Friday Five

For this weeks Friday Five I've decided to pick my favourite sitcom characters. This list unsurprisingly includes some of my favourite sitcoms though obvious not all of them as I do like a heck of a lot of them. Compiling this list I was surprised to find that no female characters made the top five or any where near it. But as a lot of sitcoms are male dominated it is perhaps harder to standout. There are a lot of quality characters that have been left out & special mentions go out to Ross Geller, Kryton, Kramer & Frasier. As usual I've turned to YouTube to provide audio visual evidence of what makes a specific character so good.

1. George Costanza - This list had to include a character from one of the all time great sitcoms, Seinfeld. And they don't come much better or more demented than Costanza. Seinfeld worked so well because each character brought something unique to the show. George Costanza was neurotic, narcissistic & cheap. Yet all these characteristics worked so well to give us so many truly memorable moments in a sitcom full of great ones. He also scores higher for having the most remarkable parents in television history. The selected clip is of George going for a massage displaying his full range of neurosis.
2. Basil Fawlty - If George Costanza was the king of the demented than Basil Fawlty was as they say in some strange parts of England his granddaddy. Combining everything that Costanza brought with some old school English eccentricity made Basil Fawlty & Fawlty Towers one of the best loved sitcoms ever. That Fawlty Towers is so well remembered despite the fact that only twelve episodes were ever made is proof of the fact that quality always triumphs over quantity. This clip is from the infamous scene with some European visitors who have the misfortune of visiting Torquay's finest establishment.
3. Barney Stinson - How I Met Your Mothers womanising Barney Stinson played superbly by Neil Patrick Harris has quickly established himself as one of TVs best characters. There's not a lot to Barney's character, he's a womaniser, selfish & extremely shallow. So you'd assume he'd be completely unlikeable. However that's not the case & he often single handedly carries the entire show. Barney is also the source of an interminable number of rules including the Bro Code, the Lemon Law, & the Platinum Rule. And he has as many catchphrases with the likes of 'Suit up!', 'Legendary' & 'True story'. The clip is of Barney going through his legendary 'Playbook' in order to get women.
4. General Melchett - Blackadder Four was undoubtedly the best of a fantastic series. And one of the reasons it was so good was the superb cast. General Melchett is the eccentric commanding officer of Blackadder's company. Actually eccentric may be too kind a term - he was more stark raving mad, which meant plenty of hilarity whenever he was on screen. The chosen clip has used some strange video technique but it's the best collection of quotes I have been able to find on YouTube.
5. Dr. Perry Cox - The last ever episode of Scrubs aired this last week & so Dr. Cox is no more. Over the 9 seasons that Scrubs has been on TV it has re-imagined what constitutes a sitcom with drama, tragedy & comedy all equal parts of the show. And central to that altered tone was the role of Dr. Cox. As an angry yet brilliant attending who most definitely cared about his patients, Dr Cox was as much the heart of the show as the title character JD. He is particularly famous for ridiculously long monologues, crazy rants & sarcastic quick wit. This specific clip is a best of compiled mainly from the early seasons of Scrubs.