The 10 most hated TV characters of all time (2024)

Any long-running TV series with a sizeable audience boasts a rich array of characters that have been crafted to generate as many emotions as the human body is capable of experiencing.

There are heroes everybody loves, villains everyone wants to see get what’s coming to them, romantic entanglements that tug at the heartstrings, death, despair, laughs, tears, tragedy, and anything else the creative team opts to throw into the mix to keep viewers on the edge of their seats.

Of course, that means there’s always room for a character that gets greeted with such a visceral reaction; their mere presence is enough to make the blood boil. Unfortunately, it hasn’t always been a deliberate intention, but certain figures have ended up going down among the small screen’s least popular characters ever, regardless of whether it was by accident or design.

In the interest of fairness, only one character from any given show has found themselves under consideration, but the following ten names are enough to dredge up the memories of just how heavily detested they were during their televised reigns of terror.

The 10 most hated TV characters:

10. Roman Roy (Succession, 2018-2023)

By and large, the main characters of Succession aren’t particularly likeable people, but as despicable as Roman Roy is, Kieran Culkin’s Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy-winning performance across the duration of the show made a disarming attempt to get viewers on his side.

On a purely personal level, though, Roman is just terrible. Easily the worst of Logan’s dysfunctional children, his foul mouth and even dirtier mind is often played for laughs, but he’s morally bankrupt, emotionally stunted, permanently an inch away from a sexual harassment lawsuit, and beyond thrilled to wield his wealth and influence in the face of those he deems beneath him.

He’ll gleefully stab his own family in the back and then shift his allegiances on a dime depending on which outcome suits him best at any given moment, and it can’t be forgotten that he ripped a million-dollar cheque up in the face of a child in the very first episode. He’s popular thanks in large part to the work of the actor who plays him, but he’s a nasty piece of work.

9. Dana Brody (Homeland, 2011-2013)

Being the most unpopular character in one of the biggest shows on television can be a struggle for any young actor, but Homeland star Morgan Saylor took it in her stride.

As she told The Daily Beast: “I don’t take it personally. I think it’s kind of interesting to see people, like, spending so much time focusing on something like that.”

Like many on-screen figures to draw ire from the audience, the disdain of Dana Brody isn’t derived exclusively from Saylor’s performance. If anything, she’s decent enough in the role, but it’s the incessant desire to tick off every ‘angsty teen’ box on the checklist that saw her portrayal take on such a life of its own that she was even parodied on Saturday Night Live.

Fortunately for her detractors, Dana wasn’t part of the series beyond its third season, but the vitriol she experienced up until that point was more than enough to gain her a reputation as being one of the most-hated characters the Golden Age of prestige television has had to offer.

8. Shou Tucker (Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, 2009-2010)

Harming children or animals is an easy way to become established as a horrendous human being, so doing both naturally accelerated Shou Tucker’s rise up the ranks of television‘s most-hated characters.

Known as the Sewing-Life Alchemist, the fate that befell his daughter Nina and dog Alexander was so vile that there was widespread outrage when their intertwined and harrowing shared fate was revealed. As part of his experiments, Tucker sought to create a chimaera, first unsuccessfully combining his wife with a canine.

Not one to be deterred by failure, he only went and did again by blending Nina with Alexander to give rise to a monster that begged for death the second it was made flesh. Putting himself before his family is reprehensible, but doing it in a fashion that caused so much rage among the Fullmetal Alchemist fandom pushed him to an entirely different level of malevolence.

7. Ziggy Sobotka (The Wire, 2003)

Even the criminal element of The Wire‘s sprawling cast were presented with such depth and flavour that they could be cool, charismatic, tragic, and terrifying, but the same can’t be said of perennial wet blanket Ziggy Sobotka.

Actor James Ransome was aware that he’d been denigrated as “the Jar Jar Binks of The Wire“, and it’s easy to see why he took it on the chin. Ziggy was brash, impulsive, a complete and total idiot, someone with ideas well above their station, and a person who couldn’t even get the simplest of things right.

A terrible person, a grating character, and one of the very few weak links both character and personality-wise in one of the most impeccably-crafted small screen stories that have ever been told, the nepo baby with a serious case of Napoleon complex deserved everything he ended up getting.

6. James Hurley (Twin Peaks, 1990-2017)

David Lynch’s expanded Twin Peaks universe might be a masterclass in small screen world-building and storytelling, but somebody has to shoulder the burden of having the most punchable square face in town, a distinction that fell upon James Marshall’s James Hurley.

Such is the bile generated by his mere existence, it’s clear that the leather jacket-wearing motorcycle enthusiast must have been written and developed with the express purpose of being reviled by the audience, which means, by extension, that Marshall’s performance does deserve some small measure of praise for accomplishing it so comfortably.

