Sometimes, even those who have it all can throw it away. In this blog, I'm going to be counting down the top ten comedy characters I could think of that started out upstanding and either went back on their own values, made some very bad choices, or just went bat**** insane.
Some disclaimers:
-Walter White isn't going to be on this list. Breaking Bad is not a comedy. I mean, we get some larfs, mostly at the expense of Marie, but it's not.
-We won't include any characters who were just terrible to begin with. We're looking for contrast. So, Gil from The Simpsons won't be on the list.
-We won't include any characters that ultimately had some kind of redemption, so no Jerry Smith, Kirk VanHouten, or BoJack Horseman.
Without further ado, here's my top 10 list! Please let me know what you think in the comments, and like and subscribe. I keep forgetting I'm not YouTube.
10. Michael Bluth - Arrested Development
How he started: As the intro narration states, "Now, the story of a wealthy family who lost everything, and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together."
As the show begins, Michael and his son, George Michael, are going back to live with his family and try to help them recover from some financial difficulties. In the first scene, he tells his son that family is the most important thing.
How he wound up: He completely abandons his family at the end of season 3, after which the show was canceled. When there was a revival for seasons 4 and 5, season 5 ends with him, again, abandoning his family, just when they were all agreeing they were lost without him.
Don't get me wrong, Michael does a lot of *****y stuff between the two abandonments. As the show progresses, he becomes more and more selfish and detached from his family. He barely listens to his son, and treats his son's first serious girlfriend terribly. He has a physical altercation with his brother because they both want to date the same girl. He has a physical altercation with his son because they both wanted to date the same girl. (Calm down, that was in season 4 when George Michael is older, everything's legal). It becomes pretty hard to root for the character who was supposed to be our hero when we see how susceptible he is to selling out. But, that's part of the comedy.
9. Hayley Smith - American Dad
How she started: Hayley was the oppressed voice of reason in the family. Obviously the smartest and most compassionate Smith, she was interested in starting a charity and frustrated with her father's political views being so different from her own.
How she is now: Hayley has gradually spiraled over the seasons, and it's ultimately revealed that she's more dependent on her family and her lovable yet moronic husband Jeff than anyone is on her. She is shown to have deep insecurities and be incapable of growing up. She purposely tries her hardest to fail community college, and let's face it, she's never going to move out of her childhood bedroom. In an episode where Jeff becomes intelligent due to a surgical procedure, she can't handle it, because she needs him to be dependent on her. She needs a purpose and never finds one, and that's what makes her the most interesting character on American Dad. At one point, she decides her purpose is to have a baby, at another, she decides she's going to raise chickens, nothing ever works out for her. She even gives up on her previously strict vegetarianism when she decides her life's purpose is her job at SubHub. Hayley is, truly the definition of, arrested development.
8. Joe Swanson - Family Guy
How he started: Joe was the life of the party. No one seemed to even notice he was in a wheelchair. His wife worshiped him, he was the life of every party, his son respected him, his confidence had no bounds, and he was described as being attractive (and, by his wife Bonnie in early seasons, some kind of sex god).
How he is now: Joe is a complete joke.
I'm not sure exactly when this happened; I think it was more of a gradual shift, like Hayley's. But Joe's main character trait now is that no one can stand being alone with him. His wife completely hates him, and it's implied that they never have sex, and when they do, it requires some very expensive equipment that insurance will only pay for once a year. He's completely checked out on his son and daughter, and he is completely incapable of making conversation.
"Joe, you should look into taking a class on making small talk."
"You know, I actually am.
-Cutaway to Joe in class-
"It sure is cloudy today."
"Joe, if you'd been paying attention, you would have been more sympathetic when your classmate told you that her son died."
"I'm sorry. It's a shame your son had to die on such a cloudy day."
7. Kitty Kenarban - Malcolm in the Middle
How she started: Kitty is the mother of Stevie, Malcolm's best friend. She is extremely strict, treating Stevie like he is made out of glass. She's also extremely reserved and uptight in her interactions with other people, in other words, the opposite of Malcolm's mom, Lois. When the two families go out to dinner (because Kitty wanted to vet Malcolm's parents and see if it was ok for Stevie to hang out with him), Lois realized Kitty is incapable of displaying any emotion other than concern and fake smiles.
How she ended up: This is more sudden than any of the prior downfalls. Kitty leaves the family, leaving her husband to take care of her handicapped son, and causing Stevie to have a complete breakdown. She comes back at some point, and we find out she had been living a life of pornography and petty crime. She never apologizes, though. It seems she had a lot repressed, but ... what happened? Did the actress who played her have other commitments? Ultimately, she's just written off the show.
6. Dee Reynolds - It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
How she started: "Sweet Dee" was the voice of reason in the gang. She cared about everyone. She has lines like, "Guys, we all love Charlie very much, we need to be there for him," "Charlie, it's the waitress from the coffee shop that you like, let's go talk to her!" and "You guys really are not hiring my friend Artemis because she does not meet your physical standards?"
How she is now: Dee is a monster.
Part of this was due to a casting change. It's Always Sunny was started as a low-budget passion project by Glenn Howerton, Rob McElhenny, and Charlie Day. They needed a token girl, so they created the character of Dee and cast McElhenny's girlfriend. She didn't screen test well, so they recast Dee as Kaitlin Olson. Kaitlin didn't like being the "straight person" and wanted to be as funny as the guys, so she helped reinvent the character into a female Dennis, just as depraved and even sometimes predatory as he is. And it's comedy gold. Seinfeld (more about them later) opened the door for a show about terrible people, and Always Sunny charged right through it.
