Tag: meredith monroe

25 Favorite Television Characters

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My intense love for certain fictional characters generally stems from four reasons:

  1. I wish they were real so I could marry them,
  2. I wish they were real so they could be my best friend,
  3. We’re the same exact person except they have a significantly better wardrobe and a hot boyfriend,
  4. Their life is so shitty that all I want to do is reach through the screen and give them a hug.

There’s also a line between characters I genuinely like as characters and not because their portrayer was obviously created on a day that God was channeling The CW Network. Is Ian Somerhalder good looking? Uh yeah. Do I worship the altar of Damon Salvatore? No. Stefan5eva. And it goes both ways. So, taking in no (or as little as I could) consideration of how much I love/hate the actor or their face, these are my favorite television characters: In alphabetical order…

Andie McPhee
“Don’t play dumb. When dumb people play dumb, it’s very disconcerting.”

You’re going to see a lot of Type A personalities on this list, because I have a great love for the straitlaced constantly stressed workaholic who is always on the precipice of a complete mental breakdown. Enter Andie, the future Harvard medical school grad who finally cracked under the pressure of being a severe perfectionist and started hallucinating her dead brother, Tim.

Annie Edison
“I’ve been worried about how uptight I am and how I’m no fun. And then I was worried I wouldn’t fit in here or be able to hang out with you guys. But you know what? Why don’t you ever ask yourselves whether you can hang with me? Why am I always the one who has to adapt?“

Forced to attend community college after suffering from a nervous breakdown and narcotics addiction, book-smart Annie has always been my favorite member of the Greendale 7.

Caroline Forbes
“So you‘re saying that now I’m basically an insecure, neurotic, control freak on crack?”

Prior to joining the League of the Undead, Caroline Forbes was my least favorite character on TVD. Seemingly shallow yet overwhelmingly insecure, the future vamp was not my cup of tea. Since being turned into kick-ass Vampire Barbie, that title has been passed on (congratulations, Bonnie!) and Caroline has become my favorite. Who knew all it took was becoming a night-walker to make me like you…

Cassie Ainsworth
I stopped eating, and then everyone had to do what I said. That was powerful. I think it was the happiest time of my life.

Generation 1 of Skins will always be my favorite, thanks in large part to the eccentric but lovably innocent, Cassie.

Chandler Bing
I’m not great at the advice. Can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?

Each Friends character is amazing in their own right, but Chandler is hands-down my favorite. I’d never want to date a Chandler, but as my BFF4LYFE? Hell. Yes.

Chuck Bass
“So you’re finally learning there are upsides to pissing off your family?”

Chuck Bass is an ass. He sold his girlfriend for a hotel. He wears purple sparkly suits. Worst of all, he bumped uglies with Jenny Humphrey. And I could seriously care less.

Cristina Yang
“I have an MD and a PhD. I’m a freaking cardiothoracic surgeon. I’m supposed to be studying for my boards, the most important exam of my life. And I’m locked in the bathroom crying because of a boy!”

It took three seasons for me to appreciate Cristina Yang. I was a big fan of her and Burke, but after he left her at the altar and she was so happy to finally be free, that moment made me a Cristina fan. Yes, she can be callous, emotionless, and, well, a bitch, but she always means well.

Debra Morgan
“We can play who’s the better asshole. But I guarantee you I’ll win.”

Deb is a character that grows on you. Her dropping an F-bomb every five seconds was initially annoying as all hell and her bitchy, cold demeanor seemed impenetrable. But I guess falling for a serial killer aka your adopted bro’s real bro and then almost becoming a victim of his tends to soften people up…spoilers?

Hannah Rogers
“I’m not beautiful. And that’s okay, because I’ve got other stuff. And eventually I will remember what that other stuff is and why it’s more important. It’s just taking longer than I thought.”

As much as I wanted to like Amy, the lead female character of Everwood, I never found her particularly relatable. Her “nerdy,” deer-in-the-headlights bestie on the other hand? Instant favorite.

Jack Shephard
“But if we can’t live together, we’re going to die alone.”

I have a tendency to like characters who are hated by the general viewing population. And it pains me that Jack is one of them. The Man of Science turned Man of Faith had one of the most compelling arcs on LOST and if his ultimate sacrifice didn’t make you cry the Pacific Ocean, we can’t be friends.

Jason Stackhouse
“Sometimes you need to destroy something to save it. That’s in the Bible or the Constitution.”

He’s pretty. He’s dumb. He’s pretty dumb. And it’s one of the many reasons why I love him. A serial ladies’ man with a heart of gold, Jason always has the best of intentions even when he eventually effs everything up.

Jesse Pinkman
“For what it’s worth, getting the shit kicked out of you? Not to say you get used to it, but you do kind of get used to it.”

I’ve never wished happiness for a character more than for Jesse. Poor guy has had it rough. Yeah, he’s a murderer, a drug dealer, and an addict, but he’s also been playing the role of Walter White’s bitch for far too long.

Jim Halpert
“A lot of people told me I was crazy to wait this long for a date with a girl I work with. But I think even then I knew that I was waiting for my wife.”


Oh Jim Halpert. You have set the bar for my future husband so impossibly high. I would brave the Dunder-Mifflin offices to work alongside Jim.

Matt Saracen
“You don’t care about me. You left me for a better job. Your daughter left me for a better guy. Carlotta left me for Guatemala. My dad left me for a damn war. Everybody leaves me. What’s wrong with me?”

Thrust into the spotlight after the first string quarterback is paralyzed during a game, Matt Saracen overcame all odds to become the starting QB the small, football-loving town of Dillon, Texas, needed. He navigated thru the perils of wooing Coach’s daughter and the arrival of his MIA parents. And he was a good friend to the ever-annoying Landry, and that more than anything makes him a hero.

Michael Scofield
“Preparation will only take you so far. After that you got to take a few leaps of faith.”

He may hold a serious grudge and talk like a serial killer, but the guy’s kind of a bamf seeing as he broke out of two prisons, successfully broke his wife out of a third, and helped clear his brother of a murder charge.

Nathan Young
“We had it all. We fucked up bigger and better than any generation that came before us. We were so beautiful!”

A smart-ass with an even smarter mouth, vulgar-mouthed Nathan was my favorite Misfit from the start. Let’s hope he wiggles his way out of prison soon so he can return with all his immortal glory.

Phil Dunphy
“I’m the cool dad. That’s my thing. I’m hip. I surf the Web. I text. LOL: laughing out loud. OMG: Oh my God. WTF: Why the face? Um you know, I know all the dances to High School Musical.”

He knows all the dances to High School Musical. ‘Nuff said.

Quinn Fabray
“I may not look like the head cheerleader anymore, but I’m still her on the inside.”

I get the hate that Quinn gets, the former HBIC of McKinley was needlessly cruel at first to pretty much every member of glee club. But Quinn hasn’t been season 1 Quinn since well….season 1. At her core, Quinn is someone who was dealt a super shitty hand and just wants someone there at the end of the day. And I don’t think anyone can argue with that.

Ron Swanson
“I’m not big on charities. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Don’t teach a man to fish and you feed yourself. He’s a grown man. Fishing’s not that hard.”

Ron Swanson is my best friend. But seriously. If my best friend worked for the city government and grew a mustache (amongst other things) she’d be Ron Swanson.

Schmidt
“Schmidt happens.”

Douche-bag characters are often one-dimensional and they remain only douche-bags for the entirety of the series. Luckily for Schmidt, douchey as he may be, the New Girl writers took a trip to the Wizard and blessed him with a brain, heart, and courage.

Seth Cohen
“Dude. You’re a Cohen now. Welcome to a life of insecurity and paralyzing self-doubt.”

Unabashedly nerdy and self-deprecating,  leave it to Orange County to make the tousled-hair, pop-culture enthusiast the laughing stock of the Harbor School.

“Stiles” Stilinski
“I’m 146 pounds of pale skin and fragile bone, okay? Sarcasm is my only defense.”


Stiles may be one of the only true “humans” left on Teen Wolf, but he has the super-human power of sarcasm to get him thru the day. And it’s not like every other word I say is sarcastic…not at all. Clearly, we were not meant to be bffs.

Summer Roberts
“Ew. But I like it.”

As Marissa started get more and more annoying with her drug and drinking problems, Summer got more and more endearing by falling for the nerd and showing off her geeky side (Princess Sparkle, helloooo). A tiny whirlwind of shopping bags and boho dresses, Summer, thankfully, easily overcame her rich bitch trope to become the best female character on The O.C.

Veronica Mars
“Congratulations, you’ve been named World’s Biggest Cockroach. This award is given in recognition of your unparalleled lack of humanity. Bravo. You’re going to die friendless and alone.”

