Diving Into the Deep or Shallow End of 10 Iconic Comedies - Part 2

Welcome back! In case you did not read part 1, a) how dare you, and b) check it out for a full explanation of the premise of this five-part blog series. The Spark Notes version is, we're doing a chronological exploration of ten iconic sitcoms, focusing on the best and the worst rated episodes on IMDB. I'm excited today to move from the early to the mid-90's and discuss two shows that became culturally ubiquitous.

3. Frasier (1993 - 2004)

It was suggested that I do Cheers as it's one of the most celebrated sitcoms of all time, but I did not want to do a show I had no context for and just sound like a total idiot spewing useless content all over the internet, that's not what I am, right, right, right guys? I've never seen a single episode of Cheers and all I know about it is that I think the characters were in a bar a lot, and Family Guy often references it, mostly as a vehicle for making fat jokes about Kirstie Alley. But I also know that it spawned a spinoff called Frasier that became wildly popular in its own right, ran for 11 years, and had a crossover (of sorts) with my beloved Simpsons. (Not as much of an overt crossover as a show I'll discuss in a later entry ... we'll get there.)

I've caught a smattering of Frasier episodes over the years, and it's a gem of a show. Unlike Full House, which was a show for kids, and Seinfeld, which was a show for cynical young adults, Frasier is for everyone. There's rarely anything you'd need to cover the kids' ears for or that would scandalize the grandparents. It's a smart show, but in a very accessible way, unlike a later entry in my list that tries to beat you over the head with how smart it is ... again, we'll get there. Let's just talk about Frasier. 

IMDB's Top: Ham Radio (IMDB 9.4, M 7.5)

I guess I'm doling out pretty middle-of-the-road ratings so far. Let's see if this continues. Will we see any great episodes that blow "Ham Radio" out of the water, or any episodes worse than the Full House episode "Secret Admirer?"

The premise of "Ham Radio" is that Frasier is enlisting his staff to do a live radio broadcast of an old-time murder mystery, and his overbearing directing style turns the performance into a disaster. It's a terrific standalone episode. With no context, you can immediately tell how each character is related to Frasier and get a good idea of their personalities. There's not really much to the premise - basically, Frasier's ridiculously high expectations for the unenthusiastic voice actors driving everyone crazy - but it's very funny and charming. By the time the performance goes live, Frasier has driven one of his actors to drop out of the show and forces his brother Niles to take over the part. In a hilarious sequence, Niles pops all the prop balloons available (these were used for gunshot sound effects) to indicate that he killed the entire cast and the play is over.

Is this the best episode of Frasier? I don't know. A few years ago a friend who is really into Frasier had us watch what he believed to be the best episode, "Halloween." It's also a very funny episode, doing the spiraling series-of-misunderstandings-until-the-truth-comes-out trope at least ten trillion times better than the Full House episode "Secret Admirer." But, "Ham Radio" is about as good as "Halloween." This is a consistent show. When you sit down to watch Frasier, you pretty much know what you're in for. As DJ Khaled describes Grace and Frankie in this awesome video, Frasier is "a nice show."

IMDB's Bottom: Some Assembly Required (IMDB 7.0, M 6.8)

See what I mean about consistency? The lowest episode is a 7. And I might have rated it a 7, but that score went to "The Contest" and I'm eventually going to have to rank these.

In this episode, Frasier has a hard time letting go of a house he volunteered to help building and keeps attempting to redecorate even after the new owners move in. Niles has to take over a career day speech at an elementary school when his dad gets sick. And Daphne is fighting with her mother.

Is this the worst episode of Frasier ever? I don't know. I remember the pilot being kind of uncomfortable because you get the feeling Frasier's dad and brother hate him; they haven't settled into the loving verbal sparring we'd get used to in later years. And I remember a kind of stupid episode where Niles is trying to settle on a pet name for Daphne. But even those episodes aren't awful, and neither is this one. If I were to watch "Some Assembly Required" as a one-off, I'd still return to the show. Frasier having to swallow his pride is always entertaining, Niles turning a class of third graders into germaphobes is pretty funny, and we get a lot of cuteness from Eddie, the Jack Russell terrier. The Daphne storyline is not funny, and I don't know if it was meant to be, but that's the only thing I'd ding this episode for.

So, why did it rate so much lower than "Ham Radio?" Well, it's not as good as "Ham Radio," but also it came out in a much later season, meaning it fits the pattern we've been following so far. A pattern that will be broken by my next entry ...

4. Friends (1994 - 2004)

Clap clap clap clap

Friends, for better or worse, may be the ultimate comfort watch for millennials. To say this show was huge would be an understatement. 

I watched Friends occasionally in junior high, and I remember a time when my dad was recommending American TV shows to our Swedish relatives. He said, "Have you seen Seinfeld?" They hadn't. He went on to gush, "It's just the best show ever made. All the actors play their roles so, so well and are so funny."

I chimed in, "Friends is really funny, too. All of those actors play those roles really well."

My dad shut me down, to youthful M's embarrassment, "They don't even have to act on that show because all the characters are the same, they're all just idiots."

I did not revisit Friends for many a year, but not that long ago I caught an episode in a hotel room and grown-up M realized that her dad was right. These characters are aggressively stupid. The episode I watched was "The One In Vegas," and it was utterly ridiculous. Ross and Rachel are having a prank war, Joey thinks he found his identical hand twin, and dumbest of all, Monica and Chandler had some kind of stupid argument and they say that a dice roll is going to determine whether they break up or get married. (They'd been dating less than 1 season.) And this is the cliffhanger? We're supposed to be invested in this relationship? Is this how grown-up dating works? What are these people's IQs?

Is Seinfeld better than Friends? Objectively, I think you'd have to say, yes. But would a teenage girl enjoy Friends more than she would enjoy Seinfeld? Probably, yeah. The generation that watched Full House as little kids graduated to Friends. Whereas Full House teaches you that adults are just big sillies and kids are just as smart as they are, Friends introduces you to a pack of adults that preteens can identify with that are also just big sillies and just as socially incompetent as our beloved Full House dads. So, it's empowering for young viewers because they can identify with whatever stupid thing Monica and Chandler are doing right now.

And now that we're talking about Friends, I'm going to broach another overarching topic. Do shows, especially those that rely on a "will they won't they" vibe to keep the audience hooked, get worse when the characters actually get together?

This is a pretty common sitcom trope, and one that tends to annoy the **** out of me. Let's go through the shows we've covered so far. Full House doesn't really have this, Seinfeld doesn't either, that tease they did in the series finale about Elaine and Jerry does not count, but Frasier sure did. My partner claims that Frasier got worse once Niles and Daphne got together. 

Friends doesn't have an overarching will-they-or-won't-they plot so much as Ross and Rachel constantly breaking up and getting back together, because they are not functional adults who know how relationships work. That "I got off the plane" series finale? If the show had kept going, they would be broken up again in the next episode. But, I think Friends did get worse after Monica and Chandler got together in a mostly stable relationship and people started settling down and having babies and stuff. Maybe we want our characters to stay young and reckless forever, like in It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Those guys will never change.

(Looking forward at the shows I have yet to cover, THREE of the remaining six are heavily based around will-they-or-won't-they plots, and from the random episodes I've caught of them, they were worse once the characters inevitably got together. I won't spoil what shows they are. Can you guess what they are???)

Anyway, enough preamble, let's not stay stuck in second gear.

