Who is the worst character on television? The Atlantic wants your vote to determine who it is. They don’t mean a “poor” character, one that’s badly fleshed out, uninteresting, or the victim of bad acting. They mean a person of loathsome quality, the kind you might enjoy on TV, but you’d never want to encounter in real life.
“Worst,” by its nature as a superlative adjective, should be easy to define, but TV’s Golden Age being what it is, there’s a lot to consider. Should the title of actual worst go to someone like Game of Thrones’s Ramsay Bolton, a psychopath and sadist with an almost unparalleled propensity for cruelty; or to House of Cards’s Claire Underwood, who threatens an employee with what amounts to infanticide? Or should it go to Homeland’s Carrie, for being a terrible spy and sleeping with all her sources, or Scandal’s Fitz, for being the worst president (and married lover) in recent memory? Is the #actualworst character someone viewers love to hate or hate to love? Is it Lucious Lyon or Piper Chapman? Hannah Horvath or Walter White?
The 32 contenders were culled from reader suggestions. Find links to a character profile for each of the contenders and the voting links here. See the entire bracket here.