Shades of Caruso

The 2009-2010 Caruso Awards: The Worst New Characters of the Year

Even the best show can be hamstrung by the introduction of a poorly realised character. Most showrunners will realise the folly of their ways and kill them off as quickly as possible: look at how speedily Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof got rid of Nikki and Paolo in Lost. Some characters can improve over time as they become more shaded: last year we railed against Dollhouse‘s Topher Brink, who was at first an unwatchably annoying creep who tried so hard to be cute and funny while just setting our teeth on edge. This year he became our favourite character on the show, just by dialling down the eccentricity and playing up his loneliness and fear. Kudos to Fran Kranz and the Dollhouse team for fixing what had been the most annoying thing about an otherwise exemplary show.

Other characters can be a puzzling mixture of good and bad. Damon from The Vampire Diaries is, at his worst, a smug prick who wishes he was Spike from Buffy, not helped by Ian Somerhalder’s questionable performance and habit of pulling in his chin whenever he’s trying to deliver a “witty” bon-mot. However, at his best he’s almost complicated. The late season revelation that he was once a more honourable man than his Angel-Puppet-lookalike brother Stefan makes him far more interesting, and when Somerhalder plays up his vulnerability and sad rage he becomes the best thing about the show by far. It’s enough to make me glad I hung around long enough to see his transformation into a compelling character, though he still fails to be funny whenever he tries.

Nevertheless, some characters are just wretched in conception and execution, and nothing can fix them. Here are the worst characters of the season, and if the defensive creator of the most heinous character doesn’t like my decision, he can kiss my arse.

10. Merritt Grieves – Happy Town

ABC’s feeble Twin Peaks pastiche had one thing going for it: an interesting cast. M.C. Gainey, Frances Conroy, Steven Weber, Amy Acker and Stephen McHattie showed up from time to time, usually struggling to make something of the strained dialogue. No one suffered more than Sam Neill, a capable actor here transformed into a sleazy English shop owner with a TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS history. Watching him attempt to breathe life into the bag of “weird” characteristics that was Grieves — sadly with only a wispy fraction of his usual twinkly-eyed charm — was a depressing and distracting experience. He needn’t have bothered. As with all of the other loosely sketched townsfolk, there was no meat to the character: he was just a collection of quirky character elements that were shuffled together in a writers room that must have stunk of desperation, and only becomes interesting in the final episode of the truncated series. Nevertheless, even the shocking last minute revelations that OMG he actually wears a leather jacket in his spare time! don’t make him any more compelling. Some questions really don’t need to be answered.

9. Jim Moriarty – Sherlock

Running through the mini-series was the knowledge that this new, terrifically entertaining Sherlock was going to face off against a re-envisioned Moriarty, the archetypal supervillain dolled up for the new age with the same care and thought that Moffat, Gatiss and McGuigan had lavished on Holmes and Watson. The final five minutes of the series were charged with even more expectation than the rest of the series, and so what do we get? Heath Ledger’s Joker? Terence Stamp’s Zod? Hell, did we even get Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor, a villain who is largely played for laughs but has a cold, cold heart underneath? No. We got Jim Carrey’s Riddler who sings half of his dialogue as if he were the lovechild of Bruno and Dame Edna. While the concept of “Jim” Moriarty remains solid (a villain for hire: nice idea), the execution was appalling. Hammier than John Simm’s Master, this Moriarty did the deadliest thing imaginable: in five minutes he stole from the best new BBC drama in years all the tension it had worked hard to generate. Maybe it can be salvaged in the next series, but for now, our enthusiasm has been put back to Defcon One.