IMDB's Top: The One Where Everyone Finds Out (IMDB 9.7, M 7.25)

9.7, wowza! This is the episode where everyone finds out that Monica and Chandler are hooking up. Joey already knew, Rachel already knew, but in this episode, Phoebe finds out in kind of a horrific way when she accidentally witnesses the two hooking up against a giant window for some reason (???). Rachel, Joey, and Phoebe agree that while they have no problem with their buds being a couple, they don't like that they're hiding it from them, so they decide they are going to call their bluff. The plan they come up with is for Phoebe to pretend to try to seduce Chandler, and they'll just see who cracks first.

This is a really funny episode. It's hilarious seeing the friends play mind games with each other - the characters may be idiots, but the actors have great chemistry. It's hilarious seeing Monica shut Chandler down when he says he thinks Phoebe is into him ("She knows about us! That is the ONLY possible explanation"). And the seduction scene between Phoebe and Chandler is one of the funniest scenes in the series.

Would I recommend this as the first episode someone watch, though, to initiate them to Friends? I don't know. I can't think of a better one off the top of my head, but I feel like this episode requires some familiarity with the characters and with the show thus far. You'd need to know that Monica and Chandler were having a secret fling, why this was a big deal, who already knew and who didn't, and the overall relationships between the characters - for example, that no one outside of Ross and Rachel have been romantically involved before, and that Ross is Monica's brother.

Not knowing stuff like that can skew your opinion of a show if you dive right in at the middle. This was my experience the first time I ever watched an episode of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia. The episode I randomly watched was "Frank Sets Sweet Dee on Fire." Not only is this episode not really funny, there are fake kittens constantly in peril, and the diaper dance thing is really weird, but I didn't get the relationship between the characters at all. I was like ... do they work together? I didn't know Frank is Dennis and Dee's dad and Charlie's roommate, and I thought until the end of the episode that Dennis and Dee were a couple (though, finding out they were brother and sister actually made the episode weirder). I said a big no thanks and didn't return to the show until years later, and the rest is history. So, this is why we need to carefully curate the episodes we choose when introducing shows to our friends, and this blog is meant to discover how helpful IMDB ratings are in selecting those episodes.

Anyway, I should probably get back to talking about the shows I'm actually blogging about. On to what IMDB calls the least friendly episode of Friends!

IMDB's Bottom: The One with the Fake Monica (IMDB 7.6, M 3.5)

Take your victory lap, Full House! You're no longer dominating the bottom of my rankings.

This is a season 1 episode, which totally overturns my theory that earlier episodes in series are rated higher due to nostalgia etc etc. But, outside of the numerous clip shows Friends has aired, this is the lowest rated episode on IMDB. (And it's still a friggin' 7.6.)

In this episode, Monica is trying to track down the person who stole her credit card while Ross struggles with the decision to get rid of his pet monkey because it is humping everything. Monica ultimately finds the woman who has been using her credit card and decides this woman is the free spirit she always wished she could be and they start going on reckless spending binges together.

It's not a good episode. There was one joke that made me chuckle a little but then they ran it into the ground. Joey is toying with new last names, and Chandler suggests "Stalin" to which Joey replies "Joe Stalin. Yeah, that's a name you'd remember" and I lurfed, but then they just ruined it by draining every last drop out of that joke, with Chandler saying "Or how about Joseph" and continuing to egg Joey on, then Joey later making a dramatic entrance to tell the other friends that it turns out, there already is a famous person named Joseph Stalin.

I'm not an avid Friends watcher, but even I get that this episode doesn't accurately portray Monica's character. Her whole "thing" is that she's OCD, a neat freak, and extremely protective of her possessions. If her credit card were stolen, she would be busting down the doors of hell, not blithely going over her credit card receipts and musing about how this person seemed to have a really interesting life. Monica is just a blank slate in this episode. And when she's devastated to find out Fake Monica got arrested, it's a completely unearned emotional moment.

The worst thing about the episode, though, is playing animal neglect for laughs. I'm an animal lover, and one of my triggers is when people give up their pets as soon as they become an inconvenience. Which is absolutely what Ross does, and we're supposed to feel sorry for him when he makes the decision to send the monkey to a zoo. It's another hugely unearned emotional moment when he says goodbye to the monkey. At least he didn't just abandon his monkey in Germany like Justin Bieber did, but, maybe life imitates art and Justin Bieber watched this show as a kid and figured monkey abandonment was totally ok.

Anyway, if any episode rates a 5 or lower, it's safe to say that if this had been my first exposure to the show, I never would have watched the show again, and this one definitely qualifies.

Anyway, gear up for part 3! In my next post, I'll be discussing a silly, beloved family sitcom as well as a show so profane that it became simultaneously one of the most loved and one of the most hated properties in the nation. Buckle up, because TV truly is a land of contrast.

Diving Into the Deep or Shallow End of 10 Iconic Comedies - Part 1

 Ok! If you are sick of my blog because I always write about the same shows, you are in for a treat! In this five-part series, I'm taking a journey through ten iconic comedies from the 90's onward that I have barely, or never, blogged about before. And because I'm not going to watch ten series in their entirety, the best option seemed to be to watch IMDB's top-rated and bottom-rated episodes of each show, in chronological order, and possibly finally answer the question, is TV getting better, or is TV getting worse?

(That link is one of my favorite clips in TV history, so you can see that I have impeccable taste in television, so let's see how my taste compares to the IMDB voters.)

All the shows I'm discussing were iconic in their day, and extremely popular. When a show gets popular, you assume it's because of word of mouth. We all know the feeling of recommending a show to a friend, hoping so much that they like it, and being anxious that they might pick the WRONG episode to start on instead of the RIGHT episode. Can you judge a show based on one episode? Well, I'm gonna try.

I wanted to avoid shows I have a deep connection with and would already know every episode really well, such as Simpsons, Family Guy, and Always Sunny, so that I could try to watch these episodes with "fresh" eyes and wonder if this would hook me or not. I also did not include shows I had no familiarity with at all. And, because I'm reviewing these on an episode-by-episode basis, we're just doing episodic shows, not shows with a continuous storyline (e.g., Arrested Development). 

For the purpose of my ratings on a scale of 0 to 10, 0 would be an episode I regret watching so badly that I immediately pour gasoline into my eyes, nose, and throat to purge myself of what I just saw, 5 would be a completely neutral experience such as staring at a plain white wall and feeling neither pleasure nor pain, and 10 would be a friggin' masterpiece that I would put on endless loop if I could and would still laugh every time.

Trust me, while there are some shows on this list I'm looking forward to revisiting, there are some that I'm not at all. Speaking of which

1. Full House (1987 - 1995)

I had to toss a coin (literally) on which cheesy 90's sitcom about a family I was going to include in this: Full House or Home Improvement. When it came up heads for Full House, I was actually glad. Not just because I thought this show might be more watchable than Home Improvement, not just because Full House is the inspiration for the show-within-a-show "Horsin' Around" in my beloved BoJack Horseman, but because I feel like Full House is more emblematic of the "family" comedies of its time. Home Improvement had all the added shenanigans of Tim's TV show and his continued quest to become a functional adult rather than some kind of ape and understand how men and women are different, with the assistance of his faceless, omnipresent neighbor. Full House was just like, "Here's a large family! Can you imagine all these people living under one roof doing normal family things and having funny family moments! This is the most heartwarming show since Cosb- oh, I'm being told that won't age well."

