The Ringer - The Ringer’s Best TV Character of the Century Bracket2020-04-04T09:10:25-04:00http://www.theringer.com/rss/stream/209634652020-04-04T09:10:25-04:002020-04-04T09:10:25-04:00And the Winner of the Best TV Character of the Century Bracket Is …
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<p>Two iconic characters, Walter White and Michael Scott, entered, but only one could prevail</p> <p id="NKqVQn">“He can’t keep getting away with it!” Jesse Pinkman yelled through tears in the final season of <em>Breaking Bad</em>. “He can’t keep getting away with it!”</p>
<p id="UpgPXl">Well, finally, someone stopped him.</p>
<p id="0sqnPZ">The man who put an end to Walter White’s reign of terror is perhaps an unlikely hero. Born in a quaint, midsized city in Pennsylvania, he grew up isolated from his peers—“I wanna be married and have 100 kids so I can have 100 friends,” he memorably admitted as a youngster—before rising through the ranks of a small but persistent paper company. As a boss, he instilled important values like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWzezWq7FkA">sensitivity</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rbS_vY4-oI">gender equality</a>, equal measures of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOW_kPzY_JY">trust</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j328SwxxQzk">distrust</a> in technology, and the sort of courage one must have to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmoZNE-tDv0">stand up to rabies</a>. He was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iPyz6Yqwl4">a screenwriter</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duq5w7tEn84">an ad man</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd-wd8u47mk">a lover</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZJR0D6hrJk">a fighter</a>, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kvw2BPKjz0">a parkour enthusiast</a>. He <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kfgXoclrjk">wore a ladies’ suit</a>, committed corporate espionage by smuggling himself into a meeting via a cart of cheese, and knew all the words to Tom Cochrane’s “Life Is a Highway.” He made everyone who worked for him feel both utterly uncomfortable and utterly at home. And on Friday night, he slayed Heisenberg.</p>
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<p id="Az73xL">Michael Scott’s run through <em>The Ringer</em>’s Best TV Character of the Century bracket was something to behold, even if <em>The Office</em>’s current standing as <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/3/24/21191677/the-office-netflix-nbc-peacock-streaming-favorite">the most popular show on streaming</a> hinted at his success. He whipped Wags of <em>Billions</em> in Round 1, as a 1-seed should do to a 16-seed. He then dominated <em>It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia</em>’s Charlie Kelly—a character who many believed was grossly underseeded—by a score of 75 percent to 25 percent. His one challenge came in the Sweet 16, when he was beaten handily in the website poll by Saul Goodman yet still won with an overall score of 56-44. Only afterward did it become clear that Saul’s votes had been inflated by a bot-fueled attack. That’s how good Michael Scott is—he defeated the machines. From there, he came at the king Omar Little and did not miss, and then walloped Ron Swanson in the Final Four. </p>
<p id="qROgwa">But the win over Walter White was Michael’s most impressive feat. No one had dominated this bracket quite like Heisenberg. In matchups against <em>Scandal</em>’s Olivia Pope, <em>The Americans</em>’ Elizabeth Jennings, <em>Friday Night Lights</em>’ Coach Eric Taylor, Tony Freaking Soprano, and Arya Freaking Stark, Walter White won with an average 78 percent of the vote. As in <em>Breaking Bad</em>, he was the one who knocked in this bracket. Until the very end. Michael’s victory was slim: The on-site poll was separated by just 153 votes, in Walt’s favor, but with Michael winning 53 percent on Twitter and 58 percent on Instagram Stories, it was enough. </p>
<p id="t8Zzj9">Congratulations to Michael Scott. He didn’t miss any of the shots he took this week. Not only is he the best boss—he’s the best TV character of the century.</p>
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<p id="gMePpl">Before we go, I want to wind down this wonderful tournament with a thank-you to everyone who voted, and with a quick ranking of my 10 favorite things that happened related to this bracket this week.</p>
<p id="QCRt9W">10. Eric Cartman <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/3/31/21200477/best-tv-character-century-bracket-round-one-cartman-baby-yoda">turning into a Cinderella story</a>, defeating Fleabag and Tim Riggins before falling to Jesse Pinkman. Those upsets were the exact, amusing kind of annoying that Cartman has traded in for the past two-plus decades. By the Sweet 16 I was actually rooting for him to go all the way.</p>
<p id="T4L0FH">9. Al Swearengen losing to NoHo Hank in the first round of the tournament, which created a bit of an existential crisis within <em>The Ringer</em>’s TV Slack channel.</p>
<p id="npNi8j">8. On the precipice of facing each other in a momentous, fraught sibling-on-sibling battle, both Tyrion and Cersei Lannister going down (to Dwight Schrute and Ron Swanson, respectively). Weirdly reminiscent of <a href="https://www.theringer.com/binge-mode/2019/5/16/18627562/game-of-thrones-season-8-episode-5-the-bells">the TV show they were on</a>!</p>
<p id="jZZZyE">7. Arya Stark absolutely slaying Baby Yoda in the Round of 32, which prompted me to ask <em>The Ringer</em>’s manager of social content, <a href="https://twitter.com/LoganRhoades">Logan Rhoades</a>, if he could Photoshop B.Y.’s head onto Walder Frey’s body, which he then did:</p>
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<p id="g9zTVv">6. Coach Eric Taylor making a late-game comeback to win an election against Selina Meyer. Just beautiful symmetry between the bracket, <em>Friday Night Lights</em>, and <em>Veep</em>. I loved it.</p>
<p id="h9WS2e">5. Nick Offerman <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/1/21201192/nick-offerman-interview-ron-swanson-tv-character-bracket">saying to <em>The Ringer</em>’s John Gonzalez</a>, “When you look in the mirror and see the hand of cards I’ve been dealt, you better have a sense of humor.”</p>
<p id="bAf141">4. Bots hacking the Round 2 poll between Gob Bluth and Ron Swanson in <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/1/21202307/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-results-sweet-sixteen">such a hilariously egregious manner</a>. The guy racked up over 200,000 votes for himself while no other poll had more than 100,000 votes total. Within about two minutes of the poll being live, we were all like, “So how about those bots?!”</p>
<p id="hVeGj8">3. The decision to eliminate Gob Bluth for attempting to rig an election. It felt good to do, I won’t lie. The integrity of our elections is essential. </p>
<p id="sWSB3s">2. Will Arnett starting a mini-feud with <em>The Ringer</em>’s Twitter over this executive decision:</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">The fact that you used this gif proves my point <a href="https://twitter.com/ringer?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@ringer</a> <br>SEE YOU IN COURT! <a href="https://t.co/1lATUgtRqE">https://t.co/1lATUgtRqE</a></p>— Will Arnett™ (@arnettwill) <a href="https://twitter.com/arnettwill/status/1245514948240748544?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 2, 2020</a>
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<p class="c-end-para" id="tbo56M">1. The realization that Ron Swanson continued to be dogged by bot activity even after the Gob fiasco, and the further realization that it was connected to some lighter bot activity we had noticed in relation to Saul Goodman. See, Ron beat <em>Better Call Saul</em>’s Kim Wexler in Round 1. Everything that followed—the Gob poll, the Saul polls, the weird de facto on-site tie between Ron and Cersei—was retribution. (A person who will remain anonymous did email us on Friday morning confessing to be the culprit of this bot malfeasance, and while that’s completely unverifiable—or if it is, we don’t care to verify it—I would like to report that this email included the phrase “the vile Ron Swanson.”) This sort of bonkers behavior is more than we could have hoped for when we dreamed up the idea to do a TV character bracket. Once again, we thank you, for all of it, and hope it brought you as much joy this week as it brought us.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/4/21207955/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-final-results-michael-scottAndrew Gruttadaro2020-04-03T16:00:00-04:002020-04-03T16:00:00-04:00The Best TV Character of the Century Bracket: Walter White and Michael Scott Face Off in the Final
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<p>This thing was destined to end with these two meteors colliding. It’s the one who knocks versus the one who hit Meredith with his car.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="7dlDKZ">Almost always, the NCAA tournament is defined by a two-part process. The first part—usually taking place over the tournament’s first two rounds—is chaos. Florida Gulf Coast University dunks the shit out of Georgetown; Mercer beats Duke; Loyola Chicago and <a href="https://www.theringer.com/march-madness/2018/3/22/17152646/sister-jean-music-video-loyola-chicago-march-madness">that adorable little old nun</a> advance over Miami. The second part unfolds thereafter, as chaos gives way to order. The shocking upsets dwindle and dwindle and dwindle (except in the case of that adorable little old nun), until the only teams left standing are the ones you pretty much thought would make it all along; some combination of Duke, Kentucky, Kansas, UNC, Michigan State, and so on.</p>
<p id="tKwc85">That’s more or less what happened in <em>The Ringer</em>’s Best TV Character of the Century bracket, which enters its final round on Friday afternoon. The first couple of rounds <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/3/31/21200477/best-tv-character-century-bracket-round-one-cartman-baby-yoda">saw stunning upsets</a>—13-seed NoHo Hank’s defeat of Al Swearengen in the opening round (Chris Ryan when that happened: “This is a crime against art.”); Nathan Fielder taking down 1-seed Villanelle; Eric Cartman demolishing Fleabag and holding off a late comeback by Tim Riggins to advance to the Sweet 16. But—despite the nefarious scheming of some robots—things have straightened out since then. The Elite Eight featured no one ranked lower than a 5-seed, and the semis were filled out by four truly iconic TV characters: <em>Breaking Bad</em>’s Walter White, <em>Game of Thrones</em>’ Arya Stark, <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/1/21201192/nick-offerman-interview-ron-swanson-tv-character-bracket"><em>Parks and Recreation</em>’s Ron Swanson</a>, and <em>The Office</em>’s Michael Scott. The chaos gave way to order.</p>
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<p id="qvyAgb">That trend continued in <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/3/21206267/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-results-final-four">the Final Four</a>. Arya may have killed the Night King, but she couldn’t kill the king of a different kind of blue ice. While she is no doubt a <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/3/21206713/perfect-tv-character-breakdown-traits-walter-white-michael-scott">perfect TV character</a>, a worthy representative of the most popular show of the 2010s, it’s no overstatement to say that Walter White is the more renowned, more central character. And while Ron Swanson has made an incredible run in this tourney—<a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/1/21202307/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-results-sweet-sixteen">overcoming bot-riddled polls</a> in rounds 1, 2, <em>and </em>3—he was no match for Michael Scott, the most universally loved character from a TV show that’s <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/3/24/21191677/the-office-netflix-nbc-peacock-streaming-favorite">found a major second life on streaming</a>. The man also known as Duke Silver put up a fight on Twitter but lost handily on the site poll and on Instagram.</p>
<p id="oXNhkC">In the end, the Final Four face-offs resembled another NCAA tournament trope: the much-hyped matchup that immediately turns into a rout. Just as Kansas trounced UNC in the ’08 Final Four, Heisenberg trounced Arya Stark 69 percent to 31 percent. Just as Duke crushed Michigan State in ’15, Michael Scott beat Ron Swanson, 56 percent to 44 percent.</p>
<p id="lFDuAr">If, at the beginning of the week, we had done odds on finals matchups, Walter White vs. Michael Scott would’ve been set extremely high (-450 maybe?). Lo and behold, that’s what we have in front of us now.</p>
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<p id="xwoQBd">A teacher of chemistry versus a teacher of business (kinda). The one who knocks versus the one who burned his foot on a George Foreman grill. The Final Four might have been runaways for these two, but this final could be a bloodbath. Without further ado, let’s get to the voting.</p>
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<p class="c-end-para" id="oJUPFn"><em>You can vote on this page, on </em><a href="https://twitter.com/ringer"><em>Twitter</em></a><em>, or on </em><a href="https://www.instagram.com/ringer/"><em>Instagram</em></a><em> until 9 p.m. PT. Come back to </em>The Ringer<em> on Saturday morning to find out who is the last man standing.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/3/21207115/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-results-finalAndrew Gruttadaro2020-04-03T09:17:13-04:002020-04-03T09:17:13-04:00What Makes a Perfect TV Character?
