Rather than send up another vote for Oz (who is indeed off-the-scale cool), I’m going to nominate Darlene Conner as the coolest TV adolescent. Intelligent, creative, independent, scathingly funny, but with a soft vulnerable side she guarded closely. I’d like to have known someone like her in my high school days; sadly my high school seemed to be filled mostly with Beckys.
In terms of “I’d like to be like that guy”-cool, perhaps Det. Bobby Simone. A great cop, and also a guy you could go to with your troubles. Either him or Race Bannon.
Cole from Charmed. Utter coolness in a slimebucket.
Garibaldi from Babylon 5, especially when he’s about to leave the room, turns around and says, “Oh, one other thing,” then tells his audience the worst news they would ever want to hear.
The team of Munch and Tutuola from Law & Order: SVU. The former activist and the reformed thug team up to combine their sinister wiles to catch the bad guys.
All of the diplomatic attachès on that show are cool, in their own way. Vir, even if it weren’t for all his other coolnesses, would get credit for “And I will wave. Like this.”. Na’Toth, who has her own methods “And I suppose you didn’t enjoy kicking me around like that?” “No, I never said that.”. And of course, Lennier. I just re-watched the episode where Londo was introducing him to the seedier side of the station… You’ll notice that despite his statements of the odds, and despite Londo’s cheating, he’s still ending up with all of the chips? I’m willing to bet that the combination which had only a 1 in 5000 chance was 2-3-4-5-7.
And yeah, Garibaldi was cool… And Kosh… And Dr. Franklin… And Delenn… Aw, heck, everyone on that show was cool.
President Bartlett closely followed by Toby Zigler. Somehow he can carry out a whole conversation with “Yes”, “No” and “OK”. Come to think of it they all do that. Slightly addicted to West Wing atm.
Also, Seven of Nine. Though I doubt that’s cause she is cool so much as well…
“You’ve got me doin’ a buck and wing with no fiddle!”
“Save sorry for Brenda Lee.”
“You don’t mouth off to anything that big. He looks like 190 pounds of gristle.”
Well, since the entire cast of Babylon 5 has already been covered…wait–no one specifically mentioned Ivanova. How could you leave out Ivanova? She had the best lines in the show (in several senses). Between the “Babylon 5 mantra” and “I am Death incarnate” she has more cool points than half the cast combined.
Daniel Jackson, the cool ubergeek, has also been mentioned. I was delighted to have a Daniel moment in a LARP game a couple of weeks ago–sitting in the dark, on top of a mountain, in the middle of a 40-person battle, solving a cipher in a dead language. It’s not fair that Daniel gets to do it all the time.
A slightly more obscure character that hasn’t been mentioned yet: Ezekiel Stone, from Brimstone. The damned soul of a cop, returned to the living world to hunt escapees from Hell. The guy’s boss is the Devil himself, and he not only gave him backtalk, he shot him. Twice.
For that matter, the Satan character in the show (as played by John Glover) was ridiculously cool.