Revisiting Full House, my main takeaway was that this is not a show for families so much as it's a show for kids. Specifically, females between the ages of 4 and 14. And that was a huge market. I remember seeing the Full House book series on the shelves next to the Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley Twins books. Are there adults on the show? Yes. Do these adults talk or function like normal adults would? No, they are giant toddlers. Which is possibly another reason this show appealed so much to kids. You watch this show where the kids and the adults are basically on the same level, and the daddies are just big goofy doofuses, you assume your parents are just big goofy doofuses too.

That might be one reason parents might not like this show, the other reason being that Full House doesn't really have any smart humor. Based on my memory and the two episodes I just watched, it doesn't have any winks to the adult audience. If it had, it could have been a show for the whole family, I guess, but Full House seems to have chosen its audience, its audience being elementary school and junior high girls, and it seemed to know its audience well.

IMDB's Top: Secret Admirer (IMDB 8.5, M 4.5)

The Tanner family is getting ready for a big family picnic that's also going to include Danny's girlfriend and her precocious young son, Rusty! However, while everyone else is working on picnic prep, Rusty types a love letter on a typewriter (this show is old) to play a prank, and the vague love letter about how "I am passionate about you, I love seeing you in the house" just makes its way through everyone's hands somehow and each person in the house thinks it was written for them by some other specific member of the household.

So then of course at the picnic, the tensions are so high (Jesse thinks Danny is trying to steal Becky! Danny's girlfriend thinks Joey is trying to steal her!) that everything eventually erupts into one of those argument scenes where every character just says indistinguishable things to another character until Rusty finally confesses he wrote the letter as a gag. Then, everyone else says, "Let's get 'im" and they proceed to chase Rusty around the yard in a single-file, evenly spaced, slow-motion running line. So many questions here. What are they going to do if they "get" this maybe 7- or 8- year-old boy? Will they catch him? Is this the last we will see of Rusty? Considering that the entire family was hunting him down with a fervor I have not seen outside of Yellowjackets except like if the girls in Yellowjackets drank 10 bottles of NyQuil prior to the hunt, I can only assume that this show ends in them tearing Rusty to pieces and eating his corpse in place of the picnic that had already been laid out, turning it into a ritualistic blood ceremony, and that's why Rusty and his mom are no longer in the picture in the second episode of Full House I watched a few years later.

Is this a good episode of television? No. I mean, it's not, offensive or anything. There's some entertainment value (Who is going to get that letter next? How will this mad series of misunderstandings end?), and, you know, it's cute, it's nice, but it's sloppy. The love letter is so vague, and when the characters try to confront their suspected secret admirers, the language they use is so vague that it's stupid, referencing things like "Sometimes a person has feelings for another person and it's not right" and "We need to control our burning passions," leading to even more confusion. I mean, if you thought your brother-in-law had typewritten a love letter to you out of nowhere and left it on the couch, which is a normal thing any sane person would immediately accept as truth, would you say "Sometimes a person likes a person even though it might be wrong" or would you say "Dude! Did you write this letter for me?" But then, the show couldn't happen.

Overall, this episode has the feel of something that would be written for children to perform for younger children, like maybe at summer camp or something, and the performances live up to that. There's no chemistry between the characters on Full House. They don't have conversations so much as each character delivers a one-liner and then pauses to wait for the laugh before the next person chimes in. 

Danny: Jesse, you don't have to go to the pickle store. I just found out they deliver.

* Laughter *

Joey: Delivery in 30 minutes or your pickles are free.

*Laughter*

This would have been a solid 5 as I felt neither pleasure nor pain watching this episode, but I'm going to dock it a little bit just for how infantilized the adult characters are. Well, Full House, if this is the best you got, that's not great, but let's check out the worst!

IMDB's Bottom: Is It True About Stephanie? (IMDB 5.8, M 5)

Middle child Stephanie just got asked out to the club by the cute new guy! But the mean girl in her grade is jealous, so she puts up a sign on Stephanie's locker that says she pays $20 for people to date her! Stephanie's social life is ruined, until she puts up a sign on the mean girl's locker that exposes her grades, which are straight F's! Now mean girl's life is ruined, and the fakest tears in the history of television appear on her face as Stephanie feels bad. So they all go to the club, and Stephanie says she's sorry, and they become friends and dance together.

There's a B-plot, and it involves Danny rearranging everything in the house because he's not over his breakup with Vicky. Vicky is not Rusty's mom. I'm assuming Danny and Rusty's mom broke up after sacrificing Rusty in a blood orgy at the end of "Secret Admirer." Danny apparently has had another girlfriend and lost her since then. Did that breakup also involve child sacrifice? I could look that up, but I don't care enough.

So, my main question about this episode is, how old is Stephanie supposed to be? I could look that up too, but I do not care enough, but it's mentioned that she is in junior high, and the actress would have been 10 or 11. What kind of club are these kids going to? It's apparently "Smash Club," which Uncle Jesse owns. And it involves a bunch of junior high kids alternating between sitting in booths drinking coffees (?) and getting up to pulsate awkwardly, as if having involuntary muscle spasms, to the lyric-less music playing.

So, this episode, in addition to making 10-year-old girls feel like slut-shaming and clubbing should be a part of their everyday lives and also they should drink coffee, infantilizes the adult characters by depicting Danny as a mindless blob who doesn't realize that he's putting things in weird places in the house because he's not over Vicky until his family confronts him and he realizes that that's the answer and everything is better. And that's a great example of why, as ... simplistic as it was, this show could be a security blanket. Every problem is easy to identify and easy to fix in less than half an hour.

I'm rating this episode a little higher than "Secret Admirer" because, I mean, it's a better episode. It's not GOOD, but it's funnier than "Secret Admirer," Michelle is old enough in this episode that she's actually acting and using her trademark sarcasm, and it really leans into the preteen girl audience that they should have accepted is their target audience from the beginning. I think the reason this rated so much lower than "Secret Admirer" is that it was in season 7 while "Secret Admirer" was in season 4, and people tend to cling to the earlier episodes of a show and accept it as the flawless classic age and then be increasingly derisive as the show advances in years, saying things like, "Well back in MY day Stephanie didn't go to clubs and also Marge and Homer are the same age as the Beatles and I wore an onion in my belt as was the style of the times."

Oops I digress. But I am honestly curious about whether any of these shows have highest rated episodes that came out AFTER their lowest rated episodes. Let's investigate that as we move on to our next entry.

2. Seinfeld (1989 - 1998)

I know Seinfeld better than any of the other shows on this list, due to catching many a rerun after The Simpsons reruns throughout my childhood. While Full House presents a world where adults and children have identical intelligence and they can work through all their problems by being nice, Seinfeld is a show for cynical adults about cynical adults who manage to make their problems worse any time they try to work through them. So, huge tone shift.

While watching Full House as a child taught me that grown-ups are just big kids that need to use their nice words to talk about their feelings, watching Seinfeld as a child taught me that having a job means carrying a briefcase and having a "file" that I need to "work" on, and also that grown-ups are hideously unstable and have no control over whether or not they cave to any impulse.

IMDB's Top: The Contest (IMDB 9.5, M 7)

Alright. I'm going to take the high road, because I have a classy blog, and if Seinfeld can take the high road, I can, too. So, this episode is about the four main characters getting into a contest on who can hold out the longest without doing "that." They never use the word; they artfully dodge it by using the euphemism of "that." And so I shall as well. But, yes, that's the premise of the episode.

Is this my favorite Seinfeld episode? Not by a long shot, but it became one of the show's most iconic. "Master of your domain" wouldn't match the popularity of catch phrases like "yada yada yada" or "no soup for you" but it's gotta be in the top ten or something. 