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<p>There are seven traits that only the Walter Whites and Michael Scotts of the world possess</p> <p id="4DJLHj"><em>March is a month for brackets, so this week on </em>The Ringer<em>, we’re hosting </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/3/30/21197143/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-intro-round-1"><em>The Best TV Characters of the Century</em></a><em>—an expansive, obsessive, and unexpectedly fraught competition to determine the best fictional TV personality of the past 20 years. To help the public make informed voting decisions, </em>The Ringer<em> has contacted some of the people who know these characters best: the actors who played them. Check back throughout the week for more interviews, and be sure to vote for The Best TV Characters of the Century </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/3/21206267/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-results-final-four"><em>here</em></a><em>.</em></p>
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<p id="hjidWu">Were there a checklist of things needed to create a perfect TV character, it would be thus: </p>
<p id="wfPHK0"><strong>Firstly, the character has to, in one way or another, be funny</strong>. They can be funny in a clever way (like Selina Meyer on <em>Veep</em>). Or funny in a deadpan way (like Earn on <em>Atlanta</em>). Or funny in an obvious way (like Abbi on <em>Broad City</em>). Or funny in a reverse obvious way (like Captain Raymond Holt on<em> Brooklyn Nine-Nine</em>). Or funny in some other way that I haven’t listed yet that you’re probably thinking of right now. And, to be clear here, “funny” does not have to be a core component of their television existence, but it does have to be a skill that they can access whenever they need to (like Mike Ehrmantraut on <em>Breaking Bad</em>/<em>Better Call Saul</em>). The perfect TV character has to have that.</p>
<p id="EIdhZv"><strong>Secondly, the character has to seem like they would be a chore to hang out with but also like it might be the most fun imaginable</strong>. Nobody was better at making me feel this way than Don Draper on <em>Mad Men</em>. He seemed, at once, to be the worst <em>and</em> the best. I could feel myself hating him during episodes and also desperately wanting him to see something good in me; he turned me into an at-home Peggy Olson. Imagining myself in the same room as him felt similar to when I imagine myself in a cage surrounded by tiger sharks; there’s a fear there, yes, but it’s coated in exhilaration, and also I’m hoping I make it out of there without getting any of my limbs chewed off.</p>
<aside id="TL0Bx6"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The Best TV Character of the Century Bracket: Welcome to the Final Four","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/3/21206267/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-results-final-four"}]}'></div></aside><p id="gMTQkJ"><strong>Thirdly, the character has to make you ask yourself some questions that maybe you’re not so interested in answering</strong>. Walter White is a very good example of this. <em>Breaking Bad</em> starts out and you’re like, “Yes, of course. The circumstances merit the deceit and the criminality. I hope this meek science teacher and his weak mustache are able to raise the money he needs for his family to be taken care of after he dies.” And then by the end of it you’re like, “Well, I mean, obviously I see all the horrible, horrible, horrible things Walter White is doing—letting Jane die in front of him; holding his wife hostage; hijacking Jesse Pinkman’s life and, in effect, selling him into slavery; poisoning a child. But … I don’t know. I can’t make myself not root for him. And I’m not so sure I’m interested in examining what that says about me, and the type of person I am, and maybe the type of person I’m subconsciously wishing I could be.”</p>
<p id="kPxRtS">(There are smaller examples of this, to be sure—times when you rewatch a show and realize how flawed or potentially problematic someone is—but it always ends the same way: with you avoiding the results of a conversation about what it might mean that you like that character in spite of their moral or enlightened shortcomings.)</p>
<p id="5ynzvi"><strong>Fourthly, and this is a silly one but also a very important one, but the character has to have a cool name</strong>. Imagine if Ron Swanson’s name was Rob Swanson. Or if Arya Stark’s name was Amanda Starp. Or if Tony Soprano’s name was Tony Poblano. Or if Dwight Schrute’s name was anything other than Dwight Schrute. Imagine if the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was the Fresh Prince of Cloverdale, or if Liz Lemon was Liz Watermelon, or if Claire Underwood was Carla Underwood. </p>
<p id="QCC6V5"><strong>Fifthly—and this is the inverse of the funny thing from earlier—the character has to be able to access a level of emotional warfare that you weren’t expecting</strong>. My favorite example of someone who’s very good at this trick (and, I would argue, the very best at this trick) is J.D. from <em>Scrubs</em>, who is, for reasons that I will never understand, <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/3/30/21199259/best-tv-characters-bracket-snubs-jenna-maroney-dennis-always-sunny-scrubs">somehow absent from <em>The Ringer</em>’s bracket</a> of the best TV characters of the century, despite the fact that he is so obviously one of the best TV characters of the century. </p>
<p id="bBCJ98"><em>Scrubs</em> is mostly a funny show, except for when it’s a heartbreaking show. And when it’s a heartbreaking show, it’s often J.D. who delivers whatever line it is that sends you into your feelings, like when he asked Dr. Cox <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e__1KU7lg-4&t=57s">where he thought he was</a> or when he told everyone it was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx4chPKwcbY">OK to cry when you’re sad</a>. It’s a remarkable skill, really, to be able to sprint in the complete opposite direction that everyone is used to seeing you go, and a thing that only the very best TV characters can do. Like, do you remember when Michael Scott teared up at his desk after Jim Halpert sniffed out that it was his last day at Dunder Mifflin and confronted him about it? Or do you remember when Poussey got crushed to death in <em>Orange Is the New Black</em> and Taystee had a breakdown next to her body? Or do you remember when Omar Little, possibly the coolest and most unflappable character on a show full of impossibly cool and unflappable characters, sat on the bench and cried while Bunk Moreland <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wmgghlEagA">gave him a lecture on criminal civility</a>? Or do you remember when Monica and Chandler had to sit with the idea that they couldn’t have children and Monica asked Chandler to do away with the quips for a second? The character has to be able to go there. </p>
<p id="25PiJl"><strong>Sixthly, the character has to be able to be completely comfortable no matter who they’re sharing a scene with</strong>. Coach Eric Taylor from<em> Friday Night Lights </em>was a delight in every scene he appeared in. You could put him with Tami or Julie or Matt Saracen or Tim Riggins or Jason Street or Smash or Buddy or Vince or Lyla, on and on, in perpetuity. Same with Olivia Pope in <em>Scandal</em>. Same with Kendall Roy in <em>Succession</em>. Same with Al Swearengen in <em>Deadwood</em>. Same with Charlie in <em>It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia</em>. Same with Carrie in <em>Sex and the City</em>. Same with Kenny Powers in <em>Eastbound and Down</em>. Same with Chuck in <em>Billions</em>. Those certainly aren’t the only characters who can do that, but they’re definitely all characters who can. If you can’t, then you can’t be a perfect TV character. </p>
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<p id="MdU6AF"><br><strong>Seventhly, and lastly, and the most vaguely, the character has to have that indescribable quality that makes you feel excited whenever they pop up on screen</strong>. When I was in college, there was this guy named Morris who lived in the same dorm as me. Morris was not taller than everyone, or more handsome than everyone, or richer than everyone, or cooler than everyone, or funnier than everyone, or more <em>anything-at-all </em>than everyone. He was, by every measurable statistic, completely and ordinarily plain. But it didn’t matter. Because Morris did not concern himself with measurable statistics. He was only concerned with immeasurables. He fucking led the league in immeasurables. Which, I suspect, is why everyone loved him so much. </p>
<p id="5eGPjO">It was weird at first, but definitely only at first. You’d hear about this guy—Morris <em>this</em>, Morris <em>that</em>, is Morris gonna be there, what’d Morris say, where’d Morris get those shoes, etc.—and then you’d finally see him and be like, “I don’t get it. What’s the big deal?” But then you’d talk to him for five minutes, or be around him for five minutes, and it was like, “Oh. Duh. Obviously. This guy is a gem, and I think I might love him, and I would absolutely give him all of my money if he asked me for it.” </p>
<p id="WBAvbf">Anyway, that’s what I’m talking about here. It’s the hardest level of TV Character-dom to achieve, but it’s also one that you absolutely have to be able to reach if you want to be considered a perfect TV character. And this one, plus the six things before it—that’s what <em>The Ringer</em>’s Best TV Character of the Century bracket was (either intentionally or unintentionally) designed to pin down. Every character who made it into, say, the Elite Eight, is a perfect character. All of the characters in the Final Four—Walter White, Arya Stark, Ron Swanson, and Michael Scott—are extremely perfect. The two characters in the championship round will be all-caps PERFECT. And the winner will be unquestionably perfect. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="68KVdY">There are others who should have at least gotten the chance to participate—anyone from my beloved <em>Scrubs</em>, as mentioned; Tom from <em>Succession</em>; Bubbles from <em>The Wire</em>; Rainbow from <em>Black-ish</em>; Dinesh from <em>Silicon Valley</em>; Jessica from <em>Fresh Off the Boat</em>; and more. That seems inarguable. But so, too, is deeming the winner of the bracket to be an absolutely perfect TV character. </p>
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https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/3/21206713/perfect-tv-character-breakdown-traits-walter-white-michael-scottShea Serrano2020-04-03T08:06:38-04:002020-04-03T08:06:38-04:00The Best TV Character of the Century Bracket: Welcome to the Final Four
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<p>A chemistry teacher, a wolf, a libertarian, and a regional branch manager walk into a semifinal. It’s Walter White vs. Arya Stark and Ron Swanson vs. Michael Scott—only two will advance.</p> <p id="YxBhfW">TV may be ground zero for the end of the monoculture, but when it comes to finding the best TV character of the 21st century, the shows that fare best are the ones that come closest to omnipresence. <em>Breaking Bad</em>. <em>Game of Thrones</em>. <em>The Office</em>. <em>Parks and Recreation</em>. These are the shows whose antiheroes, protagonists, and supporting players make up this bracket’s Final Four—and, with due respect to Nathan Fielder’s admirable persistence till the Sweet 16, a smart bettor could’ve predicted as much from the outset.</p>
<p id="ZYxIxu">It’s no coincidence that three of these shows are available to stream on Netflix (<a href="https://time.com/5614266/office-netflix-nbc-universal/">for now, at least</a>), while the last was the biggest show on TV before airing its finale last year to a viewership of <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/game-thrones-series-finale-sets-all-time-hbo-ratings-record-1212269">almost 20 million people</a>. Arya Stark, Walter White, Michael Scott, and Ron Swanson are all great characters, testaments to their writers’ and actors’ sense of comedy, menace, and the full spectrum of human emotion. But they’re also the stars of widely accessible, long-running series, not cult classics (à la Fielder) or short-lived gems (the Bluths) or new favorites (Villanelle, Fleabag, NoHo Hank). The more people see a show, the more likely they are to remember its stars. It’s not rocket science, but after four rounds of voting and many more grievances aired on social media, it is striking.</p>
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<p id="L4luFO">Mercifully, after two straight days of voting irregularities—first <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/1/21202307/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-results-sweet-sixteen">in favor of</a> Gob Bluth, then a <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/2/21203660/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-results-elite-eight">mysterious dead heat</a> between Ron Swanson and Cersei Lannister—our Final Four seem to have won their contests fair and square. Each of our on-site polls averaged about the same number of votes, all around 35,000; none of <em>The Ringer</em>’s social feeds showed any obvious anomalies, either. Though that doesn’t mean the competition wasn’t fierce, or surprising. Ron bested Dwight by just over 500 votes in our main poll, while Dwight actually edged out Ron by a margin of around 6 percent on Instagram. At the end of the day, Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/ringer/status/1245743285701771265">came to the rescue</a> of our favorite libertarian carnivore, giving him a decisive 57 percent of the vote. Maybe posters were returning the favor for all those handy <a href="https://twitter.com/ringer/status/1245088634790789120">computer GIFs</a>. According to our readership—and before them, bracket seeders—Ron Swanson can now claim the title of ultimate Scene Stealer, the division he dominated.</p>
