Today, I want to know which TV character’s origin reveal improved them the most as a character in your eyes.
Pop Culture Theme Time is a feature where I put a question to you to see what you think about a particular theme. I might later revisit the theme for a future Drawing Crazy Patterns or Top Five.
Generally speaking, we make our minds up about TV characters pretty quickly, but occasionally, some later revealed backstory can change our views about these characters fairly substantially. What I’m looking for here, then, is which TV characters was improved the most in your eyes by an origin reveal.
For me, I’m going with Trevor Lefkowitz from the hit CBS sitcom, Ghosts (where he is played by Asher Grodman). Trevor, of course, is one of the titular ghosts on the series. He is the most recently deceased ghost of the bunch, having died sometime in the early 2000s. He is a finance “bro” who died with the pants and underwear of his business suit off. Naturally, we’re to assume that he died in some sort of sordid sex or drugs (or both) scenario.
HOWEVER (Spoiler Warning), he was accidentally killed by a bad batch of drugs. His pants were off because he loaned them to one of his younger co-workers who was being hazed by the older co-workers as party of a tradition at his company that required the “rookies” to run all the way back to the city from the secluded mansion in only his undershirt. He also loaned his underwear because he didn’t want the other guy’s privates touching his nice pants (Trevor is not TOTALLY non-sleazy).
Obviously, showing that he was actually a sweet guy trying to hide his sweet insides through an exterior of sleaze really makes you look at Trevor in a different way.
Okay, that’s my pick. How about you?
Everyone, feel free to suggest future Pop Culture Theme Time topics to me at my new, much shorter e-mail, brian@poprefs.com!
I have gotten more and more dissatisfied with origin stories over the years. They seem like lazy writing to me. Better to have characters show who they are by their current actions and words (like telling their version of events). When you meet someone irl, its not like you can see their past. Writers are often just too lazy to be able to explore the nuances of real interactions in current time imho.
Spike on Buffy/Angel. Seeing how he was a weak, bullied character in life and how much he cared for his friends and family even after becoming a vampire made his redemption arc make sense for me.