Three interesting characters

I recently read a blog post on WordPress.com, where a guy was listing the three most interesting characters in tv shows. His choices surprised me a little, and I thought about which ones I find interesting (‘most’ interesting is hard to define).

Here is a list of three favorites from tv shows running today as far as I know.

From Downton Abbey: Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, played by Dame Maggie Smith.

She’s such a cool old lady, seemingly harsh, but it appears that she does have a heart somewhere, even though it’s hard to tell at first. I just love the way she can something mean in a really funny way.

From Dr Who and Torchwood: Captain Jack Harkness, played by John Barrowman. Don’t you just love the way he walks in his uniform jacket? He’s hot, funny and there’s also a bit of angst in his background.

After mentioning Jack Harkness, I just can’t pass over the Doctor himself. “My” Doctor is Nine, but I like Ten and Eleven too and I think I would have liked Five too, but that was way before my time. Speaking of the Doctor, I also have to mention some of his companions, Donna Noble, Wilfred Mott, Donna’s grandfather, Amy Pond and her husband Rory, even though they’re all by now ‘former” companions.

Then finally, a guy you won’t have heard of, but that I really like, Simon Freund from Anno 1790 (1790 AD), the Swedish historic cop series that showed up so unexpectedly when I’d more or less given up on tv. Freund works as a teacher for a Chief of Police in Stockholm in 1790. He falls in love with his employer’s wife and goes off to war, to die, but meets a medic, Johan Gustav Dåådh (‘Deede’) who saves his life and brings him back to his employers where Dåådh too finds work as a police surgeon. Freund is so sweet. When he notices his friend loves the same woman, it doesn’t ruin their friendship. Instead he tries to find Dåådh another girlfriend, but Dåådh arrives home too late for the ‘dinner for two’ his friend has plannned and finds Freund passed out drunk on the couch with the attractive young widow he found, leaning on his arm. Freund has had bad luck in love and has turned to religion and drink for comfort. He’s a Pietist. He carries around a pocket flask that Dåådh is constantly borrowing from him to disinfect wounds or anesthesize live patients (most of his ‘patients’ are murder victims).

So these are the three most interesting characters from currently running tv shows that I could think of. Which ones do you find most interesting?