However House ridiculously abuses his power and routinely commits felonies to feed his addiction and treats patients while under the influence. But we are supposed to like him. For all you can say about Tritter, in the end he was 100% right about House.
Oh, House himself was a creep for sure. I enjoyed the show in fits and starts, but I can’t help but attribute a lot of its popularity to wish-fulfillment fantasy on the part of a lot of people who wished they were so goddamn good at their job that they could treat everyone like shit and (largely) get away with it.
Not tv characters.
From my long years of watching TV, the well dressed, well coifed, erudite, upper middle class WASPy mother signal utter EVIL to the heroine. Moaning, bitching, kvetching. Everybody Loves Raymond, Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, Mary Tyler Moore, House’s girlfriend - if they have a WASP mother, she is evil.
I suppose having henchmen rules out Dr Miguelito Loveless on Wild, Wild, West? :dubious: (To be fair, the only time they were shown as being violent was when they were fighting with Jim.)
Mary’s mother was evil?!? :dubious: 
I think you must be confusing her with Rhoda’s kvetchy mother, who wasn’t WASPy by any stretch of the imagination!
What about Amon from Legend of Korra?
Livia Soprano
What do you mean “once”?
I’m embarrassed to be admitting that I came along for the ride this year when my daughter binge-watched Gossip Girl. But I did (at least for part of it), and as a consequence, I am able to nominate Bartholomew Bass.
Carmella Soprano. She turned a blind eye to her husband’s Mafia connections, all the while acting like the good Christian housewife. She enjoyed the nice house, and cars, and suburban life, knowing full well that it was blood money. And she failed in her most basic duty to protect her children from bad people.
Going to TV animation, I think I only saw him getting rid of some unsavory characters using his murder bag, but he never seemed to kill or dirty his hands directly.
I think Dr. Henry Killinger of the Venture Brothers qualifies.
Even more so when clues that he is supposed to be Henry Kissinger pop up:
When Killlinger gives Dr. Venture his super villain suit, Dr. Venture says that it’s “different”, Killinger responds saying “Nixon said the same thing when I gave him his first power tie.” 
Eddie Haskell?
President Roslin. NuBSG.
But still: not evil.
Destroying a dam and flooding a town killing thousands isn’t necessarily violent, so how about Cecil Terwilliger?
Been a while since I’ve watched Leverage (in fact, I could stand to give it another go, and listening to the commentaries, and then reading the blog posts about it on Kung Fu Monkey), but quite a few of the baddies would fit the bill; few of them were violent, and a decent handful were technically within the letter of the law, probably. It goes double for later seasons; the antagonists got rather more cartoonish as the show went on.
If it’s fair to compartmentalize specific interactions, the various spies in The Americans could fit. I’m thinking about their treatment of the closeted spec ops fella from last season. The short-lived original handlers, then Philip and Elizabeth, each blackmailed him with the threat of exposing his orientation and ruining his career into betraying his country.
Of course, the show’s set up so you usually sympathize with the KGB agents…
Frank Underwood of House of Cards.
Was Dr. Smith on Lost in Space ever really violent? He certainly tried to be evil, he just wasn’t very good at it.
Pretty sure pushing someone in front of a subway train constitutes violence.
How so?