10 TV Shows That Completely Wasted Great Characters

The Simpsons is one television’s crowning achievements, a wildly original, inventive, silly, strange, satirical, slapstick, warm-hearted, relentless comedy which proves the endless potential which the medium holds when used right. That said, the show’s fast and loose approach to canon also ensured it is infamous for wasting incredible characters here and there. The likes of Dustin Hoffman’s substitute teacher Mr Bergstrom and Michelle Pfeiffer’s seductive Mindy Simmons are criminally underutilized, most likely due to the fame of their actors and their inevitable unavailability.

But despite this reasonable limitation, there’s no getting around the fact that the frequent money woes faced by the Simpsons could reasonably be solved in most earlier episodes via the help of Homer’s Danny DeVito-voiced brother Herb Powell. And yes, a later season did address this with a throwaway line noting that Herb went broke again, but there’s no getting past the fact that it barely occurs to our hero Homer to catch up with his brother in any situation during the show’s thirty year run, an element which is more than a minor oversight even for a show as intentionally off-kilter as America’s favourite cartoon family.