3. John Ritter (Ted)
Episode: "Ted". Famous For: Problem Child; Bad Santa; It; Three's Company etc. John Ritter appeared as Ted in episode eleven of season two of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Ted was a robot, created by an inventor going by the same name in the 1950s, after his wife had left him. The human Ted created the robot with the intention of it being the man he should have been. However, the robot actually kidnapped the real Ted's departed wife and held her hostage in a bunker until she died. Following this event, the robot Ted continued to carry out this process with various other women, well in to the 1990s when he met Joyce Summers the slayer's Mother after helping her with some computer issues in her job at an art gallery. At first, when he started dating Joyce, robot Ted seemed like the perfect man but Buffy was always suspicious of him, much to Joyce's disgust. He had actually laced Joyce, Buffy and the Scoobies' food with a toxin that made them more compliant, encouraging them to like him more. Buffy was becoming more and more unnerved by Ted's behaviour and the two got in to a fight when he found her weapons and read her diary detailing her life as a slayer. Ted called her delusional and threatened to tell Joyce and, after a struggle, he fell down the stairs and was declared dead. He reactivated after having been taken to the morgue and went back to the Summers' household, knocking Buffy out cold and then doing the same to Joyce putting in to action his plan to keep her hostage like his previous victims. Buffy ultimately beat Ted with a frying pan, which revealed his robotic nature to her (making her feel better about having beaten him up), and finished him off for good. Willow Rosenberg kept some of his parts for study, which would later help her in her efforts to reprogramme the Buffybot in future seasons.