A ranking of most-loathed TV characters is inspiring social media reactions that range from wickedly funny to savagely honest to brutally confused.
Over the weekend, a top 10 list of the “most hated TV characters, according to over 20,000 votes” went viral on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
The list stems from the website Ranker, which as of Tuesday claims to have had more than 29,000 users vote for the 150 “most hated TV characters of all time.”
HuffPost has reached out to Ranker for more information about how the poll works: if it has a deadline, whether it’s an open-ended vote, and other logistical matters. The top 10 list on Ranker’s site is slightly different from the list shared in the viral X post. Most of the same names appear in both top 10 lists, but the order isn’t quite identical.
The list that most social media users saw, however, looks like this:
- Joffrey Baratheon from “Game of Thrones”
- Ramsay Bolton from “Game of Thrones”
- Skyler White from “Breaking Bad”
- Shou Tucker from “Fullmetal Alchemist”
- Cersei Lannister from “Game of Thrones”
- Livia Soprano from “The Sopranos”
- Todd Alquist from “Breaking Bad”
- The Governor from “The Walking Dead”
- Caillou from “Caillou”
- Rachel Berry from “Glee”
X users were generally in agreement about the top pick.
But there was some dissent.
Other people were tickled, or bewildered, by a children’s cartoon character showing up among sociopaths, narcissists and murderers.
And many were furious that Skyler White came in higher on the list than her fellow “Breaking Bad” character Todd Alquist, a literal Nazi who ― spoilers for a show that ended in 2013 ― kills children and enslaves people. (To be clear, we’re talking about the version of the list that circulated on X; on the Ranker site, as of Tuesday evening, Todd was #7 while Skyler was down at #20.)
Some people who saw the post decided to head to Ranker to look through the complete list. This just generated further questions:
Indeed, Stephen Colbert’s inclusion on this list (#94) is pretty weird, considering he’s an actual human being and not a character (although he did play a fictional character, a conservative blowhard named “Stephen Colbert,” on “The Colbert Report.”)
But Ranker’s list is fairly odd in general — especially since the only direction the site gives its voters is to “vote up the TV characters from any series that you just didn’t like for whatever reason.”
And it seems a lot of people’s reasons for voting for a character was that they just found them obnoxious.
Dawson Leery from “Dawson’s Creek” scored the #21 spot, possibly because he cries real ugly. Emily Waltham from “Friends” came in at #26, likely due to the crime of briefly dating Ross and keeping him away from his central love interest, Rachel.
The list also seems to be brimming with mistakes, as with the character Baby (#92) from the movies “House of 1000 Corpses” and “The Devil’s Rejects.” In those films, Baby is a human character played by Sheri Moon Zombie, but Ranker’s list illustrates the “Baby” entry with an image of Baby Sinclair, the dinosaur puppet from the ’90s sitcom “Dinosaurs.”
It should also be noted that since “1000 Corpses” and “Devil’s Rejects” are movies, it doesn’t make sense for Baby or any other character in those works to appear on a list of TV characters.
But hey, very little about Ranker’s list makes sense, so we’ll just let Baby Sinclair sum up how we feel about the whole thing: