Here are my more than 10 top choices that come to mine. Some have been suggested by others. In no particular order.
Jim Rockford
Tony Soprano
Carmela Soprano
Livia Soprano
Livia wife of Augustus in I, Claudius
Claudius
Jax Teller, The Sons of Anarchy
Gemma Morrow, The Sons of Anarchy
Hamlet the character no matter who plays him is a masterpiece of writing
Michael Corleone
Fredo Corleone
Tom Hagen
Thomas Moore as played by Paul Scofield
Horace Rumpole
Julia, as played by Vanessa Redgrave
I’m not that high on Spike as a character either because there were so many things in the mythology that just didn’t fit or track over the years but I think James Marsters played him brilliantly.
Buffy Summers
Dean Winchester (Supernatural)
Marybeth Lacey (I don’t know if I would have thought of her if I hadn’t just seen her name in another thread but I thought Cagney and Lacey were both well-developed characters)
Father Ray (from the controversial, cancelled show Nothing Sacred)
Colleen McMurphy (China Beach)
K.C. (China Beach)
Doug Ross (ER)
Hawkeye Pierce
I’ll have to nominate Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, even though I’m not normally a big fan of Angel. I think the story of his drastic change and growth over the years was very well told.
Thomas Sullivan Magnum
James Tiberius Kirk
Benjamin Lafayette Sisko
Maxwell Smart
Jimmy Rockford
Mike Hammer
Lennie Briscoe
Captain Kangaroo (we are talking lifetime of viewership, right?)
No, I’ll agree with you on that one. Their marriage was the model to which I’ve always aspired. Sure, they had problems, but you knew, deep down, that they loved each other fiercely.
There’s a difference between “truly 3-dimensional believable utterly convincing characters” and “entertaining characters”, although of course there is some overlap. Ralph Wiggum, for instance, is certainly in the second category, but not so much the first. Whereas I found a lot of the characters the recent BSG to be trying so hard to fit into the first category that (a) they overshot, and (b) they often failed to be entertaining.
For characters who fit both categories, I will go with:
-Omar, Bubbles and Stringer Bell from The Wire
-Al Swearengen from Deadwood
-Angela Chase and Brian Krakow from My So Called Life
-Coach and Mrs. Taylor on Friday Night Lights (a truly convincing portrayal of a very solid loving marriage that still occasionally has issues, but they seem real, not problem-of-the-week) (honorable mention to a bunch of other characters from the show, particularly Matt Saracen)
-Ruth Fisher from Six Feet Under (first few seasons, at least)
and, just because it’s too good a show not to mention
-Logan Echolls from Veronica Mars
That’s a good one. He is so fully realized that the creators forgot he was only half Vulcan, and made every other member of the species almost exactly the same.
**Eddie “Fitz” Fitzgerald ** played by Robbie Coltrane in the UK series Cracker, one of the best dramas in TV history.
As wikipedia says:
Fitz is a classic antihero, unfaithful to his wife, alcoholic, a chain smoker, overweight, addicted to gambling, manic, foulmouthed and sarcastic; and yet cerebral and brilliant. A genius in his speciality: getting into the heads of violent criminals. As Fitz confesses in “Brotherly Love”: “I drink too much, I smoke too much, I gamble too much. I am too much.”