If the voice inside my head manifested into a person, it would be Veronica Mars. Shamelessly snarky and unbeatably honest, it’s easy to see why she was either revered or abhorred by her peers. The teen sleuth had her character flaws: she was easy to piss-off, meddled in everything, held grudges like whoa, and served payback like a bitch. But in tandem, she was fiercely loyal to those who upheld the Mars Code of Ethical Behavior and was never afraid to put it all on the line for a friend.

Wes Mitchell
“I am way too hungry to be mature about something like this.”

I started planning my nonexistent wedding to Wes immediately after the pilot of Common Law aired. A former lawyer who swapped depositions for an LAPD badge after sending an innocent man to prison, Wes is a classic OCD-level perfectionist. He constantly clashes and bickers with his partner and (arguably) best friend, Travis, because of his laid-back stance on life. And while I feel like the show presents Travis as the guy we’re supposed to immediately root for, Wes’ personality is much more to my druthers. It also doesn’t hurt that he likes flashy cars and dresses like a GQ fashion spread, either.

Five Best TV-Music Moments

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You know those moments when the right piece music comes together with the right scene and it creates a blend of auditory and visual perfection? I live for those moments. Music has always been a big part of my life and it always plays a part in my overall assessment of a film or television program. These are the scenes that I constantly replay for the fabulous combo of acting and music. I literally got goose bumps and teared-up while re-watching the YouTube videos…for the millionth time, yes, I know how pathetic I am.

Hide and Seek, The O.C. –> Marissa shoots Trey to save Ryan. Cue Imogen Heap



Lean On Me, Glee –> The gang shows their support for Finn & Quinn


http://static.photobucket.com/player.swf?file=http://vid398.photobucket.com/albums/pp68/caseycarlson/lean-on-memovff.mp4

Stumbling to Bethlehem, Joan of Arcadia –> Joan believes that she has been imagining her encounters with God
(starts around 4:35)



Stolen, Scrubs –> Elliott gets engaged, drama ensues



Angel, Dawson’s Creek –> Jen records a video for her daughter



TELEVISION THAT CHANGED MY LIFE, I: Dawson’s Creek.

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One blustery winter morning in 2004, my sister and I were lucky enough to have been blessed with a snow day. Midway through an intense AIM convo on the family computer, I was interrupted by my sister yelling, “Kate, what’s a condom?”

Yes, I attended Catholic school, but I was also extremely jaded and blissfully naïve. I had no idea what a condom was. I vividly remember typing the fated word into Google and receiving a bevy of information and photographs that gave me my answer and more. Looking back, I wonder if it really was LimeWire that crashed our computer…

I couldn’t imagine what kind of television program my sister was watching. This definitely wasn’t the Disney Channel. Nope. It was TBS reruns of Dawson’s Creek. I watched the remainder of the episode, which I later found out was 2.11 “Sex She Wrote.” Teenage drama, cheesy dialogue and boys giving monologues that profess their undying affection? Forget CSI and American Idol, I was hooked.

The walls of my room became peppered with Dawson’s Creek posters, eating up ink cartridges by the carton. I started a list of quotes I liked. I choreographed a dance to the theme song “I Don’t Want to Wait.” I even embarrassingly created my own character on the Creek, Kahle Weaverling. Yes, I am aware that this is pathetic.

I began setting tapes to record the show so I could watch after school. I purchased the first season on dvd so I could watch it from the beginning. I would countdown the days to the subsequent dvd releases and on most occasions, my mom would buy the dvd and have it waiting in the car when she picked me up from school. Gotta love mothers.

After some serious Wikipedia research, I realized that everything the critics had hated was everything I loved. I loved how the highschoolers spoke like learned scholars. I loved the sly sexual innuendos that the writers came up with to bypass network protocol. I’d like to think that’s where I got some of my wit. But most of all, I loved the will-they-won’t-they couple of Dawson and Joey. Pacey was good for a few one-liners but I never got all the Josh Jackson hype. I was never a fan of Jen either, but that might be due to my odd universal hatred of curly-blond haired actresses on tv shows. In fact, I disliked every character that threw a wrench in the DJ mechanism. I was a hardcore shipper and I was confident that my ship would sail all the way to the finale.

These were the days before I became a devoted reader of spoilers, so I walked into the show completely blind. During their countless fights I remained a very Dawson-like hopeless romantic, certain that DJ would reign triumphant in the end. My world was inevitably rocked the night I watched the Creek finale in its entirety for the first time. I cried uncontrollably, threw stuff at the screen and cursed Joey Potter for her poor choice in judgment.