<p id="CIbRhP">Other face-offs were more clear-cut from the jump. In the Wild Cards category, Michael Scott won out over <em>The Wire</em>’s Omar Little by around 60-40 across platforms, a loss for fans of the whistling hitman but not a shock for observers of <em>The Office</em>’s <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/3/24/21191677/the-office-netflix-nbc-peacock-streaming-favorite">flourishing afterlife</a>. (I would be remiss if I didn’t point out Omar was the last remaining character of color.) Chronology be damned, Arya is our top Millennial, outstripping Jesse Pinkman 52-48. And Walter White is the final Boss, trouncing Tony Soprano by a shocking 2-to-1 in the main poll, albeit slightly less on social media.</p>
<p id="vtrz6E">As a critic, I reserve the right to be a little bummed that more personal favorites, underdogs, and niche picks didn’t make it into this final day of voting. (I’m not just talking about Fleabag, either—justice for Kim Wexler!) As a realist, it makes perfect sense. These are the shows everyone can talk about; they’re the shows that give us a sense of community, and the characters we root for and/or laugh at in their fictional worlds, and now, this very real and serious competition. Let the Final Four begin!</p>
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<p id="2eWbZ7">Walter White and Arya Stark follow roughly the same trajectory over the course of their series. Assigned mild-mannered social roles that don’t really fit their true nature—high school chemistry teacher; aristocrat’s daughter—the two plunge themselves into chaotic conflicts that unleash the anger and violence within. Of course, Walt’s transformation was a bit more voluntary, sticking with the meth trade well past the point of paying for his cancer treatments. Arya may have signed up for shape-shifting assassin school all on her own, but she didn’t start the political tug-of-war that turned Westeros into a war zone. Still, if you took all the Arya scenes from <em>Game of Thrones </em>and edited them into a miniseries, <em>Breaking Bad </em>wouldn’t be a bad choice of title.</p>
<p id="cVU5Sb">The respective champions of the Boss and Millennial divisions had to face some formidable foes to make it to the semifinals. Arya beat out Walter’s erstwhile protegé, Jesse Pinkman, by a respectable margin in her first true upset, seeded fifth to Jesse’s third. And in an antihero-on-antihero thunderdome, Walt trumped the top-seeded Tony Soprano, cementing his status as the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16158518-difficult-men">most difficult man</a> of all. But Walt’s decisive victory over Tony doesn’t guarantee he’ll win out over Arya; despite their similarities, the two characters draw on very different kinds of appeal. Who will it be: the plucky tomboy who channels her rage into revenge, or the one who knocks?</p>
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<p id="p1yQWb">Both members of the <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/2/21203985/mike-schur-dwight-schrute-michael-scott-ron-swanson-leslie-knope">Michael Schur extended universe</a>, Ron Swanson and Michael Scott take polar opposite approaches to roughly similar situations. Though neither was in the Boss division, both are bosses, middle managers who go between the unwieldy bureaucracies they serve and the unruly employees they manage. Yet Ron is a public servant who despises government, the Pawnee Parks Department included, and couldn’t care less whether he’s liked by his constituents <em>or </em>his underlings. Being liked is all Michael Scott’s ever wanted.</p>
<p id="VKa38q">Ron’s narrow victory over Dwight Schrute prevented either a true heartbreaker or an utter delight, depending where you fall on the sadism spectrum: a face-off between a would-be master and his chief minion. Instead, we get a face-off between the two last men standing—and, after the demise of Leslie Knope in the Sweet 16, we do mean men—of their respective hit sitcoms, a real-life test of which beloved, bygone series has remained foremost in the zeitgeist. Will the victor be the unlikely Gen Z icon, or the last Republican-leaning character liberal Hollywood learned to love before real life made that impossible? Only you can decide.</p>
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<p class="c-end-para" id="WBWe39"><em>Reminder: Friday is a two-round finale! For the Final Four, you can vote here on the website (except for you, bots!), on </em><a href="https://twitter.com/ringer"><em>Twitter</em></a><em>, and on </em><a href="https://www.instagram.com/ringer/"><em>Instagram</em></a><em> till 3 p.m. ET. Make sure to return to </em>The Ringer<em> right after that to vote in the final.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/3/21206267/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-results-final-fourAlison Herman2020-04-02T08:12:02-04:002020-04-02T08:12:02-04:00Schur Farms: The Organic Creation of Some of the Century’s Most Iconic Characters
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<p>Writer and showrunner Mike Schur breaks down the science behind Ron Swanson, Leslie Knope, and your favorite ‘Office’ players</p> <p id="uzaamZ"><em>There’s been one constant in every round of </em>The Ringer<em>’s </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/2/21203660/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-results-elite-eight"><em>Best TV Character of the Century</em></a><em> Bracket: characters from Michael Schur’s shows. Schur, a former writer, producer, and (occasional) actor on </em>The Office<em> and the creator or cocreator of </em>Parks and Recreation<em>, </em>Brooklyn Nine-Nine<em>, and </em>The Good Place<em>, had a hand in developing five of the bracket’s contenders: Michael Scott, Ron Swanson, Leslie Knope, Dwight Schrute, and Janet. Round 1 pitted the last two against each other—Janet was marbleized—and Tony Soprano narrowly edged out Leslie in the Sweet 16, but Michael, Ron, and Dwight have made it to the </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/2/21203660/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-results-elite-eight"><em>Elite Eight</em></a><em>.</em></p>
<p id="wfiJI1"><em>Schur, who</em><a href="https://twitter.com/KenTremendous/status/1241099713924874240"><em> by popular demand</em></a><em> is reluctantly regrowing his Mose beard from </em>The Office<a href="https://twitter.com/KenTremendous/status/1241099705703993349"><em> for charity</em></a><em>, is working on three new TV projects, including</em><a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/mike-schur-comedy-starring-ed-helms-punky-brewster-scripted-slate-at-nbcu-streamer-1240208"><em> </em>Rutherford Falls</a><em>, an NBC streaming sitcom starring </em>Office<em> alum Ed Helms. With production on his series halted, Schur made time to tell us how to create a great TV character, how classic characters evolve, his TV touchstones, the blessings and curses of deep casts, and the original Ron.</em></p>
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<p id="JEAzmk"><strong>How’s the Mose beard coming in?</strong></p>
<p id="fA7tdG">Terribly is the answer. Terribly. It’s the worst. I was accused by many people of doing this to get out of shaving my head, and my honest-to-god true response is, I would so much rather shave my head. It’s not even close. It’s a runaway victory for shaving my head over growing this stupid beard.</p>
<p id="9vHiey"><strong>For you to start selflessly growing an itchy beard at a time when it’s dangerous to touch your face—I don’t want to use the word “hero” lightly, but ...</strong></p>
<p id="RP4wuX">But go ahead, use it.</p>
<p id="Fl9o7U"><strong>Somehow, Mose did not make our bracket of the best TV characters of the past 20 years ...</strong></p>
<p id="ke0jlX">Then it’s obviously an invalid survey.</p>
<p id="jpAPfS"><strong>… but a bunch of your other characters did! It’s a very scientific process, obviously, both the seeding and the voting, all extremely scientific. Whatever the people say, that is the definitive word on which characters are good.</strong></p>
<p id="3Vu6CR">Yeah, it’s just math. You can’t argue against math.</p>
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<p id="itHGXm"><strong>I read that </strong><em><strong>Rutherford Falls</strong></em><strong> production was postponed. Are you still able to work on anything, besides the beard?</strong></p>
<p id="kazxOp">Yeah, so <em>Rutherford</em> was paused. Basically, we were in the middle of the production meeting for the first episode. We had drafts of seven out of the 10 episodes, and two others were broken. So, if it’s possible to be in a good position during something like this, we were in a good position because we were able to, thanks to Zoom, just keep working. We kept the maximum number of people on the payroll that you can, because the whole writers’ room kept working and all the assistants kept working. We’ve just continued to work on the scripts. We meet three times a week and we all have assignments and we go off and work on scripts. Hopefully, whenever this ends we will be just like, “OK, we’ve got all 10 scripts, let’s get going.” There’s other projects that were at different stages. There was a <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/mike-schur-broad-city-alums-land-dark-comedy-at-hbo-max-1274237">pilot we were going to shoot</a> for HBO Max in late April. That’s obviously completely postponed. There’s <a href="https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/netflix-orders-adult-animated-series-q-force-from-mike-schur-gabe-liedman-1203180733/">an animated show</a>. It’s, like <em>Rutherford</em>, sort of plugging along. We’re making do the best we can. These aren’t real problems. These are fake Hollywood problems.</p>
<p id="ZRRAGW"><strong>Since you’re in the early stages of a few shows, this seems like a fitting time to ask about character creation. At what point in the process of creating a show do the characters come to life?</strong></p>
<p id="Read6i">That’s entirely dependent on the show. There are certain shows that are character studies. Your <em>Breaking Bad</em>s, let’s say, where you don’t do <em>Breaking Bad </em>if you haven’t understood fundamentally who Walter White is and what’s going to happen. Famously that show was pitched as, “We’re going to take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface.” They built a show around the character. It was like, we know who this guy is at the beginning, we know what he’s going to be at the end if we get that far, and everything else fills in around the character.</p>
<p id="wAuZpI">Then you go the complete other way: Most comedies, I would say, are pretty lo-fi in terms of premise. They’re like a bunch of people hanging out somewhere in an office or in an apartment building in Manhattan. In that case, the discovery of the characters—you have <em>some</em> idea at the beginning. You can’t run a pilot without some idea of like, this is the funny one and this is the snarky one and this is the uptight one. But the characters are built brick by brick slowly by a large group of people over, hopefully, many, many years and hundreds of episodes. You have to know something about the world and something about the characters, it’s just what the ratio is at the beginning of the project.</p>
<p id="3KQvea"><em>The Office </em>was being built off of the template from the British show, but there were only four characters who meant anything in the British show. There was David Brent and Gareth, Tim and Dawn, and everybody else was either a two-dimensional cipher or never got developed. When Greg [Daniels] brought the British version to America, he started with Michael Scott, Dwight Schrute, Jim Halpert, and Pam Beesly, and then filled that office with 20 other people. He had some idea of who Oscar was and who Phyllis was, but he very deliberately left them blank at the beginning because it was like, let’s do this organically. Let’s get a bunch of funny people in a room and pitch on, who are these people? What’s their personality trait? How do we learn about them? He knew Angela was a schoolmarm-type uptight person and he knew that Oscar was fastidious, but Oscar didn’t start out as gay. That was a thing that got discovered along the way.</p>
