nicki: [about Barb] Do you think she's happy for me? About the baby?
Margie: Of course. She loves babies. Sometimes I think she wishes my boys were hers.
Nicki: Sometimes I think they wish the same thing."
"Nicki: I love you, Bill.
Bill: I love you, too.
Nicki: How much?
Bill: I say it's astronomical, beyond all measure.
Nicki: I have $58,000 in debt."
"That frightens me. I don't know that a marriage based on love can go the distance. The secret holiness of the institution. The sanctity of marriage. Without it, it's just random couplings, with no purpose or stick-to-it-iveness. How will we survive the bad times on just love?"
Nicki is so deeply, irrevocably damaged. Her entire family are, and Nicki and Albie are the two we're shown the most to demonstrate just how FAR their damage goes. Nicki is irrational, insane, obsessive, narrow-minded, and she is AWESOME in her extremely screwed up way.
The thing about Big Love that I will never, EVER understand is the show's continuing assumption that the audience was watching and rooting for Bill as a hero. No one I know who watched the show watched for Bill. Everyone watched for the women, IN SPITE of Bill. And while I love pretty much all of the women, Nicki was always my favorite. She was more or less shamelessly unlikable, but she did so in a way that somehow turned into this starkly broken lovableness. Nicki always gave the impression that if she ever threw off the oppression of her upbringing, and se her mind to doing something, she'd be pretty unstoppable, but she would always be in her own way.
Favorite Moment: I love Nicki's judgmental, harsh moments because she delivers them so, so well, but I think as a character, Nicki climbing up on the roof and declaring something that wasn't inherently selfish, in Block Party", might have been one of her first real growth steps.
Debbie Novotny
"And one more thing. The next time you talk to me like that. I'm going to rip you a new butthole so big, you're gonna be able to take a cannon up your ass."
"You know, there were people, when they found out that Michael was gay, who said, and did, the cruelest things. Friends, neighbors, family. My own goddamn sister wouldn't even let her kids come over here. She was afraid Michael was going to molest them or something. Because that's the way people are. They're ignorant and they're scared. And there's nothing you can do, except educate 'em or shoot 'em. Me, I joined P-FLAG, 'cause I figured it was more practical than shooting 'em."
"A word of advice, my sweet Emmett. Mourn the losses, because they're many; but celebrate the victories, because they're few"
"You get my tits in a knot, sunshine, and you're gonna be in deep shit! Excuse me."
Vic: "I thought I'd make a turducken."
Michael: "A what?"
Vic: "Turducken. You take chicken, you stuff it up a duck, then stuff that up a turkey."
Debbie: "Kind of like a three-way, but with poultry!"
In a show that was pretty overwhelmingly about the men, there were some women, and they were all pretty wonderful in their way, even when they were screwed up. Mel and Linds, the lone lesbian couple featured, irritated me, I admit. I always felt badly for that, but my problem was that I felt they were REALLY BAD FOR EACH OTHER, and that they were both much better people when they weren't together. So while I liked them separately, I didn't really like them as a couple. (YMMV of course.)
Deb, however, I always loved, even when she was overbearing or doing things I thought were not right. Deb was loving and controlling and an Italian mom (something I'm pretty familiar with, even if it's through my extended family, not my own mom.) She's insanely nosy, incredibly giving. She's a bold broad in the best sense of the word, and I love her for it. Deb will do anything for those she loves, and she's got a huge heart, and loves a lot of people. Even when they're acting like assholes, Db will always, always be there for her boys and girls.
Favorite Moment: Debbie and Vic are pretty much always love together, but I really liked when she first speaks to Justin's Mom, in season one, about what it's like to have a gay son.
Lisa Cuddy
"House doesn't have Asperger's. The diagnosis is much simpler. He's a jerk."
Dr. James Wilson: "You slept with House. He asked permission before taking my bagel. Took the case without a fight. Honored the parents request for an MRI."
Dr. Lisa Cuddy: "Yes, those were my terms for sleeping with him."
Dr. James Wilson: "He's in a good mood."
Dr. Lisa Cuddy: "Sex with me would explain that. But it doesn't explain why I'm not curled up in a ball weeping in shame. I did not sleep with House."
"I'm your doctor. You've been good to me and good to this hospital, of course I care, but I don't see how this conversation could end well for me. Either your wife is having an affair, or she's not having an affair, and you're coming here because you rightly think I should fire him. But I can't, even if it costs me your money. The son-on-a-bitch is the best doctor we have."
Dr. Gregory House: "You want something, I want something. We compromise. It's the grown-up way to resolve our differen... "
Dr. Lisa Cuddy: "There already *is* a mechanism for that, it's called the employer/employee relationship. I get what I want - and you don't."
Dr. Lisa Cuddy: [about Amber] "Are you sure she doesn't just want to drag you back to her lair, hang you upside down, and lay her eggs inside of you?"
Dr. James Wilson: "Excellent disguise, House."
"When I hired you, I knew you were insane. I will continue to try and stop you from doing insane things, but once they're done, trying to convince an insane person not to do insane things is, in itself, insane. So when I hired you, I also set aside fifty thousand a year for legal expenses. So far, you've come in under budget."