8. Maddux Donner – Defying Gravity

Though showrunner James Parriott denies creating Defying Gravity as a Grey’s Anatomy analogue, Maddux Donner still feels like a McDreamy substitute, with his will-they-won’t-they relationship with Zoe and his friends-with-benefits partnership with Nadia. At some point in the development of the series it must have seemed like there was potential for a longrunning love triangle plot, enhanced by Donner’s tragic past and the complications of his previous dalliance with Zoe — which of course led to her having the abortion that defines her personality as a woman who regrets that decision to the exclusion of all other emotions or motivations. How sad, then, that instead of Patrick “Oilslick” Dempsey the showrunners cast Ron “Doughball” Livingstone, possibly the least alluring and mysterious actor on the planet. What might have been intense and sexy was instead petulant and grumpy, a sour centre for this sugary show. His pouty affect and grouchy demeanour is so potent no one else on the show has enough charisma to contend with it. There’s a lot wrong with this show, but Donner is the puffy millstone around its neck.

7. D.S. Ben Holt – Paradox

The highpoint of BBC’s dour sci-fi procedural came during the second episode, as the unexplained image-downloading force from the nether realms of the multiverse (or maybe it was GOD ZOMG) sent our dreary heroes another set of puzzle pieces which would help them prevent a tragedy of some kind. The last image, one held back from the depressed band of detectives, showed D.S. Ben Holt dead on the ground, with one eye pointing off in the wrong direction. To anyone who was as sick of his relentless, aimless fury as SoC was, we could only assume it was because a rage embolism had made his brain pop as if it contained a bomb like in Mission Impossible 3. The answer was more mundane (fate intended for him to be electrocuted), but worse was that the character survived, which meant three more episodes with him being inexplicably VERY ANGRY about everything. And that’s all. How do you write about someone that one-dimensional? He’s an angry cop. He has kids, I think. He shags Tamzin Outhwaite twice. But mostly he’s just very, very, VERY angry. It barely even qualifies as screenwriting.

6. Tyler Evans – V

Major network shows, the potential tentpoles, are bound to have all of their edges smoothed down in order to appeal to the most viewers, and the big-budget remake of V was no exception. None of the characters showed any hint of life, something that even the not-that-great original managed. Of all the poorly realised mannequins in the main cast, the most awful has to be Tyler Evans, another pouty teenager in a season that had already tortured us with whiny Jeremy Gilbert from The Vampire Diaries. Tyler is entitled and belligerent, but his worst crime is to restrict Elizabeth Mitchell’s range to little more than repetitious motherly concern. His histrionic bitching and one-note obsession with the V’s are extreme enough that he comes off as more unhinged than passionate, which might account for the hints that he might have a more complicated parentage than originally thought – anything to make him more interesting. The show would be more fun if the showrunners just killed the little creep off, but sadly there seems to be some kind of arc playing out here. All we can do is stick our fingers in our ears and wait it out.

5. Steve Fleming MP - The Thick Of It

A hero needs a good villain, and a great anti-hero/villain needs a great monster. Malcolm Tucker has butted heads with some repellent arseholes before, but it’s telling that his greatest threat prior to the third season of The Thick of It was himself, as seen in the specials. Maybe Armando Iannucci and his writers should be commended for inventing someone who is able to stop Tucker in his tracks, but to do so they had to inflict upon the viewer someone so repellent that it’s almost impossible to watch without cringing. Fleming is an unhinged bag of tics, unpredictable and ruthless enough to finally ruin Tucker’s career and terrify the assorted chumps of DoSAC, but pitched at such a weird level of energy that he no longer resembles a human being. The main cast might be heightened to a level of hysteria, but they’re recognisably human. Fleming’s stylised mania represents the first failure of the Thick Of It team. The casting of cuddly sitcom favourite David Haig doesn’t help. Luckily, in the final moments of the season we’re introduced to Tom Hollander’s Cal Richards, a Satanically evil, non-irritating antagonist. More please!

4. Every character that isn’t Sue Sylvester, Principal Figgins, or Kurt – Glee

Sue Sylvester’s hatred of the Glee club is entertaining enough that it’s worth keeping them around simply so she has something to bellow at. Other than that? There is no reason for any of them, except for the hilarious Principal Figgins, Kurt (when he’s not being a sociopath), and maybe Brittany when she doesn’t garble her lines. Everyone else cannot even be considered a character: they’re more like plot-enablers, or song delivery systems. No one else has a consistent personality, sometimes changing in the middle of an episode for no reason than that there is another song coming along that they need to be able to sing as if it conveys their inner thoughts. As the showrunners only bothered to come up with three plotlines for the show — oh no, Glee club is in trouble: I love you but you don’t love me: no one really understands me — these get swapped between the characters to make the show seem more versatile. Don’t be fooled. They’re hollow shells. The disdainful laziness of the showrunners is even more of an insult than the distressing number of harridan women and victimised men polluting the show.

