Ray’s mother should be put on a Long Island ice floe. Or maybe his brother the cop should shoot her with his service revolver (“justifiable homicide”).
I would include the rest of the cast of Will & Grace, as well. I thought the first couple of seasons or so were hilarious, but eventually I found the show suffered from what I call “Seinfeld Syndrome”: the characters are all so insufferably obnoxious, hateful, and bereft of any redeeming qualities, that I can’t stand to watch them.
I’m not sure if the characters changed, or just my perception of them did. Grace is supposed to be endearingly quirky, when she’s actually profoundly neurotic and shrewish. Will is a pompous jerk and he treats is alleged best friend Grace like trash. Jack is a lazy, self-centered, freeloading idiot and I can’t fathom why a successful career man like Will would support him, even if they were friends in college. And of course, there’s the aforementioned Karen.
It was one of the first “mainstream” TV shows with gay central characters, and for that I give it its due, but for me the bloom was off the rose several years ago.
I agree with pretty much everything you said, Nordic. And it’s not just Senfeld Syndrome, it also suffers from Guest Star Syndrome. The show is so trendy, they never have to write another episode, just keep bringing in celebrity guest stars to be Jack’s long lost brother!!! or Karen’s new boyfriend!!! or Grace’s long-lost cousin!!! It’s just boring now.
Is that even possible? [hastily flips through physics textbook]
I nominate Dr. Smith from Lost in Space for much the same reason as Gilligan, except Smith was malicious while Gilligan was just inept.
I have tried to give Will & Grace a fair chance, but the Grace character has always been so loathsome it’s impossible for me to enjoy the show. Jack and Karen are obnoxious, but they’re clearly caricatures and not meant to be taken seriously. I always got the feeling that Grace was supposed to be a character that women in the audience could identify with – a slightly quirky and nervous single gal who sometimes gets into embarassing scrapes with her wacky friends. But she’s actually an evil, selfish bitch who’d probably be pushed under a subway in real life.
I think every episode I ever saw involved one of two basic plots:
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Grace doing something horrible and Will getting justifiably upset about it, but in the end he’d apologize for their falling out and she’d go back to doing the same thing again.
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Grace dragging the protesting Will into some halfbaked scheme, which results in embarassment for all.
I didn’t notice that he treated her like trash, although possibly only because I’d have wanted to treat her even worse!
[Dr. Smith voice]Silence, you mental midget. How dare you nominate me, you bubble-headed booby? Oh, the pain, the pain![/DSV]
I would say that watsherface from King of Queens is 1000 times worse. She always plays a bitch and I don’t think it’s a stretch for her as an actress.
Same goes for any of the “hot wife with doofus husband” shows.
I agree. I could care less about their sex lives but it’s thier personalities that suck. They are the classic disfunctional female stereotypes:
Carrie - The psycho bitch - Basically has the emotional development as an infant. Wants what she wants when she wants it and doesn’t know what she even wants. She barely deserves a Post-it note.
Samantha - The ho - Basically the most well adjusted of the group. Really cares about nothing except status and self gratification (more so than the rest). Unfortunately her conflict comes from the fact that she is also the oldest of the “girls” and won’t be able to get by in her looks for much longer. Too bad that’s all she has.
Charlotte - The princess - Also emotionally infantile. Constantly at odds with what she wants and living up to some 1950s WASP stereotype. Displays an almost childish naivity that is at first endearing but soon becomes tedius.
Miranda - The bitter ugly friend - Basically the stereotypical ugly chick who’s always pissed off because her friends are banging investment bankers and hip jerkoffs while she gets stuck with dumb meatheads who are intimidated by her career success.
Every episode is basically their true nature fucking things up and then them sobbing about it for 60 minutes.
The Focker parents in Meet the Fockers
They strike me as the kind of people who get off on making others uncomfortible by their lack of appropriate boundaries - with each other or other people. It is really passive aggressive behavior disguised as “free and easy”.
The Family Guy
Other than Stewie, Brian the dog and I guess the mom who’s harmless, I hate the characters. Peter is basicaly a moronic, psychotic version of Homer Simpson but without his charm. He fucks up shit for his family and in the last 5 minutes everything is somehow ok. The daughter is a pathetic whiny loser and the son is an imbecile.
Entourage
I don’t really like Vince. He comes across like a douchebag who doesn’t give a shit about anything - women, career, his friends.
