TV: Shut up, Wesley

[sigma7]

Day 01 - A show that should never have been cancelled
Day 02 - A show that you wish more people were watching
Day 03 - Your favorite new show (aired this TV season)
Day 04 - Your favorite show ever
Day 05 - A show you hate
Day 06 - Favorite episode of one of your favorite shows
Day 07 - Least favorite episode of one of your favorite TV shows
Day 08 - A show that's had a significant effect on who you are today
Day 09 - Best scene ever
Day 10 - A show you thought you wouldn't like but ended up loving
Day 11 - A show that disappointed you
Day 12 - An episode you've watched more than 5 times
Day 13 - Favorite childhood show
Day 14 - Favorite male character
Day 15 - Favorite female character
Day 16 - Your guilty pleasure show
Day 17 - Favorite mini series
Day 18 - Favorite title sequence
Day 19 - Best TV show cast
Day 20 - Favorite kiss
Day 21 - Favorite ship
Day 22 - Favorite series finale
Day 23 - Most annoying character
Day 24 - Best quote
Day 25 - A show you plan on watching (old or new)
Day 26 - OMG WTF? Season finale
Day 27 - Best pilot episode
Day 28 - First TV show obsession
Day 29 - Current TV show obsession
Day 30 - Saddest character death

Seriously, compared to some other potential inclusions on this list, Wesley Crusher isn't that bad at all. He had some pretty decent moments in some of his later seasons aboard the Enterprise, and his sendoff from the main cast was actually pretty well-done. Depending on who wrote and directed the episodes, he could be interesting or just awful. And as we've figured out since then, Wil Wheaton's not a bad actor.

Actually, that's what makes a lot of this list so frustrating. Not many of these characters are played by bad actors. They're just written in such a way that their very presence (or whatever character archetype they've been chosen to fulfill) grates against the harmony of the show. There've been enough of them on any given show -- the Trek series alone had about one apiece: TNG had Wesley and Pulaski, DS9 had Jake and Nog and Rom (up to a point), Voyager had Neelix and Kes, Enterprise had the goddamned theme music and from that point on EVERYONE COUNTED. Buffy had Maggie Walsh (though, to be fair, Lindsay Crouse's performance was unconvincing), Dawn (to a point), Kennedy, the Geek Trio and the First Evil (yap yap yap; I will say this for Joss -- with the exception of the Operative, his long-winded bad guys are so damned tedious). 24 had Kim and the cougars that steadfastly refused to eat her. Lost had Nikki/Xerxes and Ana-Lucia and MicWAAAAAAAAAAALThael, none of whom died anywhere soon enough. House had Tritter, Vogler and Cameron. Grey's Anatomy has EVERYONE WHO EVER APPEARED.... Ugh, God, people, we could do this all day, but, you know, this isn't even fun. This is wallowing in moments of misery. I can't even be bothered to attempt to be exhaustive here or make a table or...or anything. Let's just crown a winner and move the hell on, shall we?

The terrible thing is, despite it being obviously derivative of Buffy and its mythos, Angel could've been -- and occasionally was -- a decent show. This despite the fact that I found David Boreanaz's titular character as mopey and boring and, to steal a line from Spike via Buffybot: "Angel's lame. His hair sticks straight up and he's bloody stupid." Still, the series had its moments as it collected some of the more interesting but underdeveloped characters with potential -- Cordelia the alpha-bitch, Wesley the fallen Watcher, Gunn the trench-fighter, Lorne the lounge-singing demon -- but when it went off the rails, oh, wow, evacuate the area.

So Angel fathers a child with another vampire (hang on) and said child gets kidnapped, raised in another dimension where time moves differently to have nothing but contempt and loathing for Angel, and suddenly woosh, here's young Connor, now conveniently 18 years old and pissed off at his undead father. Maybe interesting if you stop right there. But oh God the whining. Connor ends up becoming part of the main cast for a season and a half, being a stand-up gent and (a) locking his father in a steel coffin at the bottom of the ocean for three months (b) stole his dad's girlfriend (c) knocked up said dad's girlfriend (d) assisted the demonic entity that was gestating inside said girlfriend in human sacrifice (e) upon being exposed to the now-born entity that was attempting to enslave humanity, even when confronted with its true nature, fought to assist it against his father and friends (f) tried to detonate himself, hostages and his (sigh) dad's now-comatose former girlfriend turned Connor's babymama with a crapton of explosives. And every line out of his mouth in the process was a chorus of fingernails down the chalkboard.

