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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.
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.
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