I love TV -- Always have and always will. What else is there to do during a pandemic than binge watch?
Recently, I watched "The Wire" all the way through and it's a top 5 show to me. "Entourage" is also one of those shows I have to watch anytime I see it on.
Who are the top TV characters of the 21st century, though?
Thrillest put out their list of "The 100 Greatest TV Characters of the 21st Century." I'm not going to list all 100 here but I will give you the top 10 and see if you agree.
10. Kenny Powers (Eastbound and Down)
Kenny Powers personifies an ultra-specific strain of American male egotism.
9. Elizabeth Jennings (The Americans)
The Americans used a little-known chapter of the Cold War to spin captivating television: What if there were agents of the Soviet Union posing as a regular old suburban family in the 1980s?
8. Al Swearengen (Deadwood)
It's fitting that the final image of Deadwood's third season, which served as its ending until a recent TV movie comeback tied up some loose ends, was of Al Swearengen kneeling on the floor of his upstairs office scrubbing away at a bloodstain
7. Blair Waldorf (Gossip Girl)
Teen TV isn't as respected as it should be, but we here are bowing down at the altar of Queen B.
6. Paper Boi (Atlanta)
Ostensibly structured around Alfred "Paper Boi" Miles' rise to fame, Donald Glover's surreal comedy Atlanta, shrewdly pitched as "Twin Peaks with rappers" at the outset, takes a subversive look at the modern star machine of the music industry.
5. Fleabag (Fleabag)
Dry, deadpan, and hopelessly (and, at times, very relatably) addicted to sex, Fleabag, spawned from creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge's one-woman show, is in a class all of her own, absolutely magnetic and charming even when her frequent fumbles in her quest to become a better person often unveil her nastier side.
4. Huey Freeman (The Boondocks)
The series as a whole is easily one of the most capital-R Revolutionary shows, animated and otherwise, that has ever been allowed to air on TV, and that's thanks to Huey's unwavering mindset as our narrator and guide through the world to sniff out racist and false societal truths that plague the collective consciousness.
3. Tami Taylor (Friday Night Lights)
In contemporary television, particularly the shows that get written up on websites and celebrated on lists, canny ruthlessness goes a long way.
2. Omar Little (The Wire)
On a show that prized unglamorous authenticity and moral ambiguity over standard cop drama catharsis, Omar Little, the shotgun-wielding, drug-dealer-robbing stick-up artist in a duster, almost scans as a writerly flourish.
1. Peggy Olson (Mad Men)
If TV at the end of the 20th century was defined by the male antihero, TV at the beginning of the 21st was defined by a rebuke to that.