This is an enjoyable episode. Unlike Full House, Seinfeld knows how to make conversation seem natural, even with the laugh track. The chemistry between the characters is great. We get a glimpse of George's ineffectual rage, and Elaine also shines. She's initially dismissed when she says she wants to enter the contest, but proves she can hang with the boys. She is, after all, the forerunner for Dee in It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, a female character who proves she can be just as funny and just as deranged as the boys and doesn't have to be a love interest for any of them in order to be a part of the gang.

So, why rank this episode only a 7? Well, for one thing, Seinfeld has done a lot funnier. For another thing, it's kind of ... weird that you would be open enough with your friends that you'd use the honor system on something like this ... like, who wants to think about their friends doing ... that? If Seinfeld did a reboot and redid this episode in the age of smartphones, the implications would be, well, horrific.

IMDB's Bottom: The Apology (IMDB 6.8, M 6)

George is mad because a friend who is going through the 12 steps for AA will not apologize to him for a comment he made about George having a fat neck. Kramer is learning that he needs to live in the shower. And Jerry is dating a nudist but realizes he is turned off when she does certain things, like brushing her teeth or bending over, in the nude.

I was really surprised this was the bottom episode. Seinfeld has done so much worse. There are some uncomfortably bad episodes in the early seasons that focus just on uncomfortable conflicts without enough relatable humor. There's the very uncomfortable episode when Elaine needs to use pepper spray to escape her assaulter. And there are a few episodes that really don't hold up due to being offensively racist or homophobic.

This is just your run-of-the-mill Seinfeld episode, and it's not bad, it's not side-splitting, but it's fine. George's effete rage is again pretty hilarious and nudges this over the 5 mark, but the apology A-plot (?) is pretty weak and forgettable. As is Kramer living in the shower. And what's up with Jerry's complete 180 on female nudity since the episode "The Contest?" It goes from "men are obsessed with female nudity in any form" to "oh, even though you are a gorgeous woman, I just realized you have a muscle that flexes in exactly that way while you are brushing your teeth and that disgusts me and I am no longer attracted to you." But, this entire show is based on the four main characters' tendencies to dump perfectly cromulent love interests due to obsessing over a minor perceived flaw.

So, it's a mediocre episode of a good show. Why did this rate so much lower than "The Contest?" Possibly because this came out in season 9, as opposed to season 4, and nostalgia etc etc. Let's see if that trend continues in our third and fourth shows!

TV's Dumberest, More Lovable Lovable Dumb-Dumbs

 In case you missed my last post, this is a continuation of a top ten countdown of TV's lovable idiot characters, ranked based on combined ratings of stupidity and lovability. I'm going to try to use more funny clips in this one!

5. Chris Griffin - Family Guy

Chris is the middle child in the Griffin family. What grade is he in? Well, that's currently being worked out by a team of specialists. He purposely gives himself nosebleeds, believing his nose is becoming a woman. He ate a diamond ring because he thought it was a lug nut. He can't read. (He knows the letters individually, but not when they gang up on him.) His vocabulary is limited in general.

Chris: How was your business trip?

Peter: Exemplary, Chris.

Chris: I don't understand what either of those words mean.

Stewie: One of them was "Chris."

That's okay, though, he's still going to be a success.

Dumbest Act of Chris

In the episode "German Guy," Chris befriends a nice old man named Mr. Gutentag who turns out to be an evil ex-Nazi named Mr. Schlechtnacht. Once his secret is discovered, Mr. Gutentag kidnaps Chris and Peter, and there's a struggle for a gun. In this hilarious scene, Chris gets the gun and doesn't know which of the two men to shoot because he has no way of knowing who is "the real dad," even though there was no implication that anyone switched places at any point.

Smartest Act of Chris

Chris's general greatest area of intelligence is emotional intelligence. He's had a LOT of girlfriends over the course of the show. To rattle off just those I can think of off the top of my head, the girl in Texas, the girl who looked like Lois, the cute vet intern, the heiress who got them into the country club, Consuela's niece, Jerome's daughter, the girl in Canada who no one believed was real, Connie D'Amico, and the one person even more impressive than Connie D'Amico, Taylor Swift herself.

You know what, I retract that. Connie D'Amico may be the most popular girl in high school, but she's dated Chris, Peter, and even Stewie. Maybe her standards aren't super high.

Anyway, some of these girls may have initially fallen for Chris because they mistook stupid things he said for jokes and thought he was cute and funny, but it seems like he's a great boyfriend in all these relationships and they want to stay with him because he treats them so well. Even when Chris pieces together a homemade girlfriend with a volleyball for a head and they go out on a double date with Peter and Lois, Lois is shocked at how much better Chris treats his girlfriend than Peter treats her.

The only two girlfriends Chris treats badly are Connie, because he lets the secondhand popularity go to his head, and Anna, the cute vet intern. Chris started out as a sweet boyfriend to Anna, but Peter thought this was making his son less of a man and taught Chris that he needs to show women who's boss and insult them in order to earn their respect.

Lois: Peter, did you tell Chris to be mean to that girl?

Peter: Define "Chris."

I guess Chris isn't the only one in the family who doesn't know the meaning of the word "Chris."

Why We Love Chris

Well, Chris rarely does anything mean-spirited. He joins in the family's neglect and verbal abuse of Meg, but who doesn't. There are a few times, though, when he shows genuine care for Meg. He's incredibly concerned that she'll hurt herself when she starts doing roller derby. And when Meg is hallucinating that she's a getaway driver for her hallucinated boyfriend Seymour and crashes the family car, Chris takes the fall for her. He tells her, "Meg, I don't know what is going on with you, but we're going to figure this out together." 

He's not always so willing to sacrifice himself for his sister, though. In one case, it's quite the opposite. In the episode "Better Off Meg," Meg is believed to be dead, and Chris becomes the most popular kid in school as a result, with students and teachers showering sympathy and attention on him. He starts strutting around wearing a shirt that says "Dead Sis Who Dis." So, when Meg reaches out to Chris to confess she's still alive and wants to come home, he has her kidnapped and left tied up in an abandoned warehouse so his popularity can continue. 

So, leaving his sister for dead is a ding in his lovability rating, but it's not the first time he's sacrificed one of his siblings for the sake of his own popularity. In the episode "Secondhand Spoke," Stewie witnesses Chris being bullied and not having any good comebacks, so he agrees to ride in Chris's backpack for one day and feed him lines. This results in Chris becoming popular, and Stewie considers it a job well done. Except, Chris won't let Stewie go. He traps him in his backpack and refuses to let him go, telling him when he tries to escape, "You're going to die in there." He does ultimately let Stewie go and apologize, but it's kind of too little too late.

So, anyway, who do we have next in our list who's much less dumb, much more lovable, and also friends with a talking dog? Why, it's

4. Todd Chavez - BoJack Horseman

Todd is voiced by the always lovable Aaron Paul. Before you start thinking this is another instance of the show casting a white actor when they shouldn't have, like their criticized casting of Alison Brie as the Vietnamese Diane Nguyen, Todd's character is white. He took his stepdad's name.

Todd is an unemployed, aimless twenty-something who stumbled into one of BoJack's parties one day, crashed on his couch, and ended up never leaving. They have kind of a symbiotic relationship, as BoJack appreciates someone younger, dumber, and far less famous that he can boss around and still consider a friend, and Todd appreciates being included in anything ("Hooray! It's great to be part of a sentence that someone says") and now also has the benefit of having a lot of wealthy and influential friends, giving him the money and resources to fund whatever ridiculous project he dreams up.