House is a show built on a formula, and it very rarely deviates for long from it. Character growth is usually reset every season to keep things within the status quo. Cuddy is one of the few characters who has been allowed to grow. It's not always a positive growth, or a well-written one even, but she had one. She started OUT being the only one with any nominal control over House. She's smart, she's tough, she's hot, and she's insanely young to be in her position, so she must have been driven and determined, all of which are good things to be. She went on to be a mother, and while I felt the show didn't do her justice when it came to her motivations for doing so, she's now balancing a career she's not giving up with a baby, and the show does at least attempt to show that a working single mother with a nanny can still be a wonderful mother. (Too often shows fall into the idea that you can either be a stay at home mom, and thus out of touch/old fashioned, or a working mother and thus career driven and emotionally crippled. There's many degrees between those two extremes, and it's nice to see SOMEONE make some attempt at showing that, however flawed the attempt.)
I also like that she can and has gotten the best of House now and then, since really Cuddy and Wilson are the only ones who ever get anything over on him. The nature of the character is that he usually always figures it out, but they're the only ons who present a real challenge.
Favorite Moment: While there are many Cuddy smack down moments and awesome banter, the show is usually House's showcase, and his show, so she tens to be dependent on him, which is sometimes a shame but the nature of the beast. I love her speech about setting aside a lawsuit budget for House, but one of my favorite Cuddy moments is one where she doesn't even say anything, and we just see her folded into a chair, looking tiny and tired at the end of "Wilson's Heart". I think my favorite though is in "Skin Deep", when House asks her for a morphine shot, and she slips him a placebo to prove her point. Sometimes, Cuddy plays hardball too.
Blair Waldorf
"Haven't you heard? I'm the crazy bitch around here."
"Not everyone can be. Since we're not friends anymore let me speak frankly, you're not that smart. You lack focus and discipline. Charm is all well and good but in the real world knowledge is power. You wouldn't make it past the first round of admissions at Yale no matter how hard you tried. Have fun in Providence."
"A hot lifeguard is like kleenex, use once and throw away!"
Blair Waldorf: "Blair Waldorf is not indebted to anyone. No matter how much I appreciate what you did."
Vanessa Abrams: "You're welcome... I guess?"
Blair Waldorf: "Good. Now this transaction is finished. And I'm free to return to disliking you.
I really have no viable leg to stand on in defending my love of this show. It's trashy, it's over the top, and apparently the consent issues that existed in the pilot get worse later on. (I haven't seen the full run, but the issues didn't bother me because the pilot was considered outside of show canon as parts were recast and things were changed around.) AND YET I LOVE IT. And Blair is like 80% of the reason why.
Blair is a bitch, and she's GOOD at it, but she's also heartbreakingly vulnerable at times. She's the poor little rich girl, and yet at times you feel so strongly for her as the runner up - always in Serena's shadow. Blair was the Queen Bee, she was the uber bitch, she was rich, she was respected, and she had everything. But the things she most wanted, she tended to lose out on. The future she planned for herself went up in smoke, and that was everything to Blair. What I love about her though, is she recovers, and she moves on, and Blair might have been handed a winning hand of cards to being with, but the girl will WORK for what she wants.
And I admit, there is nothing in this world that is more fun than Blair in full on bitch mode, scheming to get her way.
Favorite Moment: I will forever love Blair pulling on over on Georgina and sending her off to boot camp (side note: I also love Georgina), but the moment when I really realized how much I loved Blair was when she undermined her own plans to defend Eric in season one. . . which I think was in "All About My Brother", but my google-fu is failing me to find out for sure..
Louise McCloud
"You're a long way from Virginia, Kid"
"Rachel: Where'd you get the idea men and women are all that different?
Lou: Well, in the shower, for one place."
"Jimmy: "A girl?"
Lou: "Something wrong with that?"
Jimmy: "Only thing wrong with it is that I didn't say it sooner. I'm telling you Lou, it's a relief because the way you and the Kid been looking at each other all this time, I even caught myself looking at you like that a ccouple of times."
Lou: "Like what?"
Jimmy: "Mmm, You know."
Lou: "No, Jimmy I don't know.""
I admit, Lou wasn't my favorite. I liked her a lot, but I got very tired of her romance with Kid. But this was my first TV fandom, other than cartoons, and Lou was there in the thick of things, doing all the stuff the boys did. She was competent and snarky and awesome, even if the storylines of the time sometimes dragged her down to romantic-interest levels that she didn't deserve. She was loyal and brave and took care of her brother and her sister, and never backed down from something she believed in.
Favorite Moment: I love the pilot, where she jumps on a horse and shows that she can outride most of the boys, right off.
Honorable Mention
There's a lot of ladies that I love but didn't include here. Like Santana or Britt from Glee, or Jal from Skins, or El from White Collar, or a million others, just because I either thought of them later, or I just didn't feel like I know them as well as the ladies I did use. This does not mean I lack love though!
Downside of doing this meme is wanting to rewatch SO MANY THINGS when I have way too much new stuff to watch as it is.
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