3. Amy Pond – Doctor Who

Sometimes you can see the kernel of a good idea in a bad character, which makes it all the more heartbreaking when they quickly become intolerable and wreck every scene they are in because of that good thing gone bad. Amy Pond was designed to be an alternative to the doe-eyed simpering groupies that had previously accompanied the Doctor, but while the concept of “Strong-willed Independent Woman” sounds fantastic on the page, in execution we just got a sulky teenager bellowing her charming catchphrase, “SHUT UP!” every few minutes. Lacking a sense of wonder for the most part, you have to wonder why the Doctor bothered with her. That question looms over the entire season. Is there something more to Amy? Is there a secret even she doesn’t know she’s keeping? The major arc of the season seems to be leading to a big reveal, but no, she’s just someone who lost her memory and can magic the Doctor back from oblivion by shrieking “SHUT UP DOCKTORRRR!” at the cosmos. For all the hints and nudges, she turns out to be little more than the Time Traveller’s Fishwife, making her the least interesting companion in years.

2. Claire Dunphy – Modern Family

Of all the grotesque caricatures infesting this rancid comedic corpse, Julie Bowen’s Claire Dunphy is perhaps the worst of them all. A joy-vacuum that sits and snipes at all around her, her role as the nagging, sensible wife of dopey Phil would already make her eligible for this list, just for being a particularly unpleasant stereotype before we even get to the fact that she’s not that funny and Bowen’s comic timing is non-existent. Maybe that’s not her fault: it’s not like there are any really memorable jokes to work with here anyway, other than to stare at her silly husband with what often appears to be genuine loathing. No, the worst thing about Claire Dunphy is a simple one. Just as you don’t give the same name to two characters in a narrative, you shouldn’t give two characters the same nervous, disapproving, square personality when they don’t illuminate different aspects of that personality. Her brother Mitchell has exactly the same role in the broad canvas of the show, and the same role in his relationship with Cam: to be a huge downer. Jesse Tyler Ferguson is better at keeping the energy up during his scenes, and so avoids my wrath, which I instead aim at Claire with both barrels.

1. Sonny – Treme

Perhaps the most unsurprising inclusion on this list, feckless wastrel Sonny (performed with excellent self-absorbed petulance by Michiel Huisman) is universally despised by Treme fans. In this interview with Alan Sepinwall, David Simon gets defensive about the criticism of Sonny, maintaining that he’s not interested in making all of his characters likeable. Here’s some news for the great creator: audiences aren’t interested in that either. There’s room for awful characters in all fiction, but Sonny is a particularly wretched example, a whiny jerk who wrecks lives with no sense of having hidden depths that would explain why he is the way he is. What’s the worst thing about him? Not his paranoid narcissism, or his pathological self-destructiveness, or his mojo-absorbing treatment of poor blameless Annie, which reduces her to a needy loser who eventually finds her inner strength more for plot convenience than any sense of character revelation. It’s in the finale flashback, where we see him walking down the pre-hurricane streets of New Orleans wearing FUCKING CAPRI PANTS! Truly unforgivable. Let’s hope he either finds his inner-Thelonious in season two, or falls into a pothole, never to be seen or heard from again.

I’d like to say I’m finished, but I’m still not done. In the next post, best new show and pilot! Worst new show and pilot! And maybe some other stuff if the Internet will let me.

October 7, 2010 - Posted by admiralneck | 2009-2010 US TV Season, Defying Gravity, Doctor Who, Dollhouse, Glee, Happy Town, Lost, Modern Family, Paradox, Sherlock, The Thick Of It, The Vampire Diaries, Treme, Twin Peaks, V