For example, at one point he asks BoJack, "Don't you ever wish there was a Disneyland?" Despite being told that there already is, he decides to build one. The result is something truly horrific that burns down pretty quickly. 

Todd: And over here, you'll see Cinderella's pile of used mattresses.

Diane: Do you think it's a good idea to have that pile of used mattresses next to an active grease fire?

Todd: Where's your sense of wonder, Diane?

And then there's the time he decides the best way to cure children of their fear of the dentist is to train a bunch of clowns to be clown dentists. When this inevitably fails, Todd releases the clowns into the woods to be free, and the clowns become rabid. However, being ever full of ideas, Todd decides this is a good idea for a fitness company where people get exercise by running for their lives from rabid clowns.

Dumbest Act of Todd

Todd starts a business with his high school girlfriend Emily that actually ends up being successful, and they're able to sell it for 16 million dollars. However, when they go to a diner to discuss what each of them are planning to do with their newfound wealth, Todd accidentally tips the waitress 8 million dollars and is immediately broke again.

Smartest Act of Todd

I mean, he has some pretty keen reasoning skills sometimes.

But the most impressive thing that Todd has ever done, and simultaneously the stupidest, was to create a sex robot named Henry Fondle. Todd is a romantic asexual, so he wanted to be in a relationship with Emily, but Emily is not asexual. He thought the perfect solution would be to create a robot that is a horrifying mishmash of sex toys that parrots various suggestive phrases, so that he and Emily could hang out and then Emily could go have sex with the robot.

I mean, was this a good idea? Probably not, but it's pretty impressive he built a robot. However, when his plan doesn't work and he decides to throw the robot away, he proves his stupidity even further by forgetting that this robot is only saying what he programmed it to say and somehow thinking it is a sentient being, leading him to bring it to work.

Henry Fondle somehow finds his way into the CEO's office and becomes the new CEO of the company. And, in this scene, Todd is for once the smartest person in the room.

Why We Love Todd

Everyone wants Todd around (even BoJack, though he rarely admits it). Over the course of the show, he lives with BoJack, with Mr. Peanutbutter and Diane, and with Princess Carolyn. Even though he is a freeloader, he's a constantly positive presence and an eager sidekick, errand boy, and, when Princess Carolyn adopts a baby, babysitter.

Babysitting is where Todd finally finds his calling. As someone who is essentially a man-child, he gets along great with kids.

Todd's Mom: So, what is he doing for a living?

Todd's Stepdad: I think he's running a daycare, but he talks about the babies like they're his coworkers, so it's really hard to tell.

Speaking of twenty-something freeloaders with hearts of gold who owe their entire lifestyles to living with people wealthier than they are ...

3. Jeff Fischer-Smith - American Dad

For the first few seasons of American Dad, Jeff is Hayley's dim-witted and completely whipped on-again off-again boyfriend. In season 6, they elope, and Jeff moves into Hayley's childhood bedroom with her, becoming (sort of) part of the family.

How did Hayley meet Jeff? In one episode, Jeff states that he fell into the touch tank at the aquarium and Hayley pulled him out. In another, when asked, "He's adorable, where did you find him?" Hayley responds, "In a ravine."

I feel like the writers drastically changed their minds about where they were going with this character after the first season or two. Jeff initially seemed like just a gag who was basically the worst and most objectionable boyfriend for Stan Smith's rebellious, image-ruining daughter. He was a stoner who lived in a van, but he seemed more like a true dud than just an idiot. In one of the first episodes, when Hayley ran away and became a stripper, Jeff was alarmed because apparently he had dated strippers before and it looks really bad for the boyfriend when they turn up dead.

What is their relationship like? Well, in one episode, Hayley goes to a courthouse and gets a divorce from Jeff.

Jeff: Wouldn't I have to be there in order to do that?

Hayley: No, because I'm your legal guardian.

Jeff: Oh, right.

Jeff eventually runs into the other room sobbing hysterically, only to call a few seconds later, "Hey, babe, what was I crying about?"

Hayley and Jeff do seem to love each other, but it's an extremely codependent relationship. Hayley ties his shoes, hands him the crayon he wants next in his coloring book ("Are you sure you're done with green? I think I still see a tree there"), and forced him to learn how to read. 

In one episode, Hayley brings him to a double date at a fancy restaurant with some snooty friends, and we see Hayley engaged in intellectual conversation with them while they sip wine. We then cut over to Jeff, who has a juice box and some scribbled-on children's menus and is complaining, "Babe, I can't eat my soup, it keeps falling out of the spoon." Hayley has to remind him that he needs to hold the spoon right side up. "Remember, so it's like a little bowl?" "Oh. A little soup bowl. On a stick!" "Right, on a stick." t's not the only time Jeff is an embarrassment at a restaurant.

Yet, when Jeff gets a procedure done to make him intelligent, Hayley can't stand Smart Jeff and wants to get him turned back at any cost. And that brings me to

Teaser for a Future Blog

Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin, Chris Griffin, Charlie Kelly, and Jeff have each had arcs on their respective shows where they temporarily became smart, ultimately became insufferable to the other characters on the show, and had to go back to their normal state. 

There's a lot to explore here. Why do these characters lose their lovability and become pretentious jerks when they become intelligent? When their loved ones reject their intelligent versions, is it because they miss the person they've grown to know and love, or that they realize how accustomed they were to being the smartest person in the room and don't know how to deal with a new feeling of intellectual inferiority? Do these shows promote the message that intelligence and happiness are inversely proportional? 

Anyway, that's something else I might ramble about someday. Back to Jeff.

Dumbest Act of Jeff

When Jeff tries to get a job and is involved in a wrecking ball accident on day one, the ER doctor is sad to inform the Smiths that Jeff is brain dead. He is hooked up to life support and responsive, but no brain activity. The Smiths start to assure the doctor that Jeff was like this even before the accident, but then his employer's lawyer walks in and they see how they can capitalize off this. 

Lawyer: Are you the victim?

Jeff: No, I'm the Jeff.

Lawyer. Clearly major brain damage, going to take some extra zeroes.

With Jeff now rich because he was declared brain dead, the Smiths decide they need to file for a conservatorship. It's the most they've ever cared about Jeff, and that's because his stupidity has finally paid off. 

Smartest Act of Jeff

When Jeff moves in with the Smiths, they worry that Jeff will blab about Roger the alien, who the CIA is looking for. Jeff, being too dumb to understand the stakes, immediately begins telling his friends, and Stan determines they must kill either Roger or Jeff. Roger agrees to just go back to his home planet and arranges a ship to pick him up, but at the last minute, he shoves Jeff in his place and Jeff is taken off to space for a life of slavery.

Jeff complains to the leader of the slave ship that he needs to be brought back to Earth because he's separated from his true love. The ship leader insists that love isn't real, and we see that the other enslaved people/aliens on the ship have been conditioned to believe love isn't real by having to watch montages of their past relationships that include only the bad parts. Jeff refuses to be persuaded by this and incites a rebellion that allows him to escape from the ship.

Jeff actually shows the most intelligence during the few years that he's not with the Smiths and we just occasionally cut back to him traveling through space trying to get back to Hayley. He does have an opportunity to return at one point, but sees that Hayley has moved on with an intelligent, wealthy man and decides she would be better off without him.

It's not until he finally returns to the Smiths that he goes back to being the complete idiot we know and love, who is afraid of the boogeyman and wonders if the dinosaurs in Land Before Time stayed friends after the filming.

