In many of my favorite shows there may be one or two characters that lessen the experience for me.
Paul from Spin City sets my teeth on edge. Although James was a close second.
Diane on Cheers.
Bull on Night Court.
Whenever they are on the screen I’m much less entertained.
Who are yours?
Phoebe from Friends annoys me quite often; her character is just so over-written sometimes.
All of them were crazy in their own ways. I don’t think Phoebe was any more over the top than the others, especially Joey. If I was going to pick the weakest character on that show it would probably be Ross, because he was the LEAST over-written.
Chester on Soap. I hate all of his storylines.
Fish on Barney Miller. Too good an actor to be playing a one-trick pony of a character.
Bobby on Taxi. With Tony a close second. Oy vey.
Anyone filling in for Richard on Match Game, but also Richard post ca. 1976.
Chekov. Wesley. Nog. Kes.
Any relative of Marge’s in any episode that doesn’t also have Sideshow Bob.
Cameron and Thirteen in House. Cuddy is such a cool, strong female character, but these other two do nothing for me. I wouldn’t miss them if they left. I especially don’t like that the two of them have very similar personalities.
Yeah and that applied to Rachel from Friends and Monica from Friends and Joey from Friends and Chandler from Friends and Ross from Friends.
Hang on though, I never really liked* Friends*.
In the original Coupling, Jane used to annoy me to no end.
Until…
The episode where she gets fired. She decides to become a children’s entertainer with a sock puppet on her hand. She’s trying the act out with her friends and (having also taken some drugs) the puppet takes on a life of its own. At one point, she is being insulted by her own hand.
Gina Bellman is hysterical in that scene. It made the character less annoying to realize how good the actress was to be that annoying.
Edited clip here, with the good part starting about four minutes in.
AJ Soprano…
I win
Ned on Pushing Daisies. The guy will not stop lamenting that Chuck lives NEXT DOOR! The way he talks to himself is annoying.
In Ned’s defense he has some severe issues. It’s bad enough that he can never touch her but now they can’t even have the closeness they had before when they shared an apartment. It also means he has to face the fact that they can never be and eventually she will probably move on with someone else. It’s also just the past couple episodes and hopefully he will stop whining about it soon.
Will Riker & Wesley Crusher almost define this category for me.
Riker was James Kirk without the charm. Writers, your simply cannot have a sympathetic character who both (a) sleeps with every alien babe who comes down the pike, and (b) is supposedly in love with his hot coworker whom he sees every day. Kirk may have been an ass, but at least he was consistent about it; and when it was occasionally intimated that he was intensely lonely and simultaneously hated being captain but didn’t want to do anything else, it ws believable.
Wesley is, of course Wesley.
Ah, Nikki and Paulo on Lost. Everyone’s favorite mistakes. (Claire’s kind of going this way, too–I’m hoping the writers will use the mystical-Aaron angle to actually give her some lines in the last two seasons.)
I might get some flack over this, but Bela from Supernatural really didn’t need more than one or maybe two episodes. It was a great premise, but the whole posh-British thing was cheesy and it seemed like she existed solely to make the boys hold the Idiot Ball for that episode. (Ruby, on the other hand, was awesome. I’m so glad she’s back. :D)
Cally from Battlestar Galactica, but maybe it’s personal bias.
Jaga from Thundercats. Everytime he shows up I want to punch him in his ectoplasmic face.
Wesley Crusher. But I’ll watch anything else Wil Wheaton is in.
Rio from Jem and the Holograms. God, how stupid was he? Not that Jerrica was all that much brighter. The whole romance was the most awkward and wallbangingly bad thing in the show.
Heh. I know it’s a pretty trashy show a lot of the time - completely over-written and over-produced, occurs in a weird vaccuum outside politics etc, but there’s something about it I like. This is probably the wrong forum to confess to a like of Friends :p, but in every instance where a mate of mine has said they hate it they end up giggling through it (why, yes, they do have to watch it if they’re in my house).
Anyway, back to the OP - don’t know if any non UK/Irish Dopers watch Eastenders, but Little Mo a few years ago had me practically throwing stuff at the TV. I also think Susan from Desperate Housewives could do with a good slap sometimes.
I’ll add a couple more, if I may.
First, Lorne from Angel. Not that I didn’t love the character; I did. But making him a regular and giving him a backstory was a mistake. He was better off mysterious, and he was better off neutral–neither on Angel’s side nor Wolfram & Hart’s.
Don’t forget the over-affected accent known as Counselor ‘Cleavage’ Troi. (Although I imagine you’re trying hard to forget her.)
On the show Will & Grace, the weak links were always…the Will and Grace characters. Well, Ok, Grace could occasionally get me to chuckle, but Will was never less than insufferably annoying. (A pretty good feat for a character played by someone so homogenously bland.) Imagine how much better the show would have been if it had been “Jack & Karen.”
I would disagree about Diane on Cheers, at least in part. She started out much more sympathetic & likeable character. The writers on the show generally acknowledged that, after Shelley Long announced she would be leaving the show, they deliberately made the character more obnoxious so that the audience wouldn’t miss her.
Warrick on CSI has always bored me. They tried to give him some sort of dramatic appeal last season, that fell with a mundane ploppy wet-cardboard sound.
Seconding the mention of Cameron and Thirteen on House. That show’s writers have somehow managed to make sizzling hotties, which will normally hook me into some otherwise awful TV shows, into the most soporific spans of screen time.
Book on Firefly seemed like a total superfluous Poochie character, and his scenes and dialogue always felt shoehorned into the otherwise fantastic flow and chemistry of the show.
Frank Burns and, to a lesser degree, Henry Blake on MASH. Burns was a cardborard cut-out antagonist, and Blake was a buffoon and cipher who was played like a fiddle by Hawkeye and Trapper. Their replacements by Winchester and Potter elevated the show immensely (even though it also coincided with the increase in Hawkeye’s preachiness).
That and the fact that even before Long decided to leave, she had alienated so many of the “Cheers” writers that they channelled their dislike for the actress by making her character more irritating. Also, as time went on, the personalities of Diane and Long became so enmeshed that it was difficult to tell where one left off and one began.
I cannot watch Peggy-heavy episodes of King of the Hill.