Pop Culture Power Rankings: Worst New Show of 2013!

What better way to celebrate the year that was than to rank all of the characters from the worst new show of 2013?

First, we must determine the worst show to debut in the past twelve months. This was an unusually strong year; shows like Dads and The Millers were bad enough to have taken home the honor in most years. But with a slate stocked with so much dogshit, being an unfunny sit-com - no matter how racist or fart-filled - just wasn't going to cut it (if I were a writer for The Millers, the phrase "cut it" would have been an excellent opportunity for a fart joke).

With Dads and The Millers, you knew what you were getting into from day zero. Even with the amount of talent on board both shows, there was never a moment when anyone ever thought either program would be anything other than awful.

The worst show of 2013 needed to be a special kind of bad. It needed to have gotten your hopes up at some point that it could have been worth watching, only to squander that potential.

Enter: Under the Dome!

When it was announced that Stephen King's novel was being adapted as a Showtime miniseries, there was plenty of buzz. People remained interested when the commercials for the show, which was now known to be a CBS television series, started leaking out. By the time the first episode ended, we were left with some intriguing threads that could have led to a fun and absorbing mystery / science fiction show. And then, like the town of Chester's Mill itself, everything started to fall apart.

It got bad. Real bad. In lieu of any sort of interesting plot, we got a narrative that meandered between pointless cliffhangers and questions we did not care to have answered. It was as if a community college film student wrote a spec-script for a Lost spinoff series and plugged in characters and locations from Stephen King's novel. Then, so CBS' core audience could understand it, they dumbed it down even more.

The result: a verifiable hit, and one of the highest rated new shows on television.

So, without further ado, here are the rankings of the characters from Under the Dome, the worst show of the year!

1. Cow

Easily the best character was the cow that got sliced in half when the dome arrived about a quarter into the first episode. Not only were the effects pretty good (and as a bonus, it probably pissed off PETA), but the cow had the good sense to get out of this show as soon as possible. She obviously attended Bovine University.

2. The Dome

For some reason, the dome itself is a character on this show. I don’t mean that in the pretentious way some people would say “the city of New York is a character” when discussing a Woody Allen movie; I mean it more in the literal sense. The dome evidently has the ability to communicate with its inhabitants by way of inducing certain characters into epileptic seizures and then having them repeat meaningless phrases such as “pink stars are falling,” or “the monarch will be crowned.” It’s not the most efficient way to talk to someone, but then again, this is not a very well thought out show.

3. Every Human Character

If there is one thing I would change about Under the Dome, it would be to remove all of the human characters. If you are unable to write compelling characters, maybe the smartest thing to do is just not have any. I can't imagine that this show would be any worse if it were about half of a cow lying in an empty town under a dome.

The majority of the human cast of Under the Dome leave a lot to be desired in the acting department. To be fair, there are a handful of skilled actors, including Dean Norris, Mike Vogel, Rachelle Lefevre and Britt Robertson, but even Daniel Day Lewis couldn’t turn any of these cardboard cutouts into a three dimensional character. 

The motivations are vague and the dialogue is laughably unsubtle; the writers simply give us no reason to care about any of these townies. They just expect us to tune in every week to see Joe squint and state what is happening on screen or watch Linda stake her claim to the title of worst police officer character in television history. Or maybe they think our thirst to see the big questions answered, such as why no one has put a bullet through Junior's head yet or how Linda could have possibly passed a police exam or whether she can even dress herself in the morning without Big Jim telling her what to wear, will keep us coming back for more.

Spoiler alert: the monarch is the dome. Because the dome wanted that. Pink stars are dome. Dome dome dome dome dome.

I guess all I'm trying to say is that Dome wasn't built in a day, but it couldn't have taken much longer than that to write this show.