Why We Love Jeff

As I said, I think the show writers drastically changed their minds on what direction they were going with Jeff's character after season 1. He went from what seemed like a one-off no-good-boyfriend joke to a sympathetic and hilarious character. He recognizes he's the bottom rung of the ladder, even calling the fish "Mr. Klaus." But he loves his babe and his babe-in-laws and is happy to be included in the family. 

And, speaking of happy idiots who are dating someone who may be with them partially as a way to feel intelligent by comparison ...

2. Jillian Russell-Wilcox - Family Guy

Finally, a female on the list. Does this mean that women are generally smarter than men on these shows? Well, they are, but this is also a result of there just being, way more male characters than there are female characters on all of these shows.

Jillian, a recurring character voiced by Drew Barrymore, is the love of Brian's life. There are similarities between their relationship and Jeff and Hayley's. Hayley and Brian both get an ego boost from dating someone who worships their comparative intelligence. The difference is that Hayley is truly invested in Jeff and willing to humor his dumber interests so that they can spend time together, while Brian is mainly with Jillian for her body and will distract her with a laser pointer when he doesn't feel like humoring her.

Dumbest Act of Jillian

More than anyone on this list outside of my #1, Jillian is a character who simply exists to be stupid. In one episode, Quagmire dates Jillian in order to upset Brian, who he hates.

Brian: So, Jillian, how did you end up dating Quagmire?

Jillian: He showed up at my door and said he was the Federal Boob Inspector. I was going to tell him to go away, but he had a warrant.

Quagmire: It was a Snickers wrapper, Brian. I showed her a Snickers wrapper.

It wouldn't be the first time Jillian mistook a candy wrapper for something it was not.

But the stupidest thing Jillian has ever done was to let a dog and a baby exacerbate her bulimia. The first time the family meets Jillian, she happily proclaims as a cool fact about herself, "I threw up a lot in high school and now I don't get periods!" Brian encourages Jillian's purging, saying that it just makes her body look fantastic, like Karen Carpenter took it too far, but Jillian has a good balance going. Stewie also encourages Jillian's bulimia, because it's making her teeth fall out and he's trying to ensnare the tooth fairy.

Stewie: You're looking fantastic. You know, got some meat on your bones.

Jillian: What?

Stewie: I'm just saying, you look jolly, like Ruben Studdard or John Goodman or Santa.

Jillian: Oh my God, are you saying I'm fat?

Stewie: No, I'm saying Santa's thin, now get in there and throw up!

Brian is a pretty terrible boyfriend. Which leads me to

Smartest Act of Jillian

Jillian's smartest decision was not taking Brian back.

When Brian dates Jillian, it seems he prefers to keep her as kind of a secret girlfriend. He doesn't want her to meet his family, because he's embarrassed by the stupid things that she says. He's even ashamed to talk to her on the phone in front of Stewie. And he hates hanging out with her friends.

Jillian ultimately realizes this relationship isn't all she thought it was, and breaks up with Brian. Perhaps it was because he had taken her so much for granted, perhaps it was because he couldn't fathom how someone he believed was so intellectually inferior would be the one to dump him, but Brian immediately wants her back. When Jillian is about to marry Derek, a seemingly perfect man who is kind and very intelligent, Brian crashes the wedding to tell Jillian he is in love with her and is sorry he didn't realize it at the time. When he begs at the altar for Jillian to take him back, she says, "Brian, no. You had your chance. I thought you were my soul train, but you didn't want me."

Did Jillian just move on to another intellectually superior man using her for her looks? You don't really get that impression from Derek. We don't see a lot of him, but it seems like he does care for Jillian and is not ashamed of her. He is patient explaining things to her and would never say anything like "Well there you go, sport." It's believable that he sees her as a person and appreciates her sweetness and optimistic sense of wonder, which is why

Why We Love Jillian

Jillian is just a pure soul. She's the definition of innocence. She is sorry that so many lemons have to die in order to make lemonade. She saw something on TV about a guy named Hitler and is concerned that someone needs to stop him. She realized she's never seen the sun and the moon at the same time, and she's cracked the code that it's because they're the same person.

In one episode, Brian runs into Jillian and Derek and asks Stewie, "Do you think she's thinking about me?"

Stewie responds, "That depends. Are you a pony or the color blue?"

We then cut to Jillian imagining a blue pony and giggling happily.

If they ever do a Family Guy/American Dad crossover, which I would love, I really hope they team up Jeff and Jillian. They would have some of the best conversations ever written.

So, you're asking, who is dumber than Jillian, more innocent than Jillian, more lovably inept than any of the characters on this list? Well, it could only be

1. Ralph Wiggum - The Simpsons

Ralph Wiggum is the eight-year-old son of police chief Clancy Wiggum. (Allegedly.) His favorite food is school supplies. When he grows up, he wants to be a principal or a caterpillar. He's not completely toilet trained, but is surprisingly more literate than a few other entries in my list. Anything else you need to know about Ralph, you can learn from this clip.

Ralph generally identifies as human, other than when he's acting as his imaginary friend/alter ego Wiggle Puppy. So, why is Ralph so dumb? I'm going to go out on a limb and argue that this is not nature, it's nurture. Ralph was raised by a stupid man (we rarely see his mother involved in his upbringing at all) and he's following in his father's footsteps. In a season 22 flashback episode, we see a young Chief Wiggum bottle-feeding an infant that he drops on its head. The baby then is unable to put the bottle back in its mouth and keeps stabbing it into its forehead or cheek. I refuse to accept this as a Ralph Wiggum origin story. This is almost as egregious as the worst ever episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, "The Gang Buys a Roller Rink," in which they try to explain how Dee actually lived up to her "Sweet Dee" nickname until she suffered a head injury at age 18 that led her to become a profanity-spewing sociopath. No. That's not canon, and neither is Chief Wiggum dropping Ralph on his head. Ralph doesn't have brain damage. He's just ... Ralph.

Dumbest Act of Ralph

Outside of one episode I'll discuss in a bit, Ralph is dumber than Bart, who Lisa has scientifically proven to be dumber than a hamster. So, there's a lot to pick from. But, even though this episode is obviously not canon, I'm going to choose Ralph's turn as Laertes in the Hamlet parody.

Smartest Act of Ralph

In the season 4 episode "I Love Lisa," Chief Wiggum bribes his way into Ralph getting the lead role of George Washington in the school play. Reeling from Lisa's rejection of him, Ralph astonishingly pulls it together and gives a great performance, then afterwards has the emotional maturity to accept her apology and her friendship.

Why We Love Ralph

Like Jillian, Ralph is a pure soul. He's constantly smiling and wants to believe the best of everyone (granted, that sometimes gets him into stranger danger). While there are only a handful of episodes that have Ralph-centered storylines, he's always in the crowd scenes to deliver a hilarious one-liner.

In the episode "El Pluribus Wiggum," Ralph is nominated to run for President of the United States. Lisa is initially appalled, thinking that her friend has become a political pawn. But Ralph explains that he is going to make America better, a place where people share and use their words, and the only boom booms are in your pants. Lisa is touched by his innocent earnestness, and then flattered when he says that she could be his "first ladle," so she ultimately backs his campaign.

And this concludes my journey through the dumbest, most lovable idiots of TV. Out of which, one ran for governor of California, one ran for president, and one was very temporarily governor of California and also temporarily the prince of Cordovia. Which, of course, goes to show you that if you hold your head high and believe in your dreams and are on a fictional TV show, you can achieve anything, and that's the message we all need at the end of the day.