<p id="wdii8w">In <em>The Office</em>’s case, it’s like 75 percent setting, 25 percent character to begin with, and then you slowly build the characters over time. With something like <em>Breaking Bad</em>, it’s probably flipped. It’s 75 percent character understanding and 25 percent world-building, and then the world gets built up around the character. It’s much more likely that you have a vast reservoir of knowledge about the character before you begin the project if you’re doing drama, I think, than comedy, but there’s plenty of exceptions to that rule. In fact, <em>The Good Place</em>, I knew way more about those characters before we started than I had on <em>Parks and Rec. Parks and Rec</em>, everybody was vaguely fleshed out in my mind, but then the real work of building the characters was the result of a lot of pitches and a lot of conversations with the writing staff and actors.</p>
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<p id="omRYvC"><strong>You’ve </strong><a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2018/7/31/17628494/when-do-tv-shows-peak"><strong>said</strong></a><strong> that most shows typically don’t hit their stride until they’re 10 episodes in, and that it would be nice if you could just toss those first episodes and start over again. How much of that learning curve comes from getting a feel for the characters?</strong></p>
<p id="G9hsN6">So much. There are like developmental stages of sitcoms. The first developmental stages, the ugly larva stage from episodes 1 to 8 or so where everything is slimy and gross and hard to understand and you don’t even know what kind of animal you’re looking at. Then, at some point, you come through the clouds and you can see things more clearly. The whole first eight, it’s just trial and error. It’s just putting people together in different combinations and pitching jokes and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Then at some point, you hit on something. Greg used to refer to it as the “ur-episode,” where you finally at some point break an episode where you’re like, “Oh OK, this is how people function with each other. This is what’s funny about them. This is how they relate to each other.”</p>
<p id="napIwR">Then the rest of Season 1 is taking that idea and running. Then you hit this real golden period. It’s the sitcom equivalent of when you’re in your 20s and you’re totally invincible and you stay up all night and drink and smoke and then wake up the next morning at 7:00 and go for a run. That’s like seasons 2 and 3 for sitcoms. Seasons 2 and 3, you know who the characters are, you know what makes them fun, how they relate to each other, but also you’re early enough in the proceedings that you can discover new things about them all the time. Everything’s exciting and fun. You make them hook up with each other or you make them do dramatic things and you stumble into really funny stories that are unexpected and you meet their parents. You do all the exciting development off of this strong base that you discovered in those first 8-16 episodes.</p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="TW6NWc"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The Least Helpful TV Characters of the Century","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/1/21201952/tv-characters-least-helpful-randy-thats-70s-show-scrubs-last-season"},{"title":"Why Ron Swanson Is One of the Best TV Characters of the Century—As Explained by Nick Offerman","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/1/21201192/nick-offerman-interview-ron-swanson-tv-character-bracket"},{"title":"Why Gob Bluth and BoJack Are Two of the Best Characters This Century—As Explained by Will Arnett","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/3/31/21200934/will-arnett-interview-bojack-horseman-gob-bluth-arrested-development"},{"title":"All Anti, No Hero: Pete Campbell and the Failsons of the 21st Century","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/3/31/21200409/21st-century-tv-character-tropes-pete-campbell-michael-scott"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="PNbX5z">That takes you ideally through Season 3. After that, now it’s like the burden’s on you, because you’re comfortably ensconced in adulthood, if you want to continue this developmental metaphor. Now you’re just in adulthood, and to keep things interesting, it just requires a lot of really careful thought and planning and plot creation and character development to keep these characters consistent but also learn new things about them. It just gets harder and harder to do that. But if you really work at it, there’s seasons of sitcoms, Season 5, 6, 7, that are just as good as anything they did earlier.</p>
<p id="i0lyM5">There’s other wild cards that happen. If you think about <em>Cheers</em>,<em> </em>Shelley Long did that show an enormous service, probably, by bolting, because that show had done however many episodes with her. Sam and Diane is still the standard for a certain kind of relationship story in sitcoms. Then she bolted, and it was like, “Well, how much longer could they have kept going with the will-they-or-won’t-they thing?” They brought in a new woman who presented a completely different sort of challenge for the main character of the show. Sometimes weird stuff like that happens and it helps the shows reinvent themselves.</p>
<p id="L9Ozhz"><strong>When you’re in that planning stage, do you come up with comps? Do you start with an archetype or a classic character and say, this is the spin we’re putting on it? He’s like Sam Malone, but bald and in a stable, loving relationship? </strong></p>
<p id="aZR3DU">You do that sometimes. We’re closing in on 100 years of television. Just hundreds of thousands of episodes. It’s hard to find like a new dynamic, really, between friends or between lovers or between husbands and wives. Once in a while a show does something that’s truly new, I think, with its central relationship. I thought <em>Broad City</em> was like, “This is a new friendship. I’ve never seen this friendship before.” It was so specific, I think because it’s the friendship that those ladies have in real life. But it was just so specific and so modern and so fresh and so interesting that you would just tune in, or at least I would, just to be a fly on the wall of how these two women relate to each other. But usually we don’t have that, so you’re basing it on something.</p>
<p id="44gyfi">Ideally you’re not basing it on another television character or characters because everything has been done 50 million times. You’re never gonna find Ted Danson and Shelley Long again. You’re never going to find John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer again. Instead of saying, “This is a Jim and Pam relationship,” you might say, “We can take an aspect of Jim and Pam’s relationship or Sam and Diane’s relationship and weave it in here,” but you just have to get so granular with it and specific with it or else it’s going to seem tired and boring. On <em>Parks and Rec</em>, we talked a lot about Ron Swanson in the early going, not as like, this is Archie Bunker, or this is whoever character from TV, but more like, this is a kind of person who has these specific character traits that we can identify in certain other people both in our lives, and then some on TV.</p>
<p id="FclW6B">In that case, I was really sick of people in American politics who called themselves libertarians because I was like, “You don’t really know what a libertarian is.” I was like, what would be fun is to create an actual libertarian, a person who actually lives off the grid and hunts his own food and has an ideologically consistent strain of libertarianism. We just set out with him to be like, let’s make a person who, if he were asked whether gay people should get married, he would say, “Of course they should. The government shouldn’t tell anybody what to do about anything.” I think it’s more frequently stuff like that, where instead of basing your characters on previously seen characters, you’re trying to base them on archetypes or things in the culture or observations that you’ve made about people that you think might be interesting.</p>
<p id="foRrbf"><strong>How often have you been surprised by the way that certain characters really resonated or failed to connect with an audience? Presumably you start with an internal </strong><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PECOTA"><strong>PECOTA</strong></a><strong> projection for a character. If the early results deviate from that expectation, how do you decide whether it’s a small-sample fluke or a real problem?</strong></p>
<p id="2XFTPk">I don’t have a feel for what’s going to work and what doesn’t. I really don’t. I think some people do. I think Chuck Lorre seems to have some impressions about what will connect with people or what people will enjoy. That’s a skill I don’t have. I’m much better at saying, I know this actor is really good, so if we can write a good character, this actor will become famous or this character will be beloved. Aziz [Ansari], for example, I was like, that dude’s just deeply funny. He’s just a funny person. I find him really enjoyable to watch. So let’s put him on the show, and if we can design a good character for him and give him funny jokes to say, people will like Tom Haverford.</p>
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<p id="hZttGP">Then the burden is on the writers to lift the show up to the level of the actor. I felt that way about everybody at <em>Parks and Rec</em>. When Dan Goor and I were starting <em>Brooklyn Nine-Nine</em>, it was like, look, we have Andy Samberg and Andre Braugher. If we screw this up, it is 100 percent on us. If this show doesn’t work, it will not be the fault of Andy Samberg, one of the funniest people in the world, and Andre Braugher, one of America’s greatest living actors. This will be our problem. I don’t know that I ever have accurately predicted one way or the other whether a character will hit. I think with the help of Allison Jones, who’s the greatest casting director in the world, I’m much better at saying, “Oh, I think that actor will work in this show,” and that’s about as far as I get.</p>
<p id="qfp6bd"><strong>If there is a character who changes significantly or gets sidelined—like Sam Seaborn on </strong><em><strong>The West Wing</strong></em><strong> or maybe Mark Brendanawicz on </strong><em><strong>Parks and Rec</strong></em><strong>, or on the flip side, a minor character who ends up stealing the spotlight—how do you handle that?</strong></p>
<p id="O02c7H">That’s the human error part of this. The part of it that is organic leads you into weird places that you didn’t expect in a big-picture way. You start off with a theory of how things are going to go, and it could be a really good theory and it could make total sense. Then you start executing the plan and it’s like, well, there’s just something not right about this theory. We fed bad information to the computer and it started spitting out a bad result. I remember reading that <em>Family Ties</em>, I think, was basically supposed to be about the parents. Then you have Michael J. Fox come out of nowhere as one of the greatest comedic actors of all time. He and Ted Danson, I think, have the most perfect comedic timing of any actors who have ever existed on television. And so, guess what, <em>Family Ties</em> creators, you shift gears and you say, “This show’s going to be more about Alex P. Keaton now, because we just discovered this guy, and this guy is interesting and he’s brilliant.”</p>
<p id="Anlo2Q">At the beginning of any of these shows, we didn’t know. When Dan and I invented <em>Brooklyn</em>, we thought, well, maybe this character, Amy Santiago, is a potential long-term love interest for Jake, but we didn’t know. It turned out Melissa Fumero is great and she’s super funny and she became exactly what we wanted her to become. But if we had cast a different actor or it just didn’t work, we would have bailed on that. A lot of the stuff you’re talking about, in terms of shifting gears and changing things, the audience never knows about, because it’s just in the heads of the creators and the writers, and then they aim for it and then it just doesn’t work out and they just do something else. What you see is like Plan B or Plan C or Plan D.</p>
<p id="3wI88B"><strong>To make this bracket, characters had to have great writing and also a great actor portraying them. Is one or the other any less essential?</strong></p>
<p id="8ZPtum">It’s alchemy at some level. It’s mysterious and complicated and it’s never one thing. Good writing can elevate acting and good acting can elevate writing. Neither one of them is going to work on its own. The best writing in the world in the hands of a clumsy actor will fall flat. The greatest actor in the world without good things to say will fall flat. At <em>The Office </em>once, we were deep in the weeds on some rewrite of some episode in Season 2, and we just didn’t know what to do. Greg Daniels just said, “You know what? Steve will save us.” He basically just punted on whatever the scene was and said, “Maybe Steve will rescue the show,” and of course he did it. He did every week.</p>
<p id="Kgrd0F">In the Season 2 finale of <em>Parks and Rec</em>, the government had been shut down. Dan Goor wrote a cold open for this episode, and at the end of it he wrote, “Pratt does something physical.” That’s all we had. We just left it in, and [Chris] Pratt was on roller blades in that scene. At the end of it, he said something crazy and rolled up to a desk, tried to jump over, and just fell on the ground, and that was the blow of the cold open. There are times when writers just desperately need the actors to save them and vice versa, but the true magic of something really working is always a combination. It’s always a great actor and really good writing and good directing and good costume design. It’s everything.</p>