Which is sad. As he's proven elsewhere, Vincent Kartheiser is not a bad actor. Connor was a very bad character (both in terms of the wrongness of his actions and the fact that it was extremely difficult to keep any investment in the show while Connor was a part of it). Whoever was responsible for heading the writing team swallowed the idiot ball (this was not a good time at Mutant Enemy) -- the massive amount of retconning foisted into the show to explain away little things like, oh, vampires havin' behbehs and Cordelia seducing Connor were a result of a very powerful entity arranging events so as to give birth to itself. No, don't dwell on that. Just move on. Seriously. Just move on.

As part of the Faustian deal that Angel made at the end of the fourth season, Connor got a happy ending with a 'real' family. Connor made two appearances in the fifth season, one in which he wasn't aware of his true heritage and one in which he was, and in both, he was perfectly tolerable and actually fun to watch. Which is keyboard-smashing insipid, because that's the character you could've had from day one instead of trying to watch the show through a used coffee filter of insolent angst for thirty-odd episodes.

Maybe there's another character outside of 'reality' TV that's done more to make a good show utterly intolerable than Connor. At the moment, I can't think of one. Feel free to correct me.

Comments

[brightrosefox.livejournal.com]

Thank you for talking about everything that was wrong with Connor. As much as I loved Vincent Kartheiser's pretty face, the character was unlikeable and unwatchable. Bleh.

I do love how Wil Wheaton often rants against his old character and admits how ridiculous Wesley Crusher often was.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

When Connor got tazed by Fred in the fourth-season premiere, I may have fist-pumped. He was one monotonous plot point that just wouldn't go away...until he was worth having around, by which point he was given to a good family on a farm. Figures.

And I'm glad that if someone had to be Wesley, it was Wil Wheaton. Someone was going to get paid for being there and saying those lines, and he's managed to come into his own by virtue of nothing more than Being Wil Wheaton. It's almost Shatneresque.

[brightrosefox.livejournal.com]

Given to a good family on a farm, like a pet that wasn't working out, heh heh.

That's a great way to look at Wil and Wesley! And Wil is just so freaking nice and everything. I honestly don't think anyone else could have played Wesley Crusher and kept being as wonderful as Wil Wheaton. It is almost Shatneresque, without the ego.

[beagle1971.livejournal.com]

Not one mention of Cousin Oliver or Scrappy Doo. I'm hurt.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

I figured those two, specifically, went unsaid. Show-killers, those two. *shudder*

[querldox.livejournal.com]

This one's a bit different, as it's a character who actually became tolerable. Namely, Morgan on Chuck.

First season, this was a character who managed to combine having no positive qualities at all (OK, he was loyal to his friend Chuck. But he was also a key enabler and downright encourager of Chuck not doing anything close to fulfilling his potential, far outweighing the loyalty) and also grating like nails on a chalkboard in terms of personality and dialogue. I don't think I've ever seen a character who was supposed to have been considered a positive character by the audience come across so horribly.

Over the next few seasons, the writers managed, without doing a complete personality implant/retcon, to somehow write him such that while he'll never be anything close to a favorite character of mine, I don't wonder any more why no other character has killed him and discreetly disposed of the body.

Runner-up, although this may have changed since I gave up on the show, was Evan on Royal Pains. As far as I could tell, he was consisted entirely of idiotballium, admittedly taking the load of carrying one from the other characters. No signs of change as of the time I quit watching.

Admittedly, I've been realizing the past few years that "stupid for the sake of being stupid/plot reasons" just isn't working for me unless done very well, or without an expectation that we/characters on the show are supposed to ignore the stupid and still like the characters. Examples that do work: most, but not all, of Arrested Development, Jeff and Lester on Chuck.

[motteditor.livejournal.com]

Good point about Morgan, though I'm still not a huge fan of the character. Better integrating him into the A plot helped a lot, though.

Evan and Royal Pains both got a LOT better as the show has gone on (though this past week's was actually one of the worst they've done in ages). I think it may actually be No. 3 now of the USA dramas (behind White Collar and Burn Notice). As with Morgan, they made subtle changes with Evan, so they weren't completely changing his personality, but rather making it so he wasn't someone you wanted to punch all the time. Still not perfect, but far improved from how he started.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

On thinking about it a bit more, I think what particularly irks me about Morgan and Evan and similar characters is their very role as lead character's best friend makes no sense. In my experience at least, smart, competent, people mostly hang out with, well, other smart, competent, people (with an exception for the not-really-that-smart type who selects folk because they want to be the smartest person in the room at all times).

Now, I'm not trying to be an intellectual snob. For example, note that Richard Feynman liked to hang out in Vegas and the Sunset Strip and had friends across a number of spectra. But also note that he very much enjoyed attending MIT, Princeton, and working at Caltech, and it's clear from his autobios he really enjoyed being with smart and interesting types.