Oh, and screw Flanders.

TV's Dumbest, Most Lovable Lovable Dumb-Dumbs

 The lovable idiot is my favorite character trope, and it's been pointed out that my favorite character in most of my favorite comedies is the stupidest one. So, for this blog, I came up with a list of 10 characters whose most defining trait is that they are very stupid, and who are inherently lovable. To rank them, I rated them both on idiocy and loveability and averaged the scores. And now, without further ado, we shall begin Mandie's countdown to THE MOST LOVEABLE MOST IDIOT TV CHARACTER OF ALL TIME (based on shows that I watch and could think of off the top of my head).

10. Reese Wilkerson - Malcolm in the Middle

You'll notice I gave Reese a last name, while it's a what-state-do-the-Simpsons-live-in running joke on this show that the family doesn't have a last name. In the series finale, when they announce Malcolm at graduation, there's some mic feedback over his last name. However, apparently in an early season, Francis showed a badge or name tag or something that showed his last name as Wilkerson. I didn't catch that, the writers probably thought no one did, but there is the internet, so canonically the family's last name is Wilkerson.

Dumbest Act of Reese

Reese is constantly putting himself and others in peril with his stupidity. He purposely sunburnt his entire (yes, entire) body, hoping he could peel the skin off in one piece and this would somehow help him achieve immortality. He got in a prank war with Malcolm that ended with him being in a body cast. He's destroyed a stained glass window and set an RV on fire. His greatest accomplishment was joining a local pack of stray dogs and working his way up to alpha status.

The best display of Reese's stupidity, though, is the episode where Dewey is about to take an intelligence test. Malcolm is afraid Dewey is a genius, and doesn't want his little brother's social status ruined by being put in advanced classes (well, that's what he said, I think he just couldn't handle another genius in the family), so he has Reese take the test for Dewey. This results in Dewey being put in a remedial class/sweatshop. Reese is so stupid that he failed an intelligence test designed for someone five years younger than him.

I mean, it's not unprecedented. There's also an episode where Lois is praising some doodles that she believes toddler Jamie did, and then Reese walks by and grabs it, saying, "Oh, you found my homework."

Smartest Act of Reese

It only comes up in a few episodes, but Reese is a culinary genius. The episode where they discover his genius, though, brings me to why he ranked so low in my loveable idiot list, despite his stupidity. He doesn't rank very high on the loveable scale.

When Reese enters a cooking competition, he sabotages all the other contestants' entries. Hal tries to have a talk with him afterwards, as he shows no guilt whatsoever.

Hal: How would you feel if you were that woman whose dish you ruined?

Reese: Fat?

Hal: Do you not have any empathy?

Reese: What's empathy?

Hal: It's where when someone else feels bad, you feel bad too.

Reese: Then why would anyone want empathy?

Why We Love Reese

So we've established he's a destructive sociopath, so why do we love Reese? We love him because he's arguably the funniest character on a funny show. Justin Berfield plays the role in a way that's wide-eyed and innocent rather than menacing. And you kind of have to root for someone who has no real friends, is completely inept with girls, and is the stupidest member of a family of very smart sons. We want to root for the underdog. And speaking of dogs ...

9. Jerry Smith - Rick and Morty

Oh. When I started writing that sentence, I thought Mr. Peanutbutter was next. That would have been a good transition. You can skip to #8 to experience the power of the great transition I wrote.

But, yeah, Jerry is not QUITE as dumb or QUITE as loveable as my following entries.

Dumbest Act of Jerry

Like Reese, Jerry is the dumbest member of his family, dumber even than Morty. This leads him to be deeply insecure and easily manipulated. 

This is nowhere more evident than in the episode where Rick, Morty, and Jerry are placed in a very obvious alien-generated simulation with the end goal of getting the formula for concentrated dark matter. Even though the other characters are speaking stiffly in monotones, and the radio is playing "human music," Jerry thinks nothing is amiss. He goes to pitch his first ad campaign, which is "Hungry for Apples?" (a ripoff of "Got Milk?") and doesn't notice that the only sentences everyone he encounters are saying are "Yes," "Looks good," and "My man." He's so excited he thinks he sold a pitch that he goes home to make love to his wife, which he somehow doesn't realize is an immobile computer simulation.

This won't even be the last time Jerry is accidentally brought along on an adventure and made perfectly content by an obviously fake version of his wife. In a later episode, they have to drop Jerry off at a "Jerry Day Care" when they realize he stowed away in Rick's spaceship. The multiverse Jerrys in the day care are placated by a giant Beth puppet that says things like "I love you, Jerry" and lets him use the remote control.

Anyway, back to the simulation episode. After having sim sex (I believe it was called "Woohoo" in the game "The Sims,"), Jerry has a conversation with his flickering simulated boss, only capable of saying "Yes" with the exact same inflection, that leads him to believe he has won a major advertising award.

Jerry is shattered to find that the most meaningful day of his life was a simulation, but he still tries to pitch "Hungry for Apples?" after returning to real life. He's immediately fired.

Smartest Act of Jerry

While Jerry is frequently unemployed, his wife is a horse surgeon. One day, Jerry and Beth hit a deer. Beth is determined to save the deer, but it turns out the deer had just been shot by a hunter who claims the deer is his property. When Beth is mocked that she probably couldn't save the deer anyway, Jerry sees that she is about to snap.

But then who should show up but the Cervine Institute, who will transport the deer across state lines so it can be operated on by the best deer surgeon in the country. Beth's ego is bruised as they give up and drive home, but Jerry has a surprise. The Cervine Institute were buddies of Jerry, and Beth is going to perform the surgery herself. It's one of the smartest things Jerry has ever done, and as someone who thrives when someone strokes his ego, no matter how improbable the circumstances are (see: "Hungry for Apples"), you can see how he would be so sensitive to how fragile his wife's ego is, as well.

Why We Love Jerry

Jerry is the everyman on this show. He was plunged into chaos when his wife's absentee father showed up and started involving the family in his sci-fi adventures, and he knows he's a dummy and doesn't have a leg to stand on. At one point, he asks Rick to have pity on the dummies of the universe.

That said, Jerry doesn't do a whole lot to help with most situations. Granted, when he tries to, it never goes very well. And, because he gets tossed too few bones, he tends to become an egomaniac at the cost of common sense and even his own family when it does happen. For example, in one episode during the season where Beth and Jerry are separated, Jerry dates a sexy alien bounty hunter. He wants to break up with her, but tells her that it was his kids' idea that they break up, putting their lives in danger.

Still, Jerry ... tries He's relatable. And that's why we're happy when he does get tossed a bone. Speaking of which

8. Mr. Peanutbutter - BoJack Horseman

Doggy doggy what now?

Dumbest Act of Mr. Peanutbutter

Most of the characters on BoJack are people, or people who look like animals. For example, Princess Carolyn is a cat, but she doesn't really have any feline mannerisms and her species rarely comes into play. Mr. Peanutbutter, however, is pretty much half dog, despite his sculpted abs and V-neck T's. He growls at his own reflection, thinking it's another dog. He has to wear a cone after going to the doctor. He hasn't been this nervous since that time Diane was vacuuming on the Fourth of July and he had to take a bath and there was a stranger in their yard.

It's hard to nail down Mr. Peanutbutter's dumbest act. A lot of the stupid things he does can be attributed to the fact his brain seems to be half dog, but he also goes in on a lot of really stupid business ventures (often in collaboration with a character I'll cover later) and is incredibly bad at reading people. All his relationships fail, and it's not because he doesn't listen, it's because he misinterprets everything. All the women he dates are smarter than he is. I mean, everyone is smarter than he is.

