3. Mike Ehrmantraut (Breaking Bad)
Breaking Bad is the best television show I think I have ever seen. Bryan Cranston as Walter White is among the top on-screen characters ever and his story as he tries to make enough money to safeguard the future of his family while dying from terminal cancer is utterly riveting. Along the way he commits uncompromising acts of atrocity, cooking meth, killing people and hatching schemes to become a force in the criminal underworld. Yet somehow we root for him. For me this changed in the first half of Season 5. Walter lost track of his purpose and it became less about providing for his family than carving out his own name in criminal history. Seeing him descend into this almost-madness is beginning to turn me off him a bit. Meanwhile, serial hardman Mike Ehrmantraut begins to pass Walter on the way up. As he begins to get out of the crime world, we see another side to Mike who up until now has been massively engaging through Jonathan Banks's cool and unflinching portrayal. He becomes more human, beginning to fray around the edges slightly when Gus Fring is killed by Walter and the world he knew gets turned upside down. He is tailed by police relentlessly throughout Season 5, eventually making the heart wrenching decision to leave his granddaughter alone at a park so he can get away. One of the coolest things about Mike is that he quickly finds solutions to every problem, often in brutal fashion. But as the net closes and things become more desperate we are hooked as his human side begins to show. As Mike becomes more engaging as a character, we find ourselves distanced from Walt, whose character is (intentionally I might add) losing all of the charm that made us like him in the first place.