10 TV Shows Whose Leads Are The Worst Character
2. How I Met Your Mother - Ted Mosby
Ted Mosby steers clear of the number one spot by the simple virtue of not turning insufferable for the first few seasons. Ted circa HIMYM seasons 1-3 is a great romcom lead. He’s a swooning romantic, funny and charming, certainly flawed but never truly unpleasant and massively relatable in his quest to find the one.
But as the show wore on, the writers made the lazy decision to highlight all of Ted’s most cartoonishly unpleasant characteristics. He went from a minor know it all to a pretentious lunatic (who for the purposes of a bad joke in one episode could speak fluent Italian). He’s a terrible friend, making a real effort to ruin Barney and Robin’s wedding in the final season and treating the latter terribly for most of the show’s run.
He becomes a character who makes very little sense, with the “story” he’s telling to his kids becoming utterly inappropriate many times over. Actor Josh Radnor does the best he can with the material - indeed without him Ted would be far more unlikable - but the disastrous finale to HIMYM hinges largely on the mangling of its lead character.