People in TV/Movies/Books/etc who were bad at their jobs. (Spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

And I don’t mean “comically bad” (Barney Fife) or “used as a gag” bad (Ron Swanson/George Constanza), but people who were just inept at their jobs.

(Spoiler boxes on relatively recent works, please. Say… 5 years?)

To me, even though he isn’t portrayed as particularly horrible at his work, a quality candidate is FBI Agent Stan Beeman of The Americans. His friends and across-the-street-neighbors do the following to Stan (and Stan’s relatives/friends/workmates) the following:

1. Setup Stan’s boss
2. Setup Stan’s bosses secretary
3. Bug the mail robot
4. Kill a metric-shitload of people in and around DC
5. Thwart Stan’s (and the FBI’s) plans on a number of occasions
6. Faked a friendship so they could keep closer tabs on Stan
7. Not to mention a whole bunch of espionage crap that they pulled

… and a whole bunch of other shit which I can’t remember. And then, at the very end of the show

Stan let’s them go because he’s got a man-crush on Matthew Rhys’s puppy-dog eyes and Matthew says “I think you were my only friend in this crazy world” (or something sappy like that). Then Matthew gets one final cruel blow into poor Stan when he says that Stan’s current squeeze might also be a spy. “Oops, sorry for dropping that bomb on ya, gotta go! See me in Moscow!”

The series ends… at least Stan’s part of it… with Stan looking across the street with the FBI clearing out the Jennings house facing a future of whispers “Man, these spies lived across the street from Beeman and he didn’t notice shit!” “Yeah, well, you notice he hasn’t been promoted in 6 years, right? Wonder why he’s still hanging on? Guess he needs that pension” :cue laughter:

Well, it didn’t really end with the comments, but that’s the future Stan Beeman faces. Because he sucked at his job. Hell, the only thing he was good at was acting like a White Supremacist. :rolleyes:

Anyway, who else is bad at their job?

2

I’ll vote for Jax Teller from “Sons of Anarchy”. Supposedly he has some amazing new vision for the motorcycle gang, but all he ever does is make terrible decisions that antagonize other gangs.

The internal affairs agent Kavanaugh (played by Forest Whitaker) from “The Shield” does a pretty spectacularly bad job at catching Vic Mackey, too.

3

Tuvok from Star Trek: Voyager
He was head of security but it seems every episode someone either got on or off the ship breaching his “security protocols”.

4

I’m not sure anyone can top ol’ Stan. That last episode really pissed me off.

Maybe last season Michael Westen? Somehow in attempting to infiltrate and undermine an international criminal, he ends up doing exactly what the evil mastermind wants. Plus he gets his mom killed. And his easlier reinstatement to the CIA where he murders his (corrupt) boss and doesn’t get away with it. And aiding Ansen and wiping his presence from the CIA records. That could have gone better. Those later seasons doesn’t exist for me.

5

The entire prison staff from Oz. I mean really, there’s a murder or three practically every episode…

6

For that matter, Worf on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Second-strongest being on the ship (behind Data), tons of training in armed and unarmed combat, and yet, it seemed like he regularly got his clock cleaned when the fighting started.

7

Davey Deals from Pawn Stars. He is a motorcycle dealer who has had to pawn unsold motorcycles in order to make payroll. Sounds to me like he’s pretty bad at his job.

8

Hamilton Burger prosecuted cases in 225 episodes. He won twice.

Presumably he then won the cases against the real killer but that’s still a pretty bad average.

9

Did the lawyer character played by Jimmy Smits in L.A. Law ever win a case?

10

If we’re doing reality shows, I’d have to go with the brother from Property Brothers who does the renovation work. Seems like every episode they run into some unanticipated problem, like mold in the ceiling or termites in the floor beams or ductwork or wiring that’s in an inconvenient unexpected place that they have work around or reroute. The kind of stuff that seems like it should be obvious on the initial inspection, especially if you are experienced at this kind of thing.

I realize that a lot of it is manufactured drama – who wants to watch a renovation show where everything is on time and not in danger of blowing the client’s budget? But it sure does make them look like incompetent boobs.

11

An honest reading of the Harry Potter books shows that Dumbledore is, at best, massively incompetent, if not actually malevolent. Exploration of this fact is a major source of HP fan fiction.

12

Anybody remember the ill-fated movie from a couple of years ago with Michael Fassbender, The Snowman?

The character Fassbender plays, Harry Hole, is the star of a series of Norwegian mystery books. I read the first one, The Bat.

Harry Hole was so infuriatingly lousy at his job, i still wonder if he was written like that on purpose. He basically went to Australia after a Norwegian girl was killed there. And then devoted his time to half-heartedly rethread the police investigation by the Aussie police, drink a lot and shag a waitress he meets. He literally offers nothing new to the investigation, causes the death of a main character (don’t want to spoil it all) by his uselessness and everything is solved pretty much by sheer luck.

There’s a moment in the book where Harry gets himself in a bar fight and that made me think: “Well, he’s not a hard-worker, he’s not that smart or good at dealing with people… but he’s a protagonist. Maybe he’ll prove that at least he’s a bad ass now” Nope, he folds like a chump and ends up being rescued by an Australian cop.

Maybe he improves in the subsequent books. I didn’t feel like finding out.

13

In the books by Ian Fleming, James Bond comes across as incredibly incompetent. He habitually blows his cover, gets the stuffing beaten out of him, lets or causes his partners to be killed, and is captured and tortured. Nor is he an expert skier, diver, or anything else, other than a gourmand and oenophile.

Come to think of it, a lot of the same stuff happens to him in the movies, too. He usually accomplishes his mission more through dumb luck and assistance from a hot babe.

14

I listen to a podcast called “Harry Potter and the Sacred Text,” where two Harvard Divinity students discuss the series through the lens of philosophy and religion. One of their running gags is that someday they will write a book called “The Failed Pedagogy of Hogwarts.”

It ain’t just Dumbledore. With the possible exception of McGonagall, nobody at that school ought to be teaching children.

15

Ted Danson’s role on The Good Place might be a “running gag” (is TGP a comedy?), but season 2 showed that he was quite inept at his job, being a Bad Place architect.

16

Mad About You’s Ursula was a horrible waitress.

17

Maybe you didn’t read the first sentence of the OP …

18

I think the official police detectives, sheriffs, etc. in shows about private investigators tend to be incompetent. Sheriff Amos Tupper from Murder She Wrote and Lassiter from Psych are the first that come to mind, but it seems like the police are always portrayed as incompetent when compared to the amateur sleuth or private investigator.

19

:wink:

20

There’s a lot of people on The Office that either straight up bad (Andy) or seem like they’re bad but actually quite good (Dwight, Michael). But they don’t fit the OP. Instead, the one that really fits is the one straight character who is portrayed as being good at their job, but if take a real look you realize is quite bad:

Chief Financial Officer David Wallace

Let’s look at what he did:

  • Was way too involved in daily operations for a CFO
  • Had to shut down multiple branch offices
  • Nearly shutdown their most profitable branch - Scranton
  • Either failed to notice or chose to ignore Ryan’s blatant fraud
  • Also didn’t catch Kevin’s fraud and possible insider trading
  • Did nothing to stop the Scranton branch being gutted by a three person start-up
  • Oh and then Dunder Mifflin nearly goes bankrupt.