20 Most Hated Characters In TV History
13. How I Met Your Mother - Ted Mosby
When How I Met Your Mother first aired in 2005, the concept was fresh and innovative: told in flashback throughout, with framing devices and callbacks making it the ultimate shaggy dog story, lead character Ted Mosby (played by Josh Radnor) would tell his kids the story of how he met their mother.
Nine years later, any vestiges of goodwill that the show - and especially Ted Mosby - had with the audience were well and truly shredded. Ted, intended to be a lovelorn romantic on the lookout for Miss Right, had very quickly become the kind of self-obsessed indie-kid bore that you want to slap, and slap hard. As time went on (and on, and on, and on), Ted became first everything you disliked about twentysomething blokes, and then everything you disliked about people in general.
He’d treat his girlfriends like sh*t, then whine about how he could never find anyone. He’d mope about wanting to fall in love and get married, then go out on the pull with his weird, emotionally stunted friend Barney, treating women like pieces of meat. He would repeatedly demand love from close friend Robin, despite knowing that they weren’t right for each other, constantly begging for attention, neediness and insecurity oozing from every pore like flop sweat.
When we finally met The Mother, Tracy McConnell (played beautifully by Cristin Milioti) was everything that Ted had wanted his future wife to be, and more than justified the long wait for the audience to meet her. There was just one problem. By that time, Ted Mosby didn’t deserve her… in fact, he hadn’t deserved her for years.