The thread title seems simple enough. My only stipulations are that we confine ourselves to talking about television characters, not literary, dramatic, cinematic, or mythological ones; and that we leave out people who do their evil violently. No rapists, muggers, bank robbers, or serial killers, please.
Here’s my nomination. The other day I happened to catch a Leverage re-run. The baddie was played by a Beverly Hills 90210 alum whose name I can’t remember. He was playing a phony psychic–wait, that’s redundant. He was playing a psychic who had conned the team’s client out of her life savings. In the first act the team was doing recon on him, and he pulled his cold-reading bit on Parker, eliciting her memories of her younger brother’s death when she was a child and implying that it was her thought. Parker fell for it and was highly traumatized. Hardison came right out and said that he thought the guy needed to be shot, and it was clear that Eliot was willing to cut the guy’s arms off if Parker asked. Which, while an overreaction, was an understandable one; that guy needed a beatdown.
But that’s just me. What non-violent TV villains strike you as the most evil?
JR Ewing was evil. IIRC, He never physically hurt anyone unless he was defending himself. He got into a fight with one of Sue Ellen’s boyfriends and threw him over a highrise balcony.
I only watched the US version of The Office to about season four, but Dwight was a pretty evil prick (though he did redeem himself once rather nicely by macing Roy).
Wilkins tried to murder Buffy personally at least once, and had multiple assassins (human and vampire) on his payroll. Violence by proxy is still violence.
Healey, the councilor in Orange Is The New Black, is pretty bad, using solitary confinement to punish a woman for being lesbian. Also assistant warden Figgins is awful, using her position of power to steal money from the system. Come to think of it, Pornstache is fucking terrible as well, covering up a woman’s overdose so he wouldn’t get caught for smuggling the narcotics in. He also blackmailed a woman to be his accomplice in the smuggling. Yeah, I’ll say Pornstache/Mendez is the worst of the nonviolent antagonists in that show.
Runner up is Cersei in GoT. Nobody holds grudges like her. Bitch is crazy.
Too bad violence by proxy is out. Otherwise, Lydia from Breaking Bad would be perfect. She was, first of all, a drug trafficer. But not only was she evil, but she was a cowardly little weasel with no balls. She wanted someone dead to protect herself but tried to trick others into doing the deed. When she was about to be killed by Mike and Walt, you could just see the gears whirring in her head as she desperately tried to worm her way out of trouble, preferably by putting the fatal blame on someone else. When she was going to be whacked in her home she begged not to be “dissappeared” because her daughter wouldn’t know what happened to her. But it was clear to me that she was just desperately trying to appeal to emotion to save her own skin.
Disagree. All that could describe Sheldon and he can be supportive and occasionally complimentary of his friend. The mom, OTOH, goes beyond merely neglectful and into cruel and mean. Indeed, when mentioning his siblings, Leonard has related that they’ve gotten love and support and praise etc. It just seems that she goes out of her way to destroy Leonard’s ego, literally since birth. I have a pet theory that his whole life is an experiment by his mother to see what would happen to a child raised without love.
Sherlock’s Charles Augustus Magnussen made a career out of ruining lives. As far as they portrayed, he never resorted to violence. He had John Watson kidnapped, but claimed that he would never have let him be actually harmed.
Honestly, almost every major character on Seinfeld except for Kramer was pretty evil. Jerry, Elaine, and George were all deceitful and self-centered almost to the point of sociopathy.