30 Days of television: Day 14
Jul. 3rd, 2010 01:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hnpccDay 14 - Favorite male character
Hey, nothing in this meme said that it had to be sequential days!
I've been having trouble with this, to be honest. I'm not sure why exactly, just not coming up immediately with a male character that I would describe as being my favourite. Hm.
So it turned into a male characters I found interesting description.
1. Harry from Spooks. He would probably intimidate the hell out of me in real life, but I find him fascinating to watch. Again, it's a shades of grey thing - he moves between them so beautifully.
2. Saul Tigh, Gaius Baltar, Jammer, Felix Gaeta, Galen Tyrol, William Adama, Billy Keikeya from Battlestar Galactica. Tigh, Baltar, Gaeta and Tyrol because I alternately liked and disliked them as they developed. Jammer I felt got an incredibly raw deal, as did Billy and Gaeta. Adama mostly because the acting made him a far more complex person than I think the script originally did. Pretty much all the characters on the series were more complex than you'd think on first sight (possible exception Lee Adama, who remained Apollo, beloved son of the gods almost the entire way through. Even he though had his moments too, just not as many.)
3. Daniel Graystone, from Caprica. Again, complexity is part of it - but I love how he is so completely blind to what he is doing and the effect he is having on his daughter and his wife and yet is a likable and sympathetic person.
4. Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle, from Foyle's War. Probably for the moral certainty he brings. I sometimes doubt whether the level of tolerance exhibited would have been the norm for small(ish) town Britain in the 1940s, but it does fit with the character as created.
5. FakeBrit, from V. This is entirely for the level of entertainment I get from his accent, and nothing at all to do with his character, which remains minimally developed. A wonky accent is not character development.
6. Marcus, from Babylon 5. OK, I admit I've met Jason Carter in real life and can't remember anything about it except that he had nice hair. (For some reason I thought he was black - which again, probably the hair. It was a very alcoholic evening.) Not having watched any B5 until this year I had no idea who he played. Marcus as a character ended up growing on me - he had more character development in one season than some of the major leads have managed in three. And in the end he got screwed over with a "sorry Jase, Claudia brings in more fanboys." Ripped off.
7. Londo and G'Kar, again from Babylon 5. The two characters with the most development, and the two I've found most interesting to watch (screw the humans, let's go back to the alien wars.)
8. Jack Bauer, from 24. Yes, he's a caricature, but he didn't start off that way. I've taken him as being an extremely damaged man from about season 3 onwards, and a lot of the action makes much more sense if you think of him as suffering from PTSD or something similar. Also he's indestructible, which makes me wonder if he had been replaced with cyber parts in a secret government project and not told about it.
9. Dylan (90210) and Angel (Buffy,Angel). That could be the hormones talking.
10. Phil Keoghan from Amazing Race; Jeff Probst from Survivor. Probst is more of a character; Phil is more of a host. Probst gets into the action and apparently has more personal investment in certain outcomes; Phil remains detached and doesn't comment much on his personal opinion of contestants, although he does eyebrow (over)-act. I like them both for different reasons, although I roll my eyes in disbelief way more at Probst.
Edited to add:
11. Sheldon from Big Bang Theory. He would be an absolute nightmare to live or work with in real life, but he's funny as hell to watch. Also, I love that he's Texan. For some reason that makes him more human, because you know he had a hell of a time in school.
12. Giles, from Buffy. In some respects he had a very thankless role, and a large part of his job was to not get emotionally involved, not get in too deep and then move on to the next Slayer after Buffy was killed and begin again with her. And he failed totally at that. The other side of his job though - the watching, the training, the being there, the guiding - he was great at. He even managed to redefine his role in the later years, becoming more of an equal. I still wish they'd gone into his previous, pre-Watcher role a bit more though.
13. Jason and Lafayette from True Blood, which I've just started watching. OK, part of this is certainly hormonal - they have the most ripped bodies - but part of it is the way they complement each other. Jason is basically a dumb redneck hick, whose only talent is sex, and who is as a result very threatened by the open arrival of vampires, who are better at sex than he is. Lafayette is a lot smarter, and is using sex to get out of the small town he's in. He's also able to walk an interesting line - he's gay, he's black, he's camp, and he fits right into where he is. I think he's going to be an interesting character to watch.
14. Logan and Weevil from Veronica Mars. Both of them have an innate talent for doing the one thing that will totally screw them up - for Logan it's giving into anger at the wrong time; for Weevil it's being unable to stay on the right side of the law. Both, to some extent, don't feel that the law applies to them - Logan's one of the super-rich so can buy his way out; Weevil's both poor, a member of an ethnic minority and a gang member and so doesn't regard the majority laws as his. And yet, both can be sympathetic characters, and both have a (somewhat skewed at times) moral compass. Either way they were more interesting to watch than Duncan, that's for sure.
Hey, nothing in this meme said that it had to be sequential days!
I've been having trouble with this, to be honest. I'm not sure why exactly, just not coming up immediately with a male character that I would describe as being my favourite. Hm.
