20 Most Hated Characters In TV History

The wife of Breaking Bad’s protagonist Walter White - the timid high school chemistry teacher turned scheming meth dealer and criminal mastermind - Skyler White was - and still is - by far one of the most loathed television characters of modern times.

Initially, Walter operates without his wife’s knowledge, under the impression that the prognosis of his cancer is such that he’ll never need to plan for the day when his family find out how he’s been putting together this post-mortem nest egg. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, Skyler doesn’t find out long after Walter’s death, with enough time and distance to consider him the loving but desperate father and husband that he sees himself to be.

No, he goes into remission: and all the terrible cover stories and bald-faced lies come back to bite him right in the *ss when Skyler finds out what he’s been doing with his time.

The problem, however, became one of audience perspective. Despite Walter White’s clear moral and ethical failings and his increasingly murderous ways, he still considers himself a good man for the majority of the five season run of Breaking Bad.

Further than that, as the protagonist, we’re often invited to sympathise with him, as well as to consider him ‘awesome’ and ‘a badass’ when his criminal alter-ego Heisenberg delivers one of his keystone ‘awesome badass’ moments. The ‘I Am The One Who Knocks’ scene so beloved of Breaking Bad fans is remembered for actor Bryan Cranston’s stellar, menacing delivery… and not, funnily enough, for the person at whom the menace is directed, his long-suffering wife.

Like Carmela Soprano and many other wives of TV antiheroes before her (in acclaimed shows like Boardwalk Empire, Mad Men and Homeland), Skyler does the best she can with a husband who’s made her life a nightmare: and like all of those much-maligned women, she’s taken to task for getting in the way of her husband’s cool, dangerous, antiheroic lifestyle.

Described variously as a ball-buster, a drag, a shrew, a ball-and-chain; an “annoying b*tch” and “a shrieking, hypocritical harpy”, Skyler may be the latest in a long line of abused spouses in television, but she’s by far the most extreme example of the trope as well.

The hate has been vindictive, trollish in almost all respects, misogynist at worst and casually hostile at best. Actress Anna Gunn (who won awards for her portrayal of the character, and is at least as good as Cranston in the show) received personal abuse, death threats, and that new head of the online troll hydra, rape threats.

In all their limited, reductive hatred, none of these people have considered that it’s okay to have complicated, conflicting opinions and ideas about a complicated, conflicted character, and that exploring those ideas is what Breaking Bad - the show they love - was all about.