If I ask myself what my favorite television show of all-time is, three titles immediately come to mind: Dawson’s Creek, One Tree Hill and Lost. OTH started out wonderful and if the show was anything like it used to be, it might have taken the title. Lost has to be one of the most beautifully crafted shows I’ve ever watched. I can’t fathom how people can say that the finale was not one of the finest two hours of television ever.

But if I look deep down to my core, there will always be a soft spot for the show that started my hideously long record of doomed couples. The show that had such precocious dialogue like, “Feelings and emotions have an inexplicable way of manifesting themselves in subconscious and not always self-aware behavior.”  The first show I obsessed over. The first show that I owned on dvd. The first show to severely piss me off. The show that ultimately made me love television.

I guess the Creek was right, “It’s the end of something simple…and the beginning of everything else.”

Three Reasons Why Television Shows Fail

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As I sit here watching last week’s exceedingly uninteresting new episode of One Tree Hill on Hulu, I can’t help but feel an extreme sense of loss. This program used to be so freaking good. Circa seasons 2-4, One Tree Hill had some of the most powerful and creative story arcs on television. Now what has this program come to? They’re bringing back the cougar and young guy story line, a psycho comes into the picture and pretends to be someone they’re not, and ugly ass Mouth is somehow the only one getting tail in Tree Hill. Remember basketball? The voice-overs with quotes from famous authors? The original 5 characters that we have come to love?

There comes a time in the life of every television program where the writers and executive board hit a road block. Some shows find a way to rise above and continue to produce good television. Others fall by the wayside and they become syndicated history. In my opinion, there are a few main reasons why good shows fail, they are as follows:

1. The characters go off to college: Chances are pretty slim that you and your 5 closest friends all chose the same college to attend. So this puts the writers in a dilemma: how do we keep the chemistry between our actors when they are all at different schools? Eureka! We’ll create a new school that is in their hometown (or close by) and have them all attend there. There is no actual Penbrook University, the college  Cory, Shawn, Topanga, and Angela on Boy Meets World all magically chose to attend. And in sheer coincidence, that’s where Jack and Eric also go to school AND where Mr. Feeny happens to end up. Joey Potter gets accepted at the uber prestigious and uber fake Worthington College on Dawson’s Creek. Jen and Jack go to school at the equally as fake and half as prestigious Boston Bay College. Where do both of these fake institutions happen to be located? Boston (I guess I kind of gave that away), which is conveniently 15 minutes away from their fake hometown of Capeside.  Dawson then loses his way (of course), drops out of USC (idiot) and moves to where? Boston. Shocker.

Most shows that document high school fail when the characters transition to college. All of the family dynamics are lost, presumably because the parents don’t follow them to college. A bunch of new characters are introduced which takes screen time away from the characters we’ve formed a connection with. Most of the time the circumstances that bring all main characters to the same place are stupid and usually involve some sort of loss of faith, death of a family member, or being kicked out of school for ridiculous circumstances.

2. A main character is killed off / leaves: Getting rid of an essential cast member is one boat that should not be rocked. Yes, Marissa was annoying on The O.C. But she was the source of a lot of drama and half of the beloved pair of Ryan and Marissa. Were the writers missing broody and angry Ryan so much they needed to kill off his girlfriend to get him moody again? It’s common knowledge that I loathe the character of Peyton on One Tree Hill, but her and Lucas’ departure from the show have killed it. Ever since Dr. Burke left on Grey’s Anatomy, I can’t imagine Cristina being happy with anyone else. Any story line pairing her with another guy makes me cringe. Grey’s hasn’t been the same for me since Burke left, and then they have the nerve to kill my beloved George?!  FML. I am so not looking forward to tomorrow’s Lost, where I have been told that losties just start dropping like flies.

3. Story lines get recycled: How long can a couple play-out the “will they / won’t they” before the audience explodes? Apparently Friends can do it for 10 years. How many times can someone attempt to kill Dan Scott? How many times does Clark Kent have to save Lana Lang before she realizes he’s got magical powers? Seeing the same thing over and over and over again gets tiresome. The program eventually becomes so predictable that it’s not even worth watching anymore.

Alas, I have a sinking feeling this will be the last season of One Tree Hill. It didn’t even get to redeem itself. I am praying that the CW will give OTH one last chance to make things right aka bring back Leyton, ditch the newbies, and start showing the geniusness I know the writers still have.