The Simpsons: 10 Most Hated Characters

There are some characters that feel like they have been around forever, and in the case of a lot of them, it’s because they have. Gil is different, however. The pathetic lowlife feels like a mainstay of Springfield, but he didn’t actually appear until 'Reality Bites' in season nine.

It’s almost poetic that he was introduced in the years after The Simpsons’ golden era, as he just isn’t on the same level as the kind of characters that helped build the show up to the pop culture icon it became.

He is good for a chuckle every now and then, but it's always the same thing. Gil is simply pathetic, a sad sack with absolutely nothing going for him. This is a role already taken up by Kirk Van Houten. He has never lasted in a job and has had many different careers over the years. This is something that Homer has always done better than Gil.

In season 18, Gil was inexplicably given his own episode, in what has been called the worst Simpsons Christmas episode ever, and at 6.3 is rated lower than average on IMDb even compared to the rest of the later seasons. The writers had been running low on ideas for some time, but what else could they have expected from basing a whole story around such a one-note character?