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<p id="YUqafP">There’s an infuriatingly ethereal, lightning-in-a-bottle quality to most great television that makes it feel both really special and also impossible to replicate. It’s a lesson I learned at <em>SNL</em>. I think everyone who wants to be a writer should work there for a year, because it is the truest, purest, uncut heroin of the maddening nature of comedy writing. You start on Monday with literally nothing, and on Saturday at 11:30, you do 90 minutes of television and then you start over again. It’s really, really intense and adrenaline fueled. It teaches you a lot of great lessons, and one of the lessons you learn is, you can’t replicate last week, this week. Whatever happened last week, if you had an amazing show and you got a bunch of sketches on the air and they all killed, guess what, you have nothing this week. You’re starting from nothing. You don’t build off what you had. It’s a lot easier in a sitcom because you’re constantly building, and you do have things you can go back to. But the lesson of <em>SNL</em> is really good, which is you have to pay as much attention to what you’re doing every week as you did last week, or else it’s going to fall apart.</p>
<p id="MrcA1u"><strong>How does balancing screen time work on a show like </strong><em><strong>The Good Place</strong></em><strong>, which tended to focus on the core characters, compared to ensemble shows like </strong><em><strong>Parks and Rec</strong></em><strong> or </strong><em><strong>The Office</strong></em><strong>, where you could almost accidentally forget about Phyllis for a few episodes because the cast was so big?</strong></p>
<p id="NG2EDb">It’s a blessing and a curse. <em>The Office</em> is the craziest example because there were, whatever, 20 series regulars at some point. All the actors knew this, but it was still the case that there were going to be whole weeks where you didn’t say anything or you had four lines and they all got cut. That’s not ideal. There’s some perfect balance of core characters and tertiary characters who you can bring in for comedy. By the end of <em>Parks and Rec</em>, we really had a perfect situation, which is we basically had eight to 10, depending on the year, main characters, all of whom were just dynamos. Then we also had like 50 randos who we could design a situation, a public forum or some plot involving the main characters, and you could bring in whoever, Jason Mantzoukas or Mo Collins, and you just knew what they were going to give you when you brought them in. That’s ideal, I think.</p>
<p id="rMAJik"><em>The Office</em> basically took all of those tertiary characters and made them main characters, which is harder to do. There’s going to be whole weeks where Stanley only has a line or two, and that’s not great. The other problem with that is, on <em>Parks and Rec</em>, for example, you’ve got Amy Poehler in the middle of this show, and every second that you’re dealing with some side character is a second that she’s not on camera being Amy Poehler. You want to dance with the one who brung ya a little bit. Sometimes you can get really carried away with funny side characters, and then suddenly you realize, oh, we haven’t given Adam Scott any lines.</p>
<p id="P7GXVr">I used to think of it as 60, 30, 10. That like, 60 percent of every episode had to be with the real core main characters. Then 30 percent of it could be a B story with the side characters, and then 10 percent of it could be dealer’s choice, Mantzoukas or Mo Collins or whoever. If any less than 60 percent of the main story of a <em>Parks and Rec</em> episode is Leslie, Ron, Chris Traeger, April Ludgate, whoever, you’re in trouble. That means that there’s something out of balance, and you could feel it. You’d have readthroughs where you get to the end, and even if it was really funny and everybody was really great and everything, you’d be like, “Man, we just didn’t write Ron Swanson into a good story this time.” You feel their absence.</p>
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<p id="SNIAoM"><strong>Of the characters you worked on who are in our bracket, do any have particularly interesting evolutions or origin stories? Michael became less Brent-like as time went on, for instance.</strong></p>
<p id="xo7DcP">Yeah, that’s the biggest one. Basically <em>40-Year-Old Virgin</em> is what did it. Greg made the switch after <em>40-Year-Old Virgin </em>came out and said, “We need to work 20 percent of that guy into this character.” And we all fought him on it and thought he was stupid and that he was going to ruin the show. Instead, he literally saved the show.</p>
<p id="nW2swp">All of those characters had evolutions. The original conception of Ron Swanson, before we ever even wrote the pilot, was that he was corrupt. The very first incarnation, like early, early, early, was that he was a version of a modern-day political animal who is basically siphoning off public funds for his own gain. But I was also so sick to my stomach of that story that you read about all the time. Before we wrote the pilot, I was like, “No, that’s not good,” and that’s when we stumbled on the true, 19th-century-libertarian version. The ur-Episode for Ron Swanson is the episode Dan Goor wrote where Ron has a hernia and basically doesn’t move for the entire episode. He just sits in his chair and refuses to admit that he’s in pain. We shot that whole story in about four hours, because it was just him in his office trying to eat a hamburger by throwing it into his mouth. In the edit room, we were like, “OK, that’s who he is. We got it.”</p>
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<p id="JZhuVD">Janet was going to be a data center, a <em>Star Trek</em> computer-type thing. That was my original conception of her, and then it was like, “Hey, this would be funnier if a human being would portray it,” which is a very obvious conclusion to come to. But we auditioned a million people for that part. The youngest was 12, and the oldest was, I think, 70. That character is the most due to the actor involved. I said to D’Arcy [Carden] early on, this is the deal with who Janet is or the function Janet serves, but I don’t know how you should play this. I know that you shouldn’t speak in any kind of robotic voice, but I don’t really know what you should do. It’s why she was the perfect person to play the part, because she had so much improv training that I was like, “I think you’ve got to go with your gut on a lot of this stuff,” and we started defining Janet based on what she wasn’t, which is why she says all the time, “Not a girl,” “Not a robot,” not a whatever. Do you know that famous story about how Michelangelo carved the David? He chipped away everything that <em>wasn’t </em>the David. That’s basically what we did with Janet. We just kept saying what she wasn’t and then left it in D’Arcy’s hands, and she figured out what she was.</p>
<p id="0aruo0">Leslie had an evolution, too. She says in the pilot that she wants to be the president. That was the North Star for us, that she was ambitious and that she was high achieving and had huge dreams and huge goals. But at the beginning, we had her lean into a politician cadence. In the pilot, she walks into a house and Andy’s sitting on the couch and his feet are in casts, and she says, like, “How are you doing, son?” And she goes over to shake his hand. That was us thinking of her as a budding politician instead of as just a true optimist and believer in the power of community and in the power of government to help people. That we didn’t really nail down until like the last episode of the first season. A lot of that credit goes to Amy, because she’s so naturally funny when she just talks and is a human being. She was ahead of us. She kept talking like a real person and we kept trying to write her as a phony politician. Eventually, we were like, “Oh wait, she’s right and we’re wrong.”</p>
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<p id="tIrD63"><strong>Do certain people in the writers’ room have a better feel for certain characters, and if so, will you assign episodes to those specialists if they revolve around those characters?</strong></p>
<p id="Zx1nKq">Definitely, yes. No question. Writers find aptitudes for characters. Alan Yang and Harris Wittels were both Tom Haverford experts. Aisha Muharrar was a Leslie Knope expert. Mindy Kaling was a little bit of a Michael Scott expert. The writers who are experts in characters, it’s not necessarily beneficial to assign them an episode where the character takes center stage. Being an expert in a character means that you can write a joke for them or you just have a fluency in their voice that other people don’t. So they’re going to be around for every rewrite anyway.</p>
<p id="hOI3sE">Greg had a theory that if you had an episode that was particularly mushy and romantic, don’t give it to a writer who tends to be more excited about mushy and romantic episodes. Give it to the hard-joke writer who has zero tolerance for mushy romance, because it’s just a counterbalance of, make sure you don’t tilt too far in any one direction. A really good episode of a comedy like <em>The Office</em> has a little romance, it has a lot of hard jokes. It’s got a good plot, it’s got some weird little character moments. So if you have an episode where the main story is pointing in one direction, give it to a writer who has a different specialty so that you don’t go off the deep end. I always felt like the real power of the writer who was fluent in a certain character wasn’t in writing the actual draft, it was in the rewrite process. Because then you’d get to a point in whatever draft it was and say, “OK, we need a better joke for Ann here.” And then someone who was really good at writing for Ann would go like, boom, and there it is. Then you get the benefit of everybody’s input.</p>
<p id="TqMUj5"><strong>Are there certain touchstone characters for you in other shows that you keep in mind as examples of what you’re aiming for? </strong></p>
<p id="VNPPvm">Yeah, sometimes. The characters that I find most interesting are the ones where the actors seem to get it from minute one. Ted Danson and the writing staff of <em>Cheers</em> knew who Sam Malone was in the first frame of the pilot. It was a fully formed character. He knew exactly how to do it. He claims he doesn’t—Ted is a very humble person, and he claims that he was very dissatisfied with his performance or very unsure of himself. I think he’s full of shit, because I’ve watched that show a thousand times. He knows what he’s doing and he knows who his character is from literally the first frame.</p>
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<p id="8814d3">There’s definitely episodes of shows that I rewatch all the time. There’s a <em>Friends </em>episode, the one where they played the trivia game. The stakes are who moves into the big apartment. They play girls versus boys trivia. It’s just so wonderful because the show is deep enough in its run where you knew all those characters so perfectly well. Then they found a device to basically just do in-character jokes about each character over and over and over and over and over again, and they’re all funny. There’s really crazy experimental stuff that I go back and watch sometimes. I’ll watch the <em>Breaking Bad</em> episode, “The Fly.” The <em>Lost</em> episode “The Constant,” I watch once a year just because it’s such a masterful piece of character storytelling.</p>
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<p id="thWIDW">If you ask any writer, they could name 10 to 20 individual episodes of TV that are just real touchstones for them that moved them or affected the way that they thought about their job. I think I watch them not just because I love them or because they help me understand something about storytelling, but it’s just reassuring to watch people execute something perfectly. It’s like watching Mary Lou Retton vault in the ’84 Olympics or Simone Biles do a floor routine. There’s something incredibly comforting to me about just watching a perfectly executed idea. It’s like, it is possible. It’s possible to be this good, and you should try to be this good all the time.</p>
<p id="Ylztsc"><strong>The history of TV is full of white-guy writers writing, not coincidentally, white-guy characters. One of the main characters on </strong><em><strong>Rutherford</strong></em><strong> is Native American, and roughly </strong><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/lights-camera-oscars-meet-the-creators-decolonizing-hollywood-1.5450603/rutherford-falls-brings-indigenous-writers-together-for-new-nbc-sitcom-1.5452884"><strong>half the writers’ room</strong></a><strong> is Native American. In what ways does having writers who share a character’s background help you make a memorable, true-to-life character, and in what ways are there universal traits that go into a great character that are a little less dependent on that lived experience?</strong></p>
