| TV's 100 Greatest Characters - 91-100 |
| Commentary - Featured |
| Written by spunkybean staff |
| Friday, 19 June 2009 10:00 |
For the last few weeks, we’ve been abuzz with activity at spunkybean. Codenamed Project: Enigma, we’ve been crunching numbers, running data, and generally skulking about in great secrecy. Now, we can finally bring Project: Enigma out in public where it can be seen and enjoyed by all.
We are pleased to bring you the master list of TV’s 100 Greatest Characters. That’s right, we put everybody up against the wall and took their measure, and determined our 100 favorites. The results, and this may or may not be hyperbole, will blow your mind.
Now, it’s important to note that we’ve limited our search to current shows. There are so many great characters right now that they deserve their day in the sun without competing with Archie Bunker and George Costanza and
The spunkybean 100: 91-100
 100. John Munch (Richard Belzer – Various Shows)“Do I look like Montel Williams?”
While he’s currently a regular on Law and Order: SVU, Detective Munch began his career on Homicide: Life on the Street. He’s also made appearances on three other Law & Order shows (including the French version of Criminal Intent), The Beat, X-Files, The Wire, and Arrested Development. Nobody else has ever appeared as the same character on that many different series, which would earn Munch a place on the list all by himself. He is the connective tissue that binds television continuity. The fact that the sardonic, misanthropic Munch is pretty consistently hilarious wherever he appears is a bonus. (ej)
 99. Master Shake (Dana Snyder – Aqua Teen Hunger Force)“I am responsible for the paradigm shift in birthdays, and how they will be viewed in the following centuries.”
Yes, he’s a sentient milk shake. Or more likely, a sentient cup in which a milk shake is stored. Either way, it’s pretty weird. Shake is almost entirely hateful, never missing a chance to take a shot at everybody around him. His grasp on reality is not what you’d call “firm”, either. In an argument, he tends to go off on tangents entirely unrelated to the actual discussion. He’s been bitten by a radioactive Black man, accepted sponsorship money from Boost Mobile, harnessed the power of Foreigner, and has been raped to death by a Gay Ape Party Bus. So, I think you can see what he’s doing on this list. (ej)
98. Smokey (Lost)
“(Rumble)”
Remember when the Monster on
 extraneous characters? We were so young and innocent then. Right now, we’ve seen evidence that Smokey is actually Jacob’s ancient enemy and that he’s taken on the form of John Locke. We’ve seen him take on human form and judge people. And if you don’t pass, well, we’ll miss you. Recently, we learned that he guards a  97. Janitor (Neil Flynn – Scrubs)“I enjoy stuffing animals. Usually with other animals. For instance, a badger will hold five squirrels. A squirrel will hold most of a cat. A mouse will hold a shrew and a vole. You get it… the circle of life.”
Almost everything we know about Janitor is a lie. Heck, he even revealed his name at the end of Season Eight, but is he really “Glenn Matthews”, or is that just another in his web of lies? That wife he talked about for years? He wasn’t even married, certainly not to a woman with pincers for hands. Did he really appear in The Fugitive? Does he have a brother who looks exactly like him, only with a mustache and inexplicable Southern accent? We just don’t know. We do, however, know that he has amassed a squirrel army, that he wears a bedsheet and lurks in the pediatric wing pretending to be a ghost, and that he is the proud inventor of the knifewrench. We also know that if Janitor is in a scene, it’s not going in the direction that you think it’s going. It’s a gift. (ej)
96. Charles Foster Ofdensen (Brendon Smalls – Metalocalypse)
“So, you think it might be a good business move to put that troll back to sleep?”
Ofdensen is the manager/lawyer/publicist for Dethklok, the biggest band ever and the 12th largest
 economy in the world. Keeping track of these idiots would be enough of a task by itself, but when they’ve also got a shadowy cabal led by a guy who may or may not be Odin, it’s more than a full-time job. Ofdensen’s the guy who gets them into the studio to record, who indulges their destructive habits with an endless supply of lamps, and freaking kicks ass when he needs to. He’s got the reflexes of a ninja and the weapons background of a Navy SEAL. If you need a guy to dispense with a Rock ‘n’ Roll Clown, explain why you can’t record an album in the Mariana Trench, or just clear up the public relations disaster resulting from a concert that maims hundreds, Ofedensen’s your guy! (ej)95. Krusty the Klown (Dan Castellaneta – The Simpsons)
“Man, look at all the crap with my face on it.”
 If there’s a character who’s synonymous with entertainment, it’s Krusty the Klown. He’s been hosting any number of shows for decades. Not just the Krusty the Klown Show, but Krusty After Dark, Springfield Squares, and really whatever comes his way. Hey, Krusty’s got gambling debts! Sure, all of his jokes are stolen (“If this is anybody but Steve Allen, I’ll sue!”), his merchandise is shoddy (“It’s burning all the hair off my arms!”), and he’s deeply unprofessional (“A famous entertainer once said that ninety percent of success is showing up on time. Sorry I’m four hours late.”). And yes, he has a surprisingly high percentage of co-workers who have repeatedly tried to murder him. But 94. Desmond Hume (Henry Ian Cusick – Lost)
 “So we saved the world together for a while, and that was lovely.”
The first addition to the Lost cast who really gelled, Desmond is the man who lived in the Swan Station for years, saving the world every 108 minutes and accidentally causing the crash of Flight 815. He’s also the one at the center of Lost’s great love story. And he occasionally sees glimpses of the future and lurches forward and backward in time. Plus, the “
93. Bret and Jemaine (Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement – Flight of the Conchords)
Bret: There are two types of guys...
Jemaine: I'm one of them...
Bret: ...and I'm the other sort. Pretty much got it covered.
 The quotes are actually from Bret and Jemaine's live show as opposed to the series, but truer words have never been spoken. As their alter-egos (Bret and Jemaine) on their HBO series, however, they haven't got it covered at all. For the most part, they have terrible luck with women, music, smarts, etc. It is this dynamic that makes them so charming. As 92. Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel – How I Met Your Mother)
“I’m cuddly, bitch!”
91. Christian Troy (Julian McMahon – Nip/Tuck)
“The only other time I felt remotely this powerless was in the early 90’s, when some chick slipped her finger up my butt with no warning.”
There’s something vaguely shameful about being a fan of Dr. Troy. He’s vain, petty, misogynistic,
 materialistic, and occasionally outright evil. He is also awesome. While he may seem to live only for sex, money, and in those episodes where he moonlighted as a gigolo, sex for money, he also has a human side. And maybe we only see that human side when he’s at a low point, it’s still there. Considering that over the course of the series he’s had an AIDS scare, thought his fiancée left him only to find out she’d actually been abducted by a serial killer, been attacked by that same serial killer, gone bankrupt, battled breast cancer, fed a mobster to alligators, learn that his biological son and daughter were having regular sex, and about a million other things, he’s had a lot of low points. And what’s great about Christian is that he comes back from the bottom every time and immediately proceeds with being just as big a turd as he ever was. He’s kind of a hero of mine. (ej)Join us next week when we reveal 81-90. Start speculating…. Now!
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