Of course, it’s difficult to accentuate the positives of such a glaring negative, and Hurley’s self-centred, destructive, brooding nuisance is so irredeemable that he doesn’t even merit consideration as a tragic figure, although calling murdered paramour Laura Palmer ‘the one’ before putting the moves on her best friend by the end of the very same episode was never going to endear him to anybody given that’s his introductory arc.

5. Lori Grimes (The Walking Dead, 2010-2012)

The expanded universe of The Walking Dead has given rise to 11 seasons of the main show, eight seasons of Fear the Walking Dead, two seasons of World Beyond, anthology Tales of the Walking Dead, as well as spinoffs Dead City, Daryl Dixon, and The Ones Who Live, but Sarah Wayne Callies’ Lori Grimes still remains the entire franchise’s least popular television character.

That’s even more impressive considering she was a series regular for just two seasons, but a combination of her storylines and the way she both behaved around and treated Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes and Jon Bernthal’s Shane Walsh left a bitter taste in the mouth of many fans that refused to wash away.

It sounds harsh to say her death was welcomed with open arms by a large section of the viewership, but it’s also entirely true to say that it most definitely was. All Rick wanted to do was keep his community safe, she never seemed to comprehend that arc, and she still managed to almost destroy him from the inside out through the means of passing away.

4. Charles Logan (24, 2005-2010)

Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer took on more than his fair share of bad guys during 24‘s run on TV, but Gregory Itzin’s slimy, manipulative, and turkey-necked Charles Logan was comfortably the closest thing the intrepid CTU agent had to an arch-nemesis.

Introduced as the vice president and making it immediately clear that he was completely out of his depth when he assumed command, Logan’s relentless backstabbing, treachery, and desperate self-preservation made him the antagonist audiences hated with the utmost passion, especially when he continued surviving by the skin of his teeth.

His borderline-comical gulps of terror, the unnatural way his head would bob from side to side when he was under pressure, and the most eminently punchable of faces combined to make him the repeated thorn in Jack’s side everyone wanted to see dealt with, and even when it came to that Logan took the easy way out.

3. Todd Alquist (Breaking Bad, 2012-2013)

Jesse Plemons might be one of the most respected character actors in Hollywood and about as close to a guarantee of a great movie as anybody whenever his name becomes attached to a project, but his first major breakthrough role saw him end up as Breaking Bad‘s most hated figure.

The ‘Meth Damon’ jibes were complimentary compared to the reactions to greet Todd’s repulsive and mercifully short-lived stint as a sociopathic and repulsive antagonist who shot and killed a child for no other reason than the kid being in the wrong place at the wrong time, murdered Brock Cantillo’s mother Andrea into the bargain, and then held Jesse Pinkman captive without showcasing even a solitary flicker of emotion, apprehension, or regret at any point.

There were few things more gratifying about Breaking Bad reaching its resolution than watching Jesse choke the life out of Todd with the very handcuffs that had been used to keep him prisoner against his will, but it still wasn’t enough to atone for the damage he’d already done to anyone labelled as a threat to the criminal enterprise overseen by his uncle.

2. Livia Soprano (The Sopranos, 1999-2001)

James Gandolfini‘s Tony Soprano might be a feared figure in the criminal underworld, but he’s a sensitive soul and a gentle giant as well, with the majority of his lingering trauma coming directly from the impact made by his mother during the future gangster’s formative years.

Nancy Marchand’s Livia is emotionally abusive, manipulative, controlling, and constantly trying to undermine Tony, resulting in a lasting sense of powerlessness and resentment whenever he even thinks of her, never mind putting them in the same place at the same time.

The guilt trips, using her perceived frailties to prey on his sense of duty and obligation as a son, the deliberate split between the loyalty to his mother and desperation for independence is always looming in the background, and even Livia’s death doesn’t stop the abhorrent matriarch from continuing to haunt and torment Tony. It’s spectacular work from Marchand, but she’s still a nasty, nasty piece of work.

1. Joffrey Baratheon (Game of Thrones, 2011-2014)

Fair play to Jack Gleeson, who swept into Game of Thrones as Joffrey Baratheon, became arguably the most-hated small-screen antagonist in the history of television, and then promptly vanished from both film and television for years having become a source of unmatchable animosity.

Cruel, sadistic, irredeemable, but strangely captivating in the way his unpredictability and continued abuse of power defined him, Joffrey is the sneering scourge of Westeros that audiences loved to hate. Or just hated full stop, such was the level of contempt held for his every action by those both on-screen and watching at home.

Gleeson would name Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as Gladiator as a major inspiration on his own, but it would be an understatement to say he outstripped the lauded thespian by significant margins when it came to pure, unadulterated bastardry.

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