<p id="fmZMpZ">I think there are two levels of the benefit. There’s a very straightforward level where you can pitch a story or a joke or a line or an action or anything for a character who isn’t your exact makeup genetically, racially, socioeconomically, religiously, whatever, and if you have a person who does share that makeup with the character, that person can say, “That doesn’t ring true to me. That’s not what this person would do in this situation.” That is a thing that never used to happen, because it was 12 white dudes. It’s happened to me multiple times on <em>Rutherford</em> already. We’re rewriting Episode 4 of 10 now, but in the discussions in the room, I have pitched things for some of the Native characters and some of the Native writers have been like, “Yeah, that’s not what would happen.” It’s like, “Great, I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad to know that, because I have no interest in making something that isn’t authentic or true to life.”</p>
<p id="8kNSli">That’s Level A. Level B is, they can also pitch things and ideas and actions and lines of dialogue and everything else that not only are true to life, but that you have no access to, and that you would never, in a million years, know to pitch. And those things are interesting and fresh and new and different and fun and exciting. Look, most of <em>The Wire</em> was written by white dudes. It’s not like it’s impossible to put yourself in the mind of a person who isn’t exactly like you. It happens all the time. It should also be noted that in <em>The Wire</em>, a lot of those guys were either novelists or investigative journalists or former journalists or former police officers who knew the world they were talking about inside and out. They at least had spent a lot of time with people in the world they were writing about, which is better than nothing. I wrote lines for Darryl on <em>The Office</em>. Craig [Robinson] is African American, and I’m not, and that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to do that or that I can’t do that.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="ZMQyPn">But in the <em>Brooklyn</em> writers’ room, in the early going, Prentice Penny had an understanding of Andre Braugher’s mind-set that I just straight up don’t. He was very smart and nuanced in the way that he talked about a black man in a position of authority, and Terry [Crews] too, by the way. The insights that he had and that other African American writers had about the African American characters were just things I can’t have. It’s such a reductive and simple and obvious thing to say, but that’s what makes it so infuriating that it was ignored in Hollywood for 80 years. Of course it’s going to be better to have people with multiple viewpoints, and specifically the same viewpoints and touchstones as the characters they’re writing for. How would it not be better to have that?</p>
https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/2/21203985/mike-schur-dwight-schrute-michael-scott-ron-swanson-leslie-knopeBen Lindbergh2020-04-02T06:30:00-04:002020-04-02T06:30:00-04:00The Best TV Character of the Century Bracket: Down Go the Lannisters
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<p>Two NBC alums, Dwight Schrute and Ron Swanson, took down the ‘Game of Thrones’ siblings—but Arya Stark still stands among an Elite Eight of towering icons</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="xjpm8B">There wasn’t a wedding, but given what happened to a few notable <em>Game of Thrones</em> characters, there might as well have been. The North remembers, and Arya Stark—the only surviving citizen of Westeros remaining in our TV character bracket—is likely looking on with mischievous glee normally reserved for slicing her enemies’ throats and baking them into pies. </p>
<p id="kDElZF">After hard-fought opening rounds, both Tyrion and Cersei Lannister fell to members of <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/2/21203985/mike-schur-dwight-schrute-michael-scott-ron-swanson-leslie-knope">Mike Schur’s television empire</a> on Wednesday: the former queen to <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/1/21201192/nick-offerman-interview-ron-swanson-tv-character-bracket"><em>Parks and Recreation</em>’s Ron Swanson</a>—a man who hates government almost as much as Cersei hated the people she ruled—and her brother to a fellow black sheep, <em>The Office</em>’s Dwight Schrute. </p>
<p id="EeHstn"><em>Thrones</em> was the definitive story of the 2010s. HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s still-uncompleted series delighted us with dozens of memorable characters, the three featured in this bracket among the best of them. And yet it shouldn’t surprise anyone to see a Westerosi citizen meet an untimely end. We may say “not today” to the god of death, but everyone meets their end eventually. </p>
<aside id="A69GOy"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Schur Farms: The Organic Creation of Some of the Century’s Most Iconic Characters","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/2/21203985/mike-schur-dwight-schrute-michael-scott-ron-swanson-leslie-knope"}]}'></div></aside><p id="u7WZkv">Not even a confounding vote tally could save Cersei. After <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/1/21202307/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-results-sweet-sixteen">Tuesday’s botpocalypse</a> saw <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/3/31/21200934/will-arnett-interview-bojack-horseman-gob-bluth-arrested-development"><em>Arrested Development</em>’s Gob Bluth</a> tally nearly 200,000 more on-site votes than Swanson, the Parks department head was entwined in controversy once more. From the time polling opened, Swanson and Cersei stayed knotted up, never separated by more than five votes on either side. That’s nothing too out of the ordinary; we’ve had narrow margins before. What was confusing, however, was the rate at which their totals continued to rise. When voting closed, most of the other contests had between 30,000 and 40,000 ballots cast. Cersei v. Ron clocked in well over 200,000. And despite all of those votes, the poll was decided by a mere <em>two </em>votes. That’s what we in the biz call an anomaly. </p>
<p id="9ePurh">But in the end, it didn’t matter much. The razor-thin margin of what was probably a bot standoff meant the real battle would take place on social media, where Swanson thrived. But after two days of <em>peculiar</em> vote totals, I’m left wondering about the motives behind the stuffed ballot boxes. While he fell to Michael Scott, <em>Better Call Saul</em>’s eponymous lawyer saw relatively high vote totals this week. What if the Bluth bots and the Swanson-Lannister fiends were a decoy to distract us while a lighter bot movement was underway for Saul Goodman? Or maybe they’re secretly Swanson stans, knowing that we’d never allow such an obviously fake vote count to send Gob through on Tuesday, and that an even matchup on Wednesday would allow all the steak-eating, whiskey-guzzling Pawnee lovers out there to run away with the prize on social. Or maybe I’m just turning into Charlie Kelly, who was eliminated two rounds ago.</p>
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<p id="rmf8B6">Either way, it turns out the rise of the machines is much more boring than Hollywood told me it would be. Instead of Skynet and the robot wars, we get fiercely contested internet votes. On to the regional finals.</p>
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<p id="QpVA6c"><strong>You can vote on this page below, on </strong><a href="https://twitter.com/ringer"><strong>Twitter</strong></a><strong>, and on </strong><a href="https://www.instagram.com/ringer/"><strong>Instagram</strong></a><strong> till 6 p.m. ET.</strong></p>
<h3 id="BcSGr1">The Elite Eight</h3>
<p id="Z4YZPW">After edging out Leslie Knope in the Sweet 16 (I can only hope we remember her the way <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzXFU9nr7BA">she remembered Li’l Sebastian</a>), Tony Soprano faces the second-seeded Walter White. Walt’s no stranger to the world of organized crime, and <em>Breaking Bad</em> gives him a recency advantage—it finished in 2013, <em>The Sopranos</em> cut to black in 2007. Neither of these men are what one might describe as a “good” person. But they’re two of the antiheroes who built the 2000s era of Peak TV. </p>
<p id="qhxebM">Tony dispatched Knope, Liz Lemon, and Rick Sanchez to get here, while White took down Coach Taylor (turns out you <em>can</em> lose despite having clear eyes and a full heart), Elizabeth Jennings, and Olivia Pope. One of these two bosses will earn a spot in the Final Four. Determining which is up to you:</p>
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<p id="oy5pn1"><br>If Walt manages to come out of that matchup, he just might get one final showdown with his protégé. It seems <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2019/9/30/20885880/breaking-bad-episodes-ranking"><em>Breaking Bad</em>’s series finale</a> wasn’t enough to quench our Walt v. Jesse thirst, because now, only one round (and a very dangerous enemy) stands between Pinkman and his worst nightmare.</p>
<p id="Wl1oId">Jesse ended Cartman’s reign of terror on Wednesday (JUSTICE FOR FLEABAG), but he still has his work cut out for him. Arya Stark didn’t just kill Meryn Trant, the Freys, the Night King, and a whole horde of wights; she also took down Nathan Fielder, Baby Yoda, and Seth freaking Cohen. Not even Captain Oats could have prepared us for such a dominant run. Walt v. Jesse would be an exciting duel, but are you really willing to bet against someone who’s seen all of Death’s faces?</p>
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<p id="gz5Eve"><br>In the Scene Stealers Region, Dwight Schrute vs. Ron Swanson hurts in a way; it’s not impossible to think the two might be friends. Both come from Big Ten country, love the outdoors, aren’t very trusting of those they disagree with, and have very strong opinions about [<em>gestures wildly at surroundings</em>] everything. And yet, here they are, dueling for sport. </p>
<p id="qLYH28">The real difference here comes down to facial hair: Dwight has none, while <a href="https://townsquare.media/site/442/files/2012/08/Ron-Swanson.jpg?w=980&q=75">Ron typically sports</a> a regal patch of fur above his upper lip. As many (myself included) partake in growing quarantine beards, it’s possible a kinship could form with Swanson that could swing the outcome. Then again, <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2018/8/3/17639830/conference-room-five-minutes-excerpt-shea-serrano-dwight-schrute-the-office">Dwight has seen</a> his fair share of fights.</p>
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<p id="apoYCw"><br>This being the internet, I’m sure everyone will respond kindly to my admission that I’ve never seen <em>The Wire</em> or <em>Curb Your Enthusiasm</em>. What I can tell you, from my limited understanding of the shows from assorted YouTube clips, is that the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17hnNOFaRH4">voters did not, in fact, respect wood</a>. Despite a <em>tie</em> on Twitter, Omar emerged victorious thanks to a slim lead on the other voting platforms.</p>
<p id="RRoUtq">Omar might be a self-titled king, but he’s never seen an enemy quite like the pride of Scranton, Pennsylvania. Michael Scott, the regional manager himself, beat back the Saulbots, Charlie Kelly, and Wags. He’s arguably the favorite to win this entire tournament. But upsets happen all the time, and no one is immune. Michael v. Dwight would be a legendary semifinal showdown. Will we get a chance to see it?</p>
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<p id="o1JBAW"><em>For each round, you can vote here on the website (except for you, bots!), on </em><a href="https://twitter.com/ringer"><em>Twitter</em></a><em>, and on </em><a href="https://www.instagram.com/ringer/"><em>Instagram</em></a><em> every day till 6 p.m. ET.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/2/21203660/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-results-elite-eightShaker Samman2020-04-01T08:19:53-04:002020-04-01T08:19:53-04:00Why Ron Swanson Is One of the Best TV Characters of the Century—As Explained by Nick Offerman
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/SnpnzBOwdTIFCqyMPSRr8m6jNDg=/167x0:2834x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/66586055/Ron_Swanson_Illo.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="https://www.jbergerart.com" target="_blank">Jeremy Berger</a></figcaption>
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<p>The actor behind television’s most lovable libertarian talks puzzles, bacon-wrapped shrimp, and what it’s like to be married to “the Mike Trout of television comedy”</p> <p id="A8Trga"><em>March is a month for brackets, so this week on </em>The Ringer<em>, we’re hosting </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/3/30/21197143/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-intro-round-1"><em>The Best TV Characters of the Century</em></a><em>—an expansive, obsessive, and unexpectedly fraught competition to determine the best fictional TV personality of the past 20 years. To help the public make informed voting decisions, </em>The Ringer<em> has contacted some of the people who know these characters best: the actors who played them. Check back throughout the week for more interviews, and be sure to vote for The Best TV Characters of the Century </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/1/21202307/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-results-sweet-sixteen"><em>here</em></a><em>.</em></p>
