The Walking Dead: Every Character Ranked Worst To Best

Appearances: Season 1-9, 11 (104 episodes).

The man who started it all, Rick Grimes spent the first eight and bit seasons acting as the show's dramatic engine, the character who steered the majority of the series' (melo)drama and changed the most because of it.

Played by the magnificent Andrew Lincoln, Officer Friendly started the show as the everyman, a good-natured sheriff's deputy and father who finds his peaceable way of life won't cut it in the new world. After a succession of brutal losses, he becomes the brutal, unflinching survivalist he needs to be in order to keep his people safe.

Throughout The Walking Dead, Rick is portrayed as a hero, an unstable anti-hero, a romantic, a flawed but loving father and husband, a war leader and icon to the communities he helped build and save from annihilation. He may have been missing for a while at the end there, but Rick, all told, is still The Walking Dead personified.