But with Chuck and Hank, we're expected to believe their bffs aren't just not as smart and competent as they are (and at least first season, Hank was pretty much at a Mary Sue level of all around awesomeness), but are completely incompetent idiots. At a level that any sane intelligent person meeting Morgan and Evan for the first time would run screaming from them, and, if followed, look into getting a restraining order. And, admittedly due to cast budget considerations, they didn't seem to have any friends who were at their level of smarts and competence who they'd hang out with.

This is also something that's bothered me for a while about Spider-Man. Admittedly Gwen Stacy was semi-retconned into also being a science major, it's not like she and Peter were ever shown talking about science related topics. I think Peter's current girlfriend, Carlie Cooper, is the first science type with non-street type smarts that he's ever dated. And all of his close friends were never portrayed as anywhere near Peter's level of smarts. I mean, in the Silver Age/Peter's high school years, his best superhero friend should've been Hank McCoy, not Johnny Storm (although Dan Slott in particular in the Spider-Man/Torch mini- did a good job of showing the type of friendship they've had. It's not so much that he's friends with Johnny, Flash, Harry, etc., but that he's got no close friends anywhere near his level of smarts).

What worked for me was Frasier and Niles Crane's friendship beyond their being brothers. While they could still be neurotic and do dumb things which followed naturally from their personalities, they were both smart and you could see why they'd hang out together. But way too many sitcoms or dramas with a strong comedy sub-element, seem to feel either they can only have one smart person, or that they have to have a character who can be counted on to hold the idiot ball in every episode.

[motteditor.livejournal.com]

I don't disagree with any of this, though I think in both examples you've got here, you could find reasons why they hung out.

With Chuck, clearly nostalgia was a big part of it. But I also think with his season 1 depression/lack of ambition/getting kicked out of college, the people he might otherwise have hung out with didn't want to hang out with him. If Bryce (and Jill, for that matter) hadn't (seemingly) betrayed him, I don't think it would be unreasonable to think he would have been hanging out with them and others of his intellectual capacity as opposed to Morgan.

With Hank, you've also got someone who started out as despressed, creating a dependency. The fact that he's his brother also factors into it, I think. I think also Evan buffoonishness belied the fact that he actually is pretty good at marketing/finances. It's not completely clear, especially since they've got a house paid for them and are surrounded by really really really rich folks, but I think he's got the business going pretty well, despite Hank frequently not bothering to worry about getting paid/providing pro bono services.

(And, yes, Hank's still just about at Mary Sue levels of capability...)

[motteditor.livejournal.com]

With your subject line, I thought you were going to go with Wes (from "Buffy"/"Angel") and was stunned. Then I figured Wesley Crusher, and was OK with that ... but Connor defintely wins. Absolutely ruined those two seasons and was just a character you loathed. I think I would STILL avoid Kartheiser in anything because of that character.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

Early versions of Wesley Windham-Pryce might've been slightly annoying, but not egregiously so. His character might've been troublesome, but even by the end of Buffy's third season he was already established as a bit more than the council's lackey. His arc on Angel was...interesting, to say the least, and by season four, he was one of my favorites. Which made season five all the harder to watch.

[patchsassy.livejournal.com]

The Wil Wheaton episodes of Big Bang Theory are thoroughly enjoyable, as he is Sheldon's arch-nemesis and plays an "evil" version of himself. In the second episode, he's in a bowling tournament opposite Sheldon's team and Sheldon decides to name his team the Wesley Crushers.

(Then, in the third appearance this season, Sheldon and company were the last four left out in the cold at a theater replay of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Wil Wheaton's entourage had line-jumped.)

[jb-helfrich.livejournal.com]

While I haven't caught up on BBT yet, I do think it interesting how Wil has rejuvenated his acting carer playing mostly bad guys/assholes, particularly variants of himself (BBT, The Guild) or his other characters (Eureka, where he's kind of playing Wesley gone horribly wrong.)

Also, his non-fiction writing's pretty good. (I haven't read his fiction stuff yet.)

And while Connor was a train wreck, he did arguably get the best line of the series: "Come on. You drop by for coffee and the world's not ending? Please."

[kateshort.livejournal.com]

JOE-- totally unrelated, but hopefully you get emailed LJ comments. You don't have a publicly-available address on your Amazon wish list, and your other websites don't have a way to contact you via email. Here's hoping you see this. I'd like to get you a gift off of there, but I've gotta have a place to *send* it...

[jb-helfrich.livejournal.com]

Check your twitter account, since I don't have an email for you these days either.

You always could have had your husband ask my mom. :)

[kateshort.livejournal.com]

you can email me at kateshort@ my livejournal.com address. :)

And I *did* ask Joel to contact your mom about it, and he said that he would. Whether he did is another story, but yeah, we tried that route too.

I don't even remember my twitter login.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Also Chaos on Leverage. Personally, I blame his growing a van dyke, the classic Star Trek indicator of an evil twin.