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<p id="gEaprg">Ron Swanson was a modern Renaissance man. Sure, he spent much of his workday on <em>Parks and Recreation</em> trying to minimize the oppressive footprint of local government by applying his libertarian leanings from inside the belly of the American political beast, but he also had a wide range of personal passions. Among other things, he was a <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/pin/145311525450710738/">master craftsman</a> and <a href="https://images.app.goo.gl/d7JqMuiSh7k6zsuw8">outdoorsman</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ssFr62l7U4">an accomplished musician</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvvaZCuvHnc">an unapologetic gourmand</a>, and an innovator who dreamed up some delightful (if specific) <a href="https://images.app.goo.gl/6VMHXVRmTdEnddc2A">self-help guidelines in handy pyramid form</a>. </p>
<p id="ipnzmc">Like the character he played on the show’s seven-season run, Nick Offerman also has a host of disparate interests, some of which overlap with Ron’s—though, as he frequently explains to fans, he is <em>not actually Ron</em>—and many of which we discussed during the course of a lengthy recent conversation. While self-quarantining from our respective homes, we chatted about puzzles, books, woodworking, overeating on set, and, most notably, his marriage to “the Mike Trout of television comedy.” We also talked a little about Ron, who defeated Gob Bluth <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/1/21202307/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-results-sweet-sixteen">despite some internet shenanigans</a> to move on to the Sweet 16. </p>
<p id="dEqm2v"><strong>Before we get into Ron, it’s obviously a crazy time right now. What are you doing to stay busy?</strong></p>
<p id="RdmZhK">My wife [Megan Mullally] and I, we’re lucky enough to work as entertainers, either touring performers or obviously actors, and our jobs take us all over the world, which is a lot of fun if you happen to love traveling, which we do. Because of that, when we manage to secure some vacation time, the most exotic destination in our lives is actually staying home and trying to achieve some sort of banal regularity. We actually just did a month of this by choice in January. This is our jam. We’re well equipped. We do a lot of jigsaw puzzles.</p>
<p id="2djXvy"><strong>I have also devolved quickly into puzzle madness. What are you working on?</strong></p>
<p id="KRx4Ft">There’s this great company out of Boulder called <a href="https://www.libertypuzzles.com">Liberty Puzzles</a>. They make these really exquisite laser-cut plywood puzzles that are just a joy to handle and work with. Over the years, we’ve built up a collection of them. We’ll actually take them apart and put them back together again. They’re that enjoyable. </p>
<aside id="BJhKKA"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The Best TV Character of the Century Bracket: Welcome to Round 2","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/3/31/21200477/best-tv-character-century-bracket-round-one-cartman-baby-yoda"},{"title":"Why Gob Bluth and BoJack Are Two of the Best Characters This Century—As Explained by Will Arnett","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/3/31/21200934/will-arnett-interview-bojack-horseman-gob-bluth-arrested-development"},{"title":"All Anti, No Hero: Pete Campbell and the Failsons of the 21st Century ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/3/31/21200409/21st-centurytv-character-tropes-pete-campbell-michael-scott"}]}'></div></aside><p id="sAZklv"><strong>Are you reading anything?</strong></p>
<p id="99AhNA">At the moment I’m reading a book that was given to me by a farmer that I met in Scotland that’s coming out this year called <em>Native</em>. I really enjoy agrarian writing. I come from a farming family in Illinois. This year I have a couple of audiobooks that I recorded of my favorite writer, <a href="http://www.wendellberrybooks.com">Wendell Berry</a>, who is a Kentucky agrarian and in my opinion our greatest living writer. </p>
<p id="hCC6RU">Through my love of Wendell, I discovered a shepherd in England named <a href="https://twitter.com/herdyshepherd1">James Rebanks</a>, who has a great book called <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22856150-the-shepherd-s-life"><em>The Shepherd’s Life</em></a>. I became friends with James and was visiting him and we went to visit this other farmer in Galloway, Scotland. His name is Patrick Laurie and he sent me his galleys. His book is coming out momentarily. It’s just wonderful, especially now for people being sequestered in any kind of remotely claustrophobic space or urban area. These are just books about men and women adhering to the venerable and ancient tradition of maintaining a fellowship with nature and husbanding a piece of land and/or herds of animals and crops to try to benevolently feed their fellow humans while respecting what Mother Nature has to say about it.</p>
<p id="DqR4VN"><strong>This is a really awkward transition—all of a sudden we’re going from agrarian writing to talking about Ron Swanson …</strong></p>
<p id="MlwPdd">We’ll survive it. But before we do, I want to say I also just read—I have this new show airing on FX called <em>Devs. </em>Alex Garland is an astonishing brain. I’ve never worked with someone of his stature and acumen. One of the things that’s really fun, I find, if you work with someone who happens to be a novelist as well, I went back and read <em>The Beach</em> for the first time, and now I’m just finishing his second novel, <em>The Tesseract</em>. Those are really great, as well. He’s a terrific fictional talent, a terrific talent in fiction. Reading it makes me very grateful that he had hankering to become a filmmaker because otherwise I never would have gotten to meet and befriend him.</p>
<p id="TSuM9h"><strong>The people that you’ve come across in the course of your life, just from what you’ve told me so far in this conversation, are fascinating. </strong></p>
<p id="iAwRia">My subjects of inquiry and curiosity have treated me really well. I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to be an actor. I wanted to be a humorist. What I learned is that I’m not Vonnegut or, more contemporarily, another friend that came from my curiosity is George Saunders. I could never write like George. But I can read George to somebody and they will give me a sandwich.</p>
<p id="GROu44"><strong>That’s a really good trade-off. </strong></p>
<p id="8OloBc">It’s good to find your calling.</p>
<p id="wSJh6z"><strong>The goal with all of the interviews we’re doing with actors this week was to just have a fun conversation about their most famous characters. I feel like that’s putting a lot of pressure on us.</strong></p>
<p id="vXA4nX">Yeah. I tend to ignore any such guidelines. </p>
<p id="oyqmrW"><strong>Good. Same page. So for Ron, what was your favorite episode for the character?</strong></p>
<p id="ZOtfrr">Oh, boy. It’s kind of like going to the world’s greatest restaurant and eating 21 courses and having someone ask which was your favorite rib. But I do have an answer. I think the episode that I got to do with my wife [who played] one of my crazy ex-wives known as Tammy II. The first episode with her was written by Mike Scully and directed by Troy Miller called <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1531526/">“Ron and Tammy.”</a> Getting to do that with my wife—who is also my hero and my teacher, she’s like a walking Mel Brooks movie—was just an absolute dream come true.</p>
<p id="NCpe8n"><strong>Because you mentioned the 21 courses and which was your favorite rib, I’m always fascinated by actors who work with food. Obviously Ron had a voracious appetite. How much eating did you do in those scenes?</strong></p>
<p id="5Xwass">Traditionally, using the magic of Hollywood, an actor, as a matter of practicality, has to pretend to eat. If you’re shooting a scene where you’re eating a hamburger or a plate of spaghetti, invariably, depending on the genre you’re working in, whether it’s television comedy or a Francis Ford Coppola film, chances are you’ll do a great many takes of the scene in which you’re eating. Naturally, as you can imagine, the first few takes are delicious and edifying. And then, when you get to the fourth and fifth, not to mention the 24th or 25th take, suddenly a fork full of spaghetti is the last thing you ever want to see again. </p>
<p id="qCv3WM">But we had sort of a standard in place with Ron that we wanted Ron to remain beefy. Mike Schur and Greg Daniels, the creators of the show, specifically asked me to stay husky. Apparently, when <em>The Office</em> got picked up in America, a bunch of the cast started doing aerobics, getting their hair fixed or something, and they became 40 percent less Scranton-looking. And so our creators said “Please don’t do that. We’ve set this in small-town Indiana for a reason. Please help us maintain that integrity.” By and large, I took a great deal of pleasure in wolfing down bacon-wrapped shrimp, cuts of steak, and cheeseburgers.</p>
<p id="Gf6hvd"><strong>The amount of bacon and eggs in front of Ron, or when he’s watching </strong><em><strong>The Bridge Over the River Kwai </strong></em><strong>eating a steak and drinking Scotch. Good for you that you got to eat some of that. </strong></p>
<p id="feVqf5">There’s a great chef, Fred Eric, who has a great restaurant in Los Angeles called <a href="https://fred62.com/about/">Fred 62</a>. He also is this exquisite food stylist. And so he would be on hand. Whenever we’d have these scenes, we’d have this master chef there with a hunk of beef and a torch and like a bowl of butter with a paint brush. Usually, prop food is sitting there all day. It’s gross and probably even dangerous to eat. But we had this special food wrangler. He might as well have been giving me a deep tissue massage. It was incredibly pleasurable. I’ve had worse gigs. </p>
<p id="gAdP2D"><strong>What’s something you learned about Ron from playing him? You’re an extremely skilled craftsman and you have your </strong><a href="https://offermanwoodshop.com"><strong>wood shop</strong></a><strong>, and I was wondering if that was something that was added to Ron’s character as an extension of you. </strong></p>
<p id="0D9ZWo">It was. As we were getting ready to start shooting the show, the writers were talking to the actors and discerning parts of our personality they might swipe for comedic gold. They kept calling me on the phone, and I would say, “Hang on, I have to shut off the table saw in my shop.” Eventually they said, “What is this shop?” And I said “I’m a woodworker. I have this shop.” They came right over to my shop and said “This is hilarious. Can we make your character a woodworker, because we think this part of your life that you have such reverence for, we think will make people laugh?” I said OK. I’m happy to be a clown and juggle whatever balls. </p>
<div class="c-float-right"><aside id="4Y40o4"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="gecnI8">The question, did I learn anything from Ron? I would have to extrapolate quickly to “Did I learn anything from the writers who wrote Ron?” I learned from this brilliant room of writers, of women and men, [who] took parts of me and shook them up in a martini shaker and poured out a cocktail that sort of showed me ways in which I could use the parts of Ron that were real, like my woodworking, my passion for ladies that look like Megan Mullally, my love of food, my simplicity, my taciturn personality. They showed me ways in which I could use these ingredients to perhaps craft a more fruitful life. </p>
<p id="maHWVr"><strong>Who are your personal favorite TV characters?</strong></p>
<p id="OQa5FO">One for some reason springs to mind: Karen Walker, who was a great inspiration to me. She was on a show called <em>Will and Grace</em>. It’s funny, nobody ever accuses me of over-egging that particular pudding. It’s inarguable. I am married to the Mike Trout of television comedy. I don’t see a lot of TV. Phoebe Waller-Bridge in <em>Fleabag</em>. Jodie Comer in <em>Killing Eve</em>, and Sandra Oh as well. Those are contemporary examples of people at the top of their game. Those are the performances that make me desperately hope that they call me and preferably chase me through a centuries-old bathhouse in Budapest.</p>
<p id="nmc7Of"><strong>That’s a very specific example.</strong></p>
<p id="RPVnp5">It is. I’ve been to the bathhouses. It’s a great place for a chase scene. Very slippery. </p>
<p id="l0WD5F"><strong>You mentioned all those fantastic female actors. In the first round, you were pitted against one I personally love, Rhea Seehorn’s Kim Wexler. </strong></p>
<p id="1KatOQ">That show is the greatest thing happening right now. She is astonishing. She is a Mount Rushmore–level actor. Megan and I both have been commenting on how she stands out in a cast of absolute home run hitters. As is always my feeling when I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in something like what we’re talking about here with <em>The Ringer</em>, I’m just grateful that I got a job and if it were up to me and there was a trophy to hand out, I would not hesitate to hand it to Rhea Seehorn. It’s silly to consider any other option. </p>
