21 TV Side Characters Who Sucked Once They Became Main Characters

Sure, the leads might get all the Emmys, but sometimes, a side character is the best part of a TV show. There was only so much of J.D.’s whining you could tolerate on Scrubs while waiting for the Janitor to show up and torture him in some new and baffling way. But what made the Janitor such a good character was that the little we knew of his life outside of torturing J.D. was just as cartoonish. If we gave him enough real problems to sustain his own show, he would need his own rogue everyman to give him a hard time and entertain us, and then the cycle never ends.

That’s why, when a minor character becomes so popular that they get promoted to the main cast, it often ruins them. For example, “I always remember Richard Alpert being a great mysterious side character who would pop up from time to time” on Lost, Redditor SerDire recently told r/Television, “but he finally got his moment in Season Six and had an entire episode dedicated to him, and I always remember people being like, ‘Yeah, but we already knew that. We didn’t need an entire episode of Richard so close to the end of the show when in reality he wasn’t that central to the story.’ It just generally brought the opinion of him down in everyone’s eye.”

SerDire then asked, “What side character was ruined when they started getting more screen time?” and Reddit mourned the quirky little guys who died to become boring heroes.