While it's tempting to select Colin Farrell's morosely hard-boiled Ray Velcoro from the (underrated!) Season 2 as True Detective's definitive antihero, McConaughey's Cohle wins the distinction by the slim margin of one rapidly inhaled cigarette. Originally, creator Nic Pizzolatto wanted the two real-life buddies (and Surfer, Dude co-stars) playing the opposite roles, but the switcheroo, first suggested by McConaughey, allowed each actor to toy with their on-screen personas in revealing, menacing ways. Played with macho gravitas and sly humor by Matthew McConaughey, then in the middle of the McConaissance, Cohle was the unpredictable wildcard to Woody Harrelson's more conventionally buttoned-up Marty Hart. According to that airtight stoner logic, Rust Cohle, the biker-gang-infiltrating, beer-can-sculpting, Nietzsche-quoting protagonist of HBO's star-studded noir anthology series, is actually number 100 and number 1, the alpha and the omega. If time is a flat circle, then this list must be a flat circle, too.
Got it? OK, then open a bottle of Cloudmir Vodka or start making one of Rust Cohle's beer-can men and get reading. More ground rules: We limited ourselves to only one character from each show (our discussion of Arrested Development got particularly heated), and we only considered shows that began on or after Janu(so, no The Sopranos).
The one area we didn't touch is reality TV that's a whole other can of worms. We've tried to include a little bit of everything: animation, sketch comedy, prestige dramas, network sitcoms. Looking at the characters we've chosen, you can get a good sense of how tastes and formats have changed over the past 20 years, and just how vast the landscape has become. We've realized this while sitting at home for the past few months, holding our Netflix subscriptions close to our chests and bingeing all that we can to quiet the chaos of the world outside. And yet we went ahead with this fool's errand because TV has never been more vital. It's with all of this in mind that we set about arguing out this list of the greatest television characters of the 21st century, an excruciating endeavor that will surely make some readers mad. Over the two decades that followed, the medium has gone through multiple Golden Ages, as Difficult Men dramas gave way to Complicated Women Sagas, and the rise of streaming services flooded our screens with Too Much TV. People sat through commercials to get their nightly programming fix.
The big four broadcast networks still reigned. When this century began, "streaming" was something that might refer to a river, not a way to watch TV shows and movies.