<p id="w29vrw"><strong>Do you miss anything about Ron?</strong></p>
<p id="tRRpXj">Well, sure. Again, when great comedy writing succeeds, often the audience thinks there’s no way somebody thought that up. I get in arguments with fans who think I am Ron Swanson, that it was all my idea, that I was this libertarian character and somehow ended up getting a show. No, the writers are just that good.</p>
<p id="XVUkup">In the moments of, figuratively speaking, figure skating on a comedy show like that, when you’re nailing your pirouette, or whatever your moves are, it’s because of that writing and the crew behind them. That’s what I miss. I could never write my everyday behavior and my relationships as cleverly as a room full of the world’s greatest comedy writers. That’s what I miss about Ron specifically. And more generally, my favorite baseball team is the Chicago Cubs. And if you talk to any of them right now, they’d probably say, “Well, I kinda miss the gang from 2016. That was a pretty good year.” If you happen to win the World Series in whatever way that may apply to you, you’d be a fool not to recognize what an incredibly lucky thing that is. There’s an element of winning the lottery when you find yourself working on a show like <em>Parks & Rec</em>.</p>
<p id="WXSKId"><strong>Is there anything you’d change about him?</strong></p>
<p id="vAqoRw">Again, he’s not mine. He’s not my creation. Something I learned from my collaborators in the Chicago theater, I had a company called <a href="https://www.dispatch.com/entertainmentlife/20200306/nick-offerman-nearly-cracked-his-head-open-on-chicago-stage---more-than-once">Defiant Theater</a>, one of the things I learned is that I’m a very good soldier. I’m not cut out to be the general. I like to find a better brain than my own and say, “Ma’am or sir, I am very good with a shovel. If you want to tell me where to dig and how deep, I will aim to impress you with my spading acumen.” So, no, I guess, is the short answer. </p>
<p id="ZKk1BW"><strong>So what do you think? Did we make it fun?</strong></p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="2wAm36">Sure. When I read my books, in my head I have this earnest idea that I’ll save the planet with every notion. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m not a planet-saving scholar or journalist or researcher. I’m a song and dance man. A bullshiting song and dance man. I think when editors say things like “We want this to be fun,” I think they’re talking to the kind of guests that would go on <em>Letterman</em> and just tank because they don’t attack their lives with a sense of humor. I have to. When you look in the mirror and see the hand of cards I’ve been dealt, you better have a sense of humor.</p>
<p id="b5IaM6"><em>This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/1/21201192/nick-offerman-interview-ron-swanson-tv-character-bracketJohn Gonzalez2020-04-01T06:30:00-04:002020-04-01T06:30:00-04:00The Best TV Character of the Century Bracket: Gob Hijacks the Tournament
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<p>Very early on into the second round, it was clear something went wrong—the ‘Arrested Development’ failson had become the subject of some bot-aided magic. Now we move on to the Sweet 16.</p> <p id="QjeDIK">Call it magic. Or just the internet.</p>
<p id="jYFj3K">If you visited our Best TV Character bracket on Tuesday, you may have seen a shocking result, which was <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/3/31/21200934/will-arnett-interview-bojack-horseman-gob-bluth-arrested-development">Gob Bluth, a no. 6 seed</a>, absolutely destroying Ron Swanson, a no. 3 seed:</p>
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<p id="zdoRf1">Upsets certainly aren’t new in this bracket (hello, Cartman!), but Bluth received an astonishing 210,176 votes—and no other matchup cracked 100,000 in <em>total</em>. It would be impressive if it weren’t so obviously tampered with. We took a deeper look at the numbers, and, well, just see for yourself:</p>
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<p id="HzcNbJ">So yeah, we had some bots voting in Tuesday’s polls. This couldn’t have been the result of a legion of Gob fans—<a href="https://giphy.com/gifs/arrested-development-screencaps-gpofuckingy-CP36C8PRG250Y">he doesn’t really have any</a>. The only explanation is fraud. You’d think that if internet troublemakers would hack our polls, it would have been to benefit Rick Sanchez, who lost to Tony Soprano in his opening-round matchup on Monday. But Gob couldn’t have been a more hilarious pick. The magic-wielding <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/3/31/21200409/21st-century-tv-character-tropes-pete-campbell-michael-scott">failson</a> of the Bluth family (well, one of them) <em>would</em> try to pull a stunt like this—and would be equally ham-fisted about it. So in the face of such obvious cheating, what are we at <em>The Ringer</em> to do?</p>
<p id="vN75dF">Well, whoever engineered the pro-Gob vote made a huge, tiny mistake. While Gob dominated on the website, the votes were much more Swanson-friendly on our social feeds:</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">(6) Gob Bluth, ‘Arrested Development’ vs. (3) Ron Swanson, ‘Parks & Recreation’ <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/BestTVCharacter?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#BestTVCharacter</a></p>— The Ringer (@ringer) <a href="https://twitter.com/ringer/status/1245020559064231936?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 31, 2020</a>
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<p id="DiYg7y">On the website, assuming Swanson’s 27,194 votes were all legitimate, he would have easily beaten Gob if that matchup had received an average number of votes (roughly 45,500). That’d be a win of 59 percent to 41 percent—an 18-point gap that is actually pretty generous to Gob, given that Swanson received 79 percent of the vote on Instagram and 75 percent on Twitter. There really is no controversy here; Swanson is the clear winner. So like most of Gob’s tricks—sorry, “illusions”—this one didn’t work. We’re hurling these fake website votes into the sea.</p>
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<p id="98ZFgr">Swanson is moving on to our Sweet 16 to join 15 other contenders. Let’s have a look at the eight matchups taking place today.</p>
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<p id="c25SiX"><strong>You can vote on this page below, on </strong><a href="https://twitter.com/ringer"><strong>Twitter</strong></a><strong>, and on </strong><a href="https://www.instagram.com/ringer/"><strong>Instagram</strong></a><strong> till 6 p.m. ET. </strong></p>
<h3 id="eaXPBo">Millennials Region</h3>
<p id="BYOibk">Arya Stark, a real character, beat out Baby Yoda, a marketing ploy pretending to be a character. Congratulations, internet—you got this one right. </p>
<p id="Buot0L">While Season 8 of <em>Game of Thrones</em> was a widely panned disappointment, Arya was <a href="https://www.theringer.com/game-of-thrones/2019/5/20/18632635/game-of-thrones-season-8-finale-arya">better served by the ending</a> than most of the show’s other characters. (Again, that isn’t saying much.) Sure, her leaving to find what’s west of Westeros feels a little bizarre (one line to Lady Crane doesn’t count as foreshadowing) and she never used her Faceless Men powers or grappled with the ethics of her homicidal spree, but hey, she got to kill the Night King! And she knows a killer when she sees one—or, after she sees that killer commit a mass killing. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="ay5Ni2"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The Least Helpful TV Characters of the Century","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/1/21201952/tv-characters-least-helpful-randy-thats-70s-show-scrubs-last-season"},{"title":"Why Ron Swanson Is One of the Best TV Characters of the Century—As Explained by Nick Offerman","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/1/21201192/nick-offerman-interview-ron-swanson-tv-character-bracket"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="lmdz4d">But let’s not limit Arya to the final seasons of <em>Thrones</em>. This bracket is about the characters in totality, and Arya’s arc from defiant tomboy to anonymous assassin to loyal sibling was one of the more satisfying ones on <em>Thrones</em>. </p>
<p id="XMxqAk">In the next round Arya has a matchup with Nathan Fielder, who prevailed after an impossibly close matchup against <em>Killing Eve</em>’s Villanelle. Across all platforms, Fielder got just over 52 percent of the vote—this one was teetering on the edge all day:</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">help <a href="https://t.co/jkixvZ4piq">pic.twitter.com/jkixvZ4piq</a></p>— Sean Yoo (@SeanYoo) <a href="https://twitter.com/SeanYoo/status/1245053700453752832?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 31, 2020</a>
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<p id="Zv94CG">I expect the matchup with Arya, who I consider a powerhouse, will be a bit less nail-biting.</p>
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<p id="jMKuxm">And in the second matchup in this region, we’ve got Jesse Pinkman versus Cartman, two punks who probably would get along really well if they ever met. Has Cartman also screamed “Magnets, bitch!” before? I feel like he has.</p>
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<h3 id="XiNjOg">Bosses Region</h3>
<p id="2RMPVi">I can’t believe we’ve been deprived of Tony Soprano vs. Don Draper, which would have been the all-time difficult men showdown. Few characters have defined an era of television like Soprano and Draper … but Leslie Knope beat Draper and will now move on to take Soprano. Maybe that’s a good thing after all—this region would be pretty depressing if not for Knope.</p>
<p id="dR1h9r">On the bottom half, Walter White has won both of his matchups by overwhelming margins, and should be the favorite against Coach Eric Taylor in the Sweet 16. But Taylor is no lightweight—he had a late surge to beat Selina Meyer on Tuesday. A comeback victory for Taylor makes so much sense it’s almost too perfect—and ditto for Selina losing a close election. </p>
<p id="TSrHD1">Between these three guys and one woman, one thing is for certain: We didn’t name this the “Bosses” region for nothing.</p>
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<h3 id="SVGylH">Scene-Stealers Region</h3>
<p id="qrHt44">Speaking of matchups that feel like they’re coming a round early, Tyrion vs. Dwight is a wild one. With two fan-favorite characters from two of the most wildly popular shows this century, this is the matchup I’ll be watching the closest on Wednesday. Tyrion is one of the most popular characters ever … but then so is Dwight. I have no idea who will come out on top. Whoever does will be facing the winner of the <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/1/21201192/nick-offerman-interview-ron-swanson-tv-character-bracket">saved-from-fraud Ron Swanson</a> and Cersei Lannister, who came out on top against 2-seed Peggy Olson. Any combination of results here would produce a thrilling Elite Eight matchup: We could be seeing Dwight versus Ron, or even more deliciously, Tyrion versus Cersei.</p>
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<h3 id="4XfPv2">Wild-Card Region</h3>
<p id="JENLNv">Michael Scott is going all the way in this region. I just can’t see it playing out any other way.</p>
<p id="RUDmRx">In his way this round is Saul Goodman, who is no pushover, sure. Goodman is beloved for not one but two different shows, one of which is arguably the most iconic drama of the 21st century. But he’s also not the most notable character from that show, and the same can’t be said about Michael. <em>The Office</em> became <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/3/24/21191677/the-office-netflix-nbc-peacock-streaming-favorite">the internet’s favorite show</a> because of Michael Scott, and as the show dominates streaming platforms it has remained at the forefront of many peoples’ minds even seven years since it ended. <em>Better Call Saul</em> might be on the air right now, but it still isn’t coming close to the widespread appeal of <em>The Office</em>.</p>
<p id="nGJyU6">It’s Omar vs. Larry David in the other matchup on this bracket. Assuming Michael moves on to the next round (not to get too far ahead of ourselves), I’d imagine he’s still a massive favorite against either. After all, Michael said it best:</p>
<p id="Pvy1jf"><em>“Come at the king, you best not miss.”</em></p>
<p id="z1dvwK"><em>— Omar Little</em></p>
<p id="K7p6e1">— Michael Scott.</p>
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<p id="PgfLsH"><em>For each round, you can vote here on the website (except for you, bots!), on </em><a href="https://twitter.com/ringer"><em>Twitter</em></a><em>, and on </em><a href="https://www.instagram.com/ringer/"><em>Instagram</em></a><em> every day till 6 p.m. ET.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/1/21202307/best-tv-character-of-the-century-bracket-results-sweet-sixteenRiley McAtee