10 TV Characters With The Most Wasted Potential

Darla is the very first character we ever see or hear in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, playing the stereotypical blonde damsel who, in a then-shocking twist, is revealed to be a demon. 

Her importance to the Buffy canon doesn't end there, though. The sire of infamous vampire Angel, it could be argued Dara almost singlehandedly sets some of the biggest stories of the franchise in motion. Only, she's never treated as more than this - a plot device for the bigger (male) characters to suffer and grow. 

In Buffy, Darla lasts a few episodes before Angel kills her, and when she returns for the Buffy spinoff, her new life as a human never feels like anything more than an attempt to torture her former lover, and move the plot rather than her character. 

For someone with so much backstory and critical importance to the events around her, Darla was entertaining and tragically empathetic for a soulless killer, but every time she looked poised to become something outside of Angel's influence, the shows pulled back and used her only to move his story along. Booooo!