The episode "The Gang Buys a Roller Rink" is a really, really terrible flashback episode where we see that when the gang were around 18 - 20 years old, they worked at a roller rink and Dee was actually sweet and everyone loved her. She has a head injury while roller skating and immediately is shoving people and yelling out her standard "sonsof******s" accusations. Fans, including me, were really not happy about that episode, but maybe it was Always Sunny's way of going back to try to explain the extreme character change between season 1 and season 2.
5. Meg Griffin - Family Guy
How she started: She's a sweet 15-year-old girl. She wants plastic surgery because gosh, her lips are too thin! How is she supposed to get the attention of the cute boy named Kevin who just moved in next door (more about him later)?
How she is now: Meg is a monster and also depicted as grotesque, even though the character design hasn't changed. She's frequently mistaken for a man, a sack of potatoes, or a barrel that happened to have a hat that looked like hers on top of it.
It's a good thing they aged Meg up from 15 to 18 over the course of the show, because multiple times she's been depicted as a sexual predator who will sleep with absolutely anyone. Her family's treatment of her is terrible, but her behavior is also terrible. She can't get a date to save her life, but she's trying to get all the older man *** in town. She's also been married or at least gotten up to the altar three times, including once to a gay man in his 50's. This girl is messed up. But, like Dee Reynolds, she is the result of a staff of male writers who felt like they needed a female character but didn't know how to write for one. And like Dee Reynolds, she started out kind of stiff and stereotypical before going straight off the deep end.
4. Eleanor Abernathy (commonly known as "Crazy Cat Lady") - The Simpsons
How she started: Is this a cheat? The first time we see her, she's already become the crazy cat lady, who can't speak intelligibly and throws cats at people. But in a flashback episode, we see that she used to be a promising young lawyer. This proves to be canon, as in the La La Land parody episode, she sings that "I have a law degree, but now I smell like cat pee" and one of the cats then sings along to affirm that her brain is gone.
Where she is now: Well, she can't speak intelligibly and she throws cats at people. What was meant to be a one-time joke, I assume, became a regular character. In the season 34 finale, Homer becomes so enraged that he can't speak intelligibly either, and they have a conversation. Maybe she's just dealing with a whole lot of rage.
3. Kevin Swanson - Family Guy
How he started: He was the bland, described-as-attractive son of Peter's new neighbor Joe. Meg was mad crushing on him. He walked her home from school once and they held hands. He invited her to his New Year's Eve party, which did not happen due to Y2K.
How he is now: Everyone is advised to not talk to or acknowledge Kevin. Again, I have no idea what happened with this character. Did they decide not to pursue the love-interest-for-Meg storyline? Did the actor leave the show? At any rate, at one point we randomly find out that Kevin died in Iraq. He returns at one point, admitting that he faked his own death, and from then on it's just increasingly downhill. We see that Kevin is no longer the upstanding young man he used to be, he has PTSD, and his parents have checked out on him. In one episode, Stewie and Brian are trying to find someone desperate enough to date Meg, and they land on Kevin since he was in the middle of the street trying to set himself on fire. But even Meg turns him down at this point.
Is this an insensitive portrayal of veterans? Yeah. Am I glad they got rid of Kevin for a while and didn't move forward with the whole Meg-likes-Kevin subplot they had in the first two seasons? Also yeah. That would have been insufferable. I hope this guy gets back on his feet at some point.
2. Russell Dalrymple - Seinfeld
How he started: He was the president of NBC, divorced, very protective of his daughter.
How he ended up: This might be the darkest downfall of any of these characters, and the fact that a laugh track was playing through the whole thing is unnerving, but it's a product of the times.
Russell had it all, until he went on one date with Elaine. Elaine wasn't into him and had gone out on the date just to prove a point, and tried to let him down easy by giving an excuse. "I don't really like television. I mean, maybe if you were in Greenpeace or something."
After this, Russell, now completely obsessed with Elaine, checks out at work, starts firing people at random, actually does join Greenpeace, and dies.
I re watched that episode of Seinfeld because I don't return to that one too often, even though I loved the show when I was young. The laugh track can sometimes be jarring because we're not really used to laugh tracks anymore. I'm strangely fascinated by the logistics behind when they play the laugh tracks, but that could be a whole separate post. The main storyline of "The Pilot" is funny, but the B-plots of Russell spinning out and George thinking he might have cancer are absolutely anything but funny, and the laugh track plays any time there's a pause. I mean, he was obviously mentally ill, and stalking Elaine. And his sacrifice pretty much puts his death and the failure of Jerry and George's pilot squarely on Elaine, but I don't think she cares enough to notice. Elaine, after all, is the character that opened the door for Dee Reynolds to charge through.
1. Matthew Mara (now known as "Cricket") - It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
How he started: He was a priest who was dedicated to the Lord but still harbored some feelings for his high school crush, Dee Reynolds.
How he ended up: God, you knew this would be my #1 as soon as you saw the title, right? There's no one else it could be.
Dee, mainly because she is a horrible person and wanted attention (this is why she's also on this list), told Cricket that she loved him so he would leave the priesthood to be with her. Immediately after he did so, she told him she was kind of just kidding about that.
When Cricket manages to clean up a little bit, the gang ruins that by getting him addicted to cocaine. He ends up homeless, a lifelong drug addict, and trying to write a rock opera. Over the course of the show he is hunted for sport, set on fire, and eventually becomes a prostitute.
Cricket goes from being a priest to being, essentially, sub-human. Currently, he runs with a pack of stray dogs and he's not even the alpha, but the gang still lets him come into the bar to wash himself off and smoke PCP in their bathroom. So, hey. He's still got friends.