Well in the show’s defense they have to do something to occupy 24 minutes, since clearly they can’t (God & Zell Miller forbid) let Will or Jack actually kiss another guy [unless it’s for laughs] and therefore an accurate depiction of a gay relationship just isn’t an option (unless it’s with Special Guest Star Michael Douglas! and begins and ends in that episode).
I suppose the show deserves some type of kudo or at least kudette for “first openly gay title character” yadda yadda, but as a gay man I actually find it offensive. I’d just as soon see gays stereotyped as ultra-promiscuous leather clad bondage freaks as I would see them stereotyped as seemingly celibate immaculately coiffed fashion accessories to successful urban women (who are always polite enough to not actually have a PDA with another man less it freak out the “normal people”). I much prefer Queer as Folk, which while strictly a soft-core soap opera it doesn’t try to pretend its the queer Rosa Parks and the characters actually have sex and relationships on camera.
All that aside though, I think Megan Mulally is an incredibly talented actress who can even make a one-dimensional character like Karen funny.
Who in Red Dwarf has no redeeming qualities? The only one I can think of who’s even close to being evil is Cat. But, he hates Rimmer and I’d say that’s a redeeming quality 
Kochanski is a whining bitch and never should have been brought on the show but even she has some good moments. She did save Lister’s life.
And, of course, in the series finale they show the characters getting their just deserts when they are brought on trial for laughing at a guy getting mugged (instead of helping him) and the prosecution brings in all the characters from previous shows that the main characters acted horribly toward. End result–they are sent to prison! GREAT concept–totally unexpected and unsentimental. I know it left a lot of viewers feeling unsatisfied–including myself when it first aired. But now that I’ve seen almost every Seinfeld episode several times in syndication, that final show becomes funnier and funnier to me. Ending the show by basically saying that each of the main characters is a :wally --perfect!
I forgot to put my show here:
Brains from Thunderbirds. He’s a whiny annoying prick. I can just picture him going off on the whole Tracy family because they don’t kiss his ass. Actually, Tin Tin is pretty freakin annoying too.
Dr. Frank Burns, from MASH* . The number of people he killed with incompetence… :eek:
I’d like to know too. I’m fascinated by the character of Dave Lister. We even have a Sim in Sims 2 like him.
I do think that the character they brought back as Kochansky is not the real Kochansky that Dave used to know or even the one he married in that one ep. What she is, I don’t know.
Rachael from *Friends * is one of the most horrible obnoxious women to ever “exist”. She’s horrible to everyone but for the way she deliberately treats Ross she should be pushed under a train.
I was going to add Frank Burns, but Bosda beat me to it. Not for the surgical incompetence but pretty much anything bad you can think about a person - bigotry, selfrighteousness, cowardice, infidelity, greed, meanness, etc.
So I will add my second pick, Louie DePalma from Taxi.
Scrappy Doo.
The Horror! The Horror!
:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
Not all the Scooby Snacks in the world could make it right…!
You missed the one where he inherited some amount of money - not huge, but not insignificant either - and Archie’s all “Gonna pay me back now?” and Meathead’s all “No, I’ve been working on paying you off but with this free money I got from a deceased relative (and it’s all okay until now but this is the kicker) I’m gonna contribute it to the McGovern campaign.” This is, of course, the day before the election or so, when one could not possibly miss the fact that this is gonna be wasted money. What a little jerk. Not that he had to give it to Archie, but hell, I’m sure he and Gloria could use a little treat of some sort. Give it to Edith, she needs it!
I though Seinfeld syndrome was where you ended up dumping people routinely for the slightist little percieved inperfections: “She had man Hands!” or there was one episode where Jerry was freaked out by a toe that was too big.
Basically, being incredibly shallow.
I agree with all of that except for, I didn’t enjoy it even in the first couple of seasons. I think Debra Messing is hot, so I usually tune in for just a little while, but usually they drive me away quickly.
Meh. The Seinfeld final episode sucked because it was a lousy clip show.
Frank Burns as a surgical klutz was somewhat contradicted by the repeated claims that the 4077 patients had a 90%+ survival rate, which might have been true of real-life MASH units, but raises the question of why a fictional version would keep an incompetent surgeon on staff. The first episode of that series, as I recall, had a bit where Colonel Blake tells Pierce and McIntyre to lay off of Burns because “he’s a good surgeon and we need him.” As far as I know, that was the first and only time Burns’ skills were referenced positively. Frankly (bDOOM kssh) it was the bullying, nasty, smug, disrespectful attitudes of Pierce and McIntyre that struck me as hateful and turned me away from the show, once I was old enough to understand a level beyond the simple slapstick comedy.