Characters don’t have to be likable to be watchable or entertaining, nor are they always supposed to be. Some TV show characters are clear-cut villains designed to make audiences seethe with rage, and others are just so obnoxious they unintentionally become the villains of their own story.
From angsty teens to cruel sadists and unabashed narcissists, below are 20 of the most unlikable and annoying characters on TV.
SEE ALSO: The most unlikable TV characters
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Piper Chapman never seemed to learn from her mistakes on “Orange Is the New Black.”
Piper is supposed to serve as a proxy for viewers watching “Orange Is The New Black.” It’s through Piper’s story that audiences are first introduced to life inside a women’s prison, but with every passing season, the character becomes less sympathetic.
At her core, Piper is a manipulative, self-centered narcissist, who treats prison like a soul-searching wellness retreat. As an inmate with a relatively-short 15-month sentence, Piper frustratingly never tries to keep her head down as she serves her time. Rather, her sense of entitlement leads her to repeatedly participate in incredibly stupid and risky activities — like her rogue panty-business.
“Gossip Girl” writers spent six seasons trying to make Chuck Bass likable after he sexually assaulted Serena and Jenny in the pilot episode.
Almost none of the characters on “Gossip Girl” were ever going to win any awards for being decent people, but Chuck Bass was particularly worthy of viewer contempt.
He was sleazy, smarmy, entitled — and an attempted rapist. Chuck was a misogynist, who repeatedly called female characters “sluts” and viewed women as conquests rather than people. Despite all this, show writers seemed hell-bent on re-branding Chuck as a sympathetic bad boy character, who could be reformed with help of Blair’s love.
But anyone who remembered how Chuck behaved in the series earlier episodes had a hard time finding the character anything other than repulsive.
Marissa Cooper’s never-ending breakdown on “The O.C.” became annoying and tedious.
Marissa Cooper wore out her welcome long before — sorry, SPOILERS — she was killed in a fiery car crash at the end of the third season of “The O.C.” Yes, the character had a lot of trauma thrown at her throughout the series, but she also handled everything in the worst and most dramatic way.
Marissa went from having a bit of a rebellious streak to being completely self-destructive over the course of the first season. The character only continued to further spiral out of control and eventually, the show just became caught in a loop where Marissa would inevitably make a terrible decision and the rest of the characters would have to save her.
Audiences were frustrated by Marissa’s inability to learn from her mistakes and became particularly tired of her perpetual need to give others the benefit of the doubt, which was always done to the detriment of her own safety.
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