But perhaps what takes the cake is when Mr. Peanutbutter is running for governor and decides that the race for governor will be decided by a literal race ... a ski race. And he neglected to remember that he doesn't know how to ski.

Mr. Peanutbutter literally stumbled into superstardom when he accidentally walked in on a live taping of a 90's sitcom and the studio audience liked him more than they liked the actors on the show. So, it makes sense he would think he could stumble into politics, even though he has no opinions on things like fracking and gun control and doesn't really even know what they are, but will go along with anything if people will tell him he's a good boy.

Smartest Act of Mr. Peanutbutter

Man, the things I thought I would be writing about when I pursued an advanced degree in English. But anyway! The smartest act of Mr. Peanutbutter is his ability to be an incredibly supportive friend when it counts. And I'm going to specifically call out his actions in the season 4 episode "Stupid Piece of ****."

BoJack has been going through a difficult family situation that results in him throwing his senile mother's beloved doll out the window, running out on his family, and drunkenly stumbling into Mr. Peanutbutter's home, which is currently campaign headquarters. Mr. Peanutbutter gives his staff the day off because BoJack clearly needs a friend day, and takes over the task of getting the doll back and mending things with BoJack's family.

When BoJack expresses fears he will "BoJack things up" and how he can't stop thinking about the stupid things he's done, Mr. Peanutbutter tells him, "Well, if by BoJack things up, you mean, showing up and being the life of the party and then having a laugh with your good friend Mr. Peanutbutter ..."

The thing is, BoJack is a TERRIBLE friend to Mr. Peanutbutter. For the entire first season, he was aggressively trying to steal Mr. Peanutbutter's girlfriend Diane.

When BoJack says he doesn't know if he deserves to be loved, Mr. Peanutbutter says, "I don't know anything about balancing a state budget or how a bill becomes a law. I don't know a lot of things. But I do know this. Everybody deserves to be loved."

It's what BoJack needed to hear, it's what a lot of us do, and it's one of the most touching scenes in the entire series.

Why We Love Mr. Peanutbutter

Dogs are man's best friend, and Mr. Peanutbutter is everyone's best friend. He's constantly enthusiastic and optimistic, even when dealing with things way out of his depth. He'll join any passion project any of his friends are working on and try his very best at it. 

Really, this is a character who wants to love everyone and wants everyone to love him, for better or worse. The worst thing he did, other than a fracking disaster that killed multiple people or potentially endangering the entire state of California, was cheating on his girlfriend Pickles with his ex Diane. And then handling the situation in the worst way possible. Hence the ding on his loveability rating. And hence why he rates lower than

7. Terry Opposites - Solar Opposites

Dumbest Act of Terry

Terry escaped a planet that was hit by a meteor because he pretended to be the Pupa expert. He knows absolutely nothing about the Pupa and is constantly asking other members of his crew, "Well, am I supposed to be the Pupa expert around here? ... Oh, right."

However, this cold open might be his dumbest moment.

Terry, like the next entry on this list, is barely literate, but he is an alien, so he gets a pass. That's why when he was trying to turn his friend's fiancee into a cool girl using the "Rad Awesome Terrific Ray," he ended up turning her into a rat, but he gets a pass on that too because that's pretty misleading. And that time he got the whole family hopelessly lost in the woods trying to drive the kids to camp, he also gets a pass on that, because he'd had a couple tiki drinks.

Okay, Terry does a lot of dumb stuff. But we love him.

Smartest Act of Terry

In the episode "The Lake House Device," Korvo discovers a way to deliver letters to Terry from the future and uses it to manipulate Terry into becoming smarter and more productive. However, he eventually breaks Terry, turning him from our favorite loveable idiot on the show into a homicidal maniac. 

Terry then, of course, kills the entire family and goes on to live a long, full life, including an Up-style married-and-then-wife-dies montage. But then, he does something incredibly brilliant and sends Korvo a letter that will arrive exactly before he was broken, stating, "If you're ever being chased by a very handsome homicidal maniac, TURN LEFT." Bringing the family back to life in that reality.

I mean, he also uses a word-of-the-day calendar to attempt to become literate, and he has pretty clever T-shirts, but in my mind this is the smartest thing Terry has ever done.

Why We Love Terry

I mean, Terry's done some not great stuff. He pretended to be something he wasn't in order to escape a doomed planet, but, hey, he got away with it. He conspired with Korvo on how to kill the kids when they found out summer break existed and they just couldn't deal with them being home all summer. But, he's not evil, he's just, well, dumb, and never really thinks too far ahead of the current moment. He's constantly smiling, and he's always down to party. And, for a guy whose entire planet was destroyed by an asteroid, he has zero emotional baggage. Unlike my next entry ...

6. Charlie Kelly - It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

It's time to talk about Charlie! But that's fine, because he won't realize that we're talking about him. And in case you were wondering, the way he expresses his "wild card" persona ends up being cutting the brakes in a van full of gasoline.

Dumbest Act of Charlie

Well, where do we start. He eats chalk and drinks paint, though his favorite food is milk steak. He believes in ghouls, leprechauns, and the Nightman. He gets stung by a copious amount of hornets when he tries to suck honey out of a hornet's nest. But possibly the most common joke about Charlie is that he is illiterate. And that leads me to possibly the dumbest thing Charlie has ever done. When the gang is hosting a dance competition at their bar, Charlie puts the prize for winning the contest as "Paddy's Pub." He thought that he was saying he had "pride" in Paddy's Pub, and he almost cost everyone their livelihoods.

It's not the only time his illiteracy has hurt business at the bar. In one episode, we find out he'd been putting a "Closed" sign up every day because he thought it said "Coors" and wanted to advertise the delicious beer they had.

Smartest Act of Charlie

Charlie is a janitor, and you wouldn't think he'd be a very good one, because he lives in squalor with Frank, in a studio apartment where he pees in a bucket and has eight cats that sleep in his sink, and also because the bar is constantly infested with vermin. There's the aforementioned hornet's nest, there are the silverfish, and Charlie's job seems to consist mainly of bashing rats.

Except for one day a year. The annual health inspection, which is Charlie's time to shine. And you find out that not only does he know his **** as a janitor, but him springing into action last minute is the only reason this bar hasn't been shut down. The episode "Charlie Work" is an amazing showcase for Charlie Day as it's essentially a half-hour monologue as he runs around the bar ensuring everything is up to par and distracting the inspector from things that aren't. The rest of the gang doesn't seem too concerned, because, hey, they always pass the health inspection. But, who's doing all the work?

Why We Love Charlie

So ... the reason Charlie ranks in the bottom half here, despite being the third stupidest person on my list, is that ... there are a lot of not so loveable things he does. From his incredibly creepy stalking of the waitress, to his faking cancer, to the general mean-spiritedness he and the gang share toward anyone outside of the gang.

But, we love Charlie because, hey, he's our wild card. He's a 40-year-old child living a life we could only dream that someone would find fulfilling, but he seems to be loving it. Whether he's staging a musical, running around dressed as Green Man, crawling around pretending to be a worm, or exploring the sewers, Charlie does exactly what Charlie wants. And when we need some escapism, he's a character that makes us feel like maybe facing reality is optional. If he can believe he's a master of karate and friendship for everyone, why can't we?

Anyway. That's the bottom five. Get ready for even more love and even more stupidity in my next blog! I think "get ready for even more love and even more stupidity" was my bio when I did online dating.