I mean, they have made passing mention to Meg having killed a brother or something as a bad dream that Chris has mentioned (I believe?), but I must have missed the episode where this is confirmed? shrug
I took that as a Joke -you know, like when Lois mentions having come down from Meth ages ago as a passing joke. Doesn’t mean she really is a drug addict while taking care of a baby.
Er…and I’m not defending Meg, just mentioning why I find Lois to be rather unlikeable. I find the whole family (including Lois) to be cruel - at times unwatchable. shrug
It’s pretty hard to dislike Chris…I mean, he makes fun of Meg too, but as a normal brother-sister relationship…I don’t seem to remember him ever trying to harm her aside from some pranks. And he also seems to be the most well-meaning character (aka boring) on the show.
Nobody on Scrubs is particularly likable. I mean, if I had to spend time with any of those people, it would probably be Carla, but I don’t think I’d want to even spend time with her.
Bobby Baccalieri had kind of a sweet quietness about him. Other than the fact that he was in the mob in the first place, it was really hard to find a reason to dislike him. Dude was like a big teddy bear. He complained about being too shy to don a Santa suit, which is hard to imagine any of the other characters citing as a reason not to take on that job.
In one episode it was mentioned that he loved his wife so much that he was the only member of the gang who didn’t have a goomma on the side, and that he took some shit from the other guys because of his faithfulness. He seemed like an excellent, caring father, and he was genuinely distraught for a very long time when his wife died in a car accident.
Now, I’m only up to the first episode of season five on my Netflix DVDs, so it’s possible that he could do something something extremely fucked up in this or the last season, but such an act would be very out-of-character for him.
Type 1:
[ul][li]Seinfeld[/li][li]Everybody Loves Raymond[/li][li]Two and a Half Men[/li][li]Family Guy[/ul][/li]The only character on Family Guy who doesn’t irritate me is Lois, and she’s just OK. For the other three shows, I have active dislike (ranging from mild annoyance to full-blown hatred) for every main character on the show.
Type 2:
[ul][li]The Sopranos[/li][li]Married…With Children[/li][/ul]
I rented the first season of The Sopranos on Netflix. There was a lot of good drama, but I couldn’t root for any of the main characters, because they were all terrible people who really did deserve to end up riddled with bullets. Consequently, I never went any further than season 1 with the show. I’ve never seen Prison Break, but from what I’ve heard I suspect I’d feel the same way.
For Married…With Children, I’ve often thought that the perfect ending would have gone like this: Peg is sitting on the couch watching TV, being her usual obnoxious self, giving abuse to Al. Finally, she pushes Al too far. He leaves the room, and comes back a moment later carrying a big axe, with a demented gleam in his eye. Peg, still watching TV, is oblivious to this development. The camera slowly pans away, and the violin chords from Psycho play in the background as we hear the sound of chopping and Peg screaming in agony. In the next scene, we see Al sitting in a padded room wearing a straightjacket. He’s smiling, and he says to himself, “Finally, I’ve got some peace and quiet.”
I do like Homer on the Simpsons, but that show jumped the shark about a decade ago. Dr. House on House is a total raging asshole, but I have a lot of sympathy for the underlings that have to put up with him. They have much more patience than I could ever muster up in their situation.
The other shows mentioned here I haven’t seen enough to form an opinion.
If a show had no likable character, it would flop. I think what you mean is “no character we SHOULD like, if it were a real, live person.”
Truth is, we like assholes. Assholes make for great TV. Hell, Assholes can be likable, to a degree – Dr. Greg House prove that weekly. If he happened to be your coworker, you’d be in the pit bitching about him on a daily basis… but man, he makes for some awesome TV.
In the same category:
The Sopranos
Law & Order: Criminal Intent
Family Guy
Married with Children
Deadwood
Firefly (no, really…)
Seinfeld
American Dad
Grey’s Anatomy
… and so on.
But House is probably the best example: the Leads are more than just seriously flawed. They’re flawed to make them downright morally teetering on the edge…
And that makes for good TV.
Elenfair, the happy television scribe, currently on hiatus (but not for long. Unless there’s a SAG strike, of course)
34.67 % of everything I post in Cafe Society is a smart-ass remark. 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 % of the things I post in CS that include statistics are smart-ass remarks.
Yeah, in regard to Sex and the City, I was actually going to say that Steve is very likeable. Hell, I more than forgave him for…
… cheating on Miranda in the movie, since by that point Miranda had become an evil, hateful she-harpy. Steve should have divorced the bitch.
I’d also say that Berger was pretty likeable. He went a little crazy having to deal with Carrie, but he didn’t strangle her and leave her at the bottom of the Hudson like I would have, so I give him points for that.
In general, the women on SaTC were such walking bundles of neuroses that the men came off pretty well for putting up with them.
Not even the Doctor? He seems like a genuinely decent person. Sure, he may rarely break a law or some such, but he never hurts anyone who isn’t asking for it.
Hell, he told Jane that no matter what Jane did, if he was on his operating table he would never hurt him. That was a clumsy sentence, I apologize. And that was after Jane had tried to sell Doc and River out.
I’d also say that Wash and Kailey are likable enough.
I’m gonna jump on the Sopranos bandwagon. They fit types 1 and 2 for me. I watched every episode and wish they would have stopped after season 3. I kept waiting for it to get better, but it never did.
As **Elenfair ** noted upthread, bad guys, villains, flawed characters, pricks, egotists ASF are generally much more interesting than good guys. You wouldn’t want every show to be like Love Boat, would you.
Godfather I+II are great without having any really likable character (no not even Dianne Keaton), superhero movies are not fun if the superhero is a really nice guy (Superman) as opposed to a troubled asshole trying to do good stuff (Batman et al).
Interesting things happen when the audience start rooting for the psycopath. Off hand, I can only come up with one example (Highsmith’s books about Ripley, not the movie versions). When we want the total asshole to win, what does that tell us about ourselves?
Becker. Only the blind black guy was a half-way decent person, and even he had no compunction being out-and-out nasty for the sake of a good line.
No, no no! Charlie is likeable … not someone I’d want to know personally, but likeable as a character, sure. Similarly with the neighbour (Rose?) and the cleaner.
Certainly not Maggie. There’s enough evidence to indicate she’s really smart but still plays the dumb baby for the sake of an easy life and/or Marge’s ego.
Wash and Kaylee had traits of the inherently likable – they were supporting characters. Shepherd Book, as well – that said, Book’s background, had the show been allowed to progress, would slowly have been revealed. Chances are that he was not all sunshine and puppies.
The thing about Whedon is that none of his characters are, in the end, ever what they seem. None of them are 100% “good”, or 100% likable. They always turn out to have some kind of flaw - moral or otherwise - that makes them truly “human”. They all have an edge that makes us love them and hate them, all at once.
The best example of such a creation of his is Spike. Another one would be Willow.
Charlie is an alcoholic sex addict, Rose is his stalker, and the maid is a total smartass. Likeable as those characters are on TV, in real life you wouldn’t be able to stand them for five minutes.
“Married With Children” has been mentioned here. I’ll point out that Steve & Marcy were introduced as a lovely young couple who were to be corrupted by the Bundys. The formula worked beautifully, as Marcy got more and more like Al. I did like Jefferson D’Arcy.
You’d actually want to spend time with either Dr. Cox or House? I mean, given the choice, you’d like to hang out with them, have a beer?
They’re both, at the least, extremely verbally abusive to the people around them. Don’t get me wrong, it makes them great characters to watch…and they’re both two of my favorite characters. But they’re not nice guys.