So it turned into a male characters I found interesting description.
1. Harry from Spooks. He would probably intimidate the hell out of me in real life, but I find him fascinating to watch. Again, it's a shades of grey thing - he moves between them so beautifully.
2. Saul Tigh, Gaius Baltar, Jammer, Felix Gaeta, Galen Tyrol, William Adama, Billy Keikeya from Battlestar Galactica. Tigh, Baltar, Gaeta and Tyrol because I alternately liked and disliked them as they developed. Jammer I felt got an incredibly raw deal, as did Billy and Gaeta. Adama mostly because the acting made him a far more complex person than I think the script originally did. Pretty much all the characters on the series were more complex than you'd think on first sight (possible exception Lee Adama, who remained Apollo, beloved son of the gods almost the entire way through. Even he though had his moments too, just not as many.)
3. Daniel Graystone, from Caprica. Again, complexity is part of it - but I love how he is so completely blind to what he is doing and the effect he is having on his daughter and his wife and yet is a likable and sympathetic person.
4. Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle, from Foyle's War. Probably for the moral certainty he brings. I sometimes doubt whether the level of tolerance exhibited would have been the norm for small(ish) town Britain in the 1940s, but it does fit with the character as created.
5. FakeBrit, from V. This is entirely for the level of entertainment I get from his accent, and nothing at all to do with his character, which remains minimally developed. A wonky accent is not character development.
6. Marcus, from Babylon 5. OK, I admit I've met Jason Carter in real life and can't remember anything about it except that he had nice hair. (For some reason I thought he was black - which again, probably the hair. It was a very alcoholic evening.) Not having watched any B5 until this year I had no idea who he played. Marcus as a character ended up growing on me - he had more character development in one season than some of the major leads have managed in three. And in the end he got screwed over with a "sorry Jase, Claudia brings in more fanboys." Ripped off.
7. Londo and G'Kar, again from Babylon 5. The two characters with the most development, and the two I've found most interesting to watch (screw the humans, let's go back to the alien wars.)
8. Jack Bauer, from 24. Yes, he's a caricature, but he didn't start off that way. I've taken him as being an extremely damaged man from about season 3 onwards, and a lot of the action makes much more sense if you think of him as suffering from PTSD or something similar. Also he's indestructible, which makes me wonder if he had been replaced with cyber parts in a secret government project and not told about it.
9. Dylan (90210) and Angel (Buffy,Angel). That could be the hormones talking.
10. Phil Keoghan from Amazing Race; Jeff Probst from Survivor. Probst is more of a character; Phil is more of a host. Probst gets into the action and apparently has more personal investment in certain outcomes; Phil remains detached and doesn't comment much on his personal opinion of contestants, although he does eyebrow (over)-act. I like them both for different reasons, although I roll my eyes in disbelief way more at Probst.
Edited to add:
11. Sheldon from Big Bang Theory. He would be an absolute nightmare to live or work with in real life, but he's funny as hell to watch. Also, I love that he's Texan. For some reason that makes him more human, because you know he had a hell of a time in school.
12. Giles, from Buffy. In some respects he had a very thankless role, and a large part of his job was to not get emotionally involved, not get in too deep and then move on to the next Slayer after Buffy was killed and begin again with her. And he failed totally at that. The other side of his job though - the watching, the training, the being there, the guiding - he was great at. He even managed to redefine his role in the later years, becoming more of an equal. I still wish they'd gone into his previous, pre-Watcher role a bit more though.
13. Jason and Lafayette from True Blood, which I've just started watching. OK, part of this is certainly hormonal - they have the most ripped bodies - but part of it is the way they complement each other. Jason is basically a dumb redneck hick, whose only talent is sex, and who is as a result very threatened by the open arrival of vampires, who are better at sex than he is. Lafayette is a lot smarter, and is using sex to get out of the small town he's in. He's also able to walk an interesting line - he's gay, he's black, he's camp, and he fits right into where he is. I think he's going to be an interesting character to watch.
14. Logan and Weevil from Veronica Mars. Both of them have an innate talent for doing the one thing that will totally screw them up - for Logan it's giving into anger at the wrong time; for Weevil it's being unable to stay on the right side of the law. Both, to some extent, don't feel that the law applies to them - Logan's one of the super-rich so can buy his way out; Weevil's both poor, a member of an ethnic minority and a gang member and so doesn't regard the majority laws as his. And yet, both can be sympathetic characters, and both have a (somewhat skewed at times) moral compass. Either way they were more interesting to watch than Duncan, that's for sure.
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no subject
Date: 2010-07-03 05:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-03 09:30 am (UTC)Ooh I love him, I don't find him so intimidating though - I think he's really a bit of a father figure to the other characters, although obviously the job is the most important thing in his life.
In the new series (which is reportedly the last), apparently one of the main characters will turn out to be a 'double agent'. I really hope it's not him!
no subject
Date: 2010-07-03 09:43 am (UTC)And then he lost the weight in one episode and was back to being Marty Sue. Tsk.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-03 10:52 am (UTC)