The Top TV Villains

TV villains ... where would we be without them? They're the guys and gals who give our favorite television heroes something to strive for-namely, these villains' destruction. They remind us why we love the good guys so much, and sometimes they make us wonder how we could ever love the bad guys so much! They are tricky, conniving, evasive, and good at what they do, which is, standardly, nothing good. Here is a list of who I think make up the top ten modern television villains. As always, it might not be your top ten, but hopefully it will still make for a fun group of villains to look up to ... or down on, what have you! Enjoy!

10. Dwight Schrute (The Office)-So he's not the traditional villain, but Dwight is always up to something, usually a plot to destroy Jim Halpert. I don't think he'd ever reduce himself to murder (besides cats, that is), but he does keep a stock of deadly weapons in and around his desk, so you can never be too sure. The guy has a way of turning any situation into a scheme for self-advancement. I'm pretty sure the list of his favorite hobbies includes "vengeance" somewhere near the top.

9. Sue Sylvester (Glee)-Sue will stop at nothing to get what she wants. The one moment in which she managed to step down from her throne of seeking-the-destruction-of-others is when we see her visit her sister who has Down syndrome, but that's about as far as her soft side has ever bent. Her sole reason for hating the Glee club is that their success means less funding for her cheerleading squad, the Cheerios. Her spot on the local news is filled with anti-moral, stingingly scathing commentary regarding everything from her pro-littering stance to an appeal for a day without ugly people. By the end of the first season her antics have earned her a suspension from the school, but she threatens to return and promises Spanish teacher and Glee-coach Will Schuster a ticket to the Sue Sylvester Express, destination "horror."

8. Red John (The Mentalist)-Not only is this guy referenced in every single title of the show, but after two seasons we still haven't even seen the man known as Red John. This man has killed at least thirteen people, including the wife and daughter of pseudo-psychic Patrick Jane. His sole purpose in life seems to be to kill and taunt Jane until he's caught. His mission, according to a woman he has kill for him, is one of "love and enlightenment," which we can probably take as "homicide and psychological warfare." In one episode he has a team of "Serial Crimes Unit" agents killed when they discover a lead on him, just so Jane can have his case back because, as his accomplice tells Jane, Red John "misses" him. Talk about your Hannibal Lector personalities ...

7. The Borg (Star Trek)-At least with most bad guys you can avoid them like the plague and be okay; with these guys, "resistance is futile." Other villains follow you to the ends of the Earth to mess with you. The Borg will follow you literally to the ends of the universe to assimilate and/or destroy you. The Borg Queen is one bald, clammy-looking chick you don't want to mess with ... because if you do she'll either inject you with synthetic nanoprobes to assimilate your cells and reprogram your DNA, or just kill you in cold blood. Sure, Klingons, Romulans, and Kardasians might kill you in cold blood, too, but at least it's possible to negotiate, and possibly even become friends, with them. No such luck with the Borg, unless your definition of friendship includes "becoming part of a hive collective."

6. Arvin Sloane (Alias)-Talk about the ultimate double crosser! This guy betrays just about everyone he comes in contact with; I mean, if you talked to his bank counter agent, I'll bet you he or she would have some story about how Sloane stole the bowl of lollipops they leave out for kids or something. He's kind of the Benjamin Linus of the Alias-universe. First, he betrays Sidney Bristow like you wouldn't believe, and he does it pretty much every single season the show was on television. He betrays his own daughter by injecting her with a serum that almost kills her to find the missing artifacts of a 15^th-century mystic, Rambaldi, and uses those artifacts to either take over or destroy the world (we're just never too sure). He kills Sidney's father ... although there's also the suspicion that he might, in fact, be Sidney's father, which makes all the more heinous his innumerable attempts to kill her, too.

5. Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell (Prison Break)-When Prison Break first came to television, we all wanted Michael Scofield and his group of co-conspirators to escape from prison. Then T-Bag came along and everything came to a grinding halt as the realization dawned on us that his escape could not, under any circumstances, mean anything good, ever. Let's tick of T-Bag's list of crimes, shall we? How about battery, assault, rape, murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, and torturing animals. That's what he's in prison for, but it's also what he manages to do while he's in prison (that's including kidnapping and excluding the animal torture ... presumably). Yeah ... he's just not a good person. He is also a self-acknowledged pedophile and racist. I mean, even the other inmates at Fox River State Penitentiary hate the guy.

4. Nina Myers (24)-Nina Myers not only deceived us for an entire season-seriously, who saw that coming?!-but she committed probably the worst crime anyone can commit on television these days: she crossed Jack Bauer. But every villain on 24 has done that, so there's got to be more. She not only crossed Jack Bauer; she broke Jack Bauer's heart. That's pretty bad, but one could say Tony Almeda did that, too, when he betrayed Jack and all their friends last season. But that's not as bad as old Nina got. She not only crossed Jack Bauer and broke his heart; she also killed his wife. Jack gets even two seasons later, when he kills her in the same room she killed his wife in in season three, but only after having to deal with her treachery for three seasons in a row. As they say, Nina: three strikes, you're out.

3. The Joker (any Batman series ever made)-This guy has been introducing anarchy into the world for ages. He's a clown, that's enough to make him a top villain on my list. But what really makes him a baddy is his ability to take absolutely any occasion, situation, and resource and turn it into crime, chaos, and destruction. He's not above murder, and laughs when he does it. He's even been known to kill folks by poisoning them so that they laugh themselves to death, which is just wrong. Of all the bad guys Batman has to deal with, he's the one who keeps coming back for more. In the comic series, he's killed a bunch of different Robins; in one of the animated series, he actually mutates the Tim Drake-version into a mini-me Joker and tries to get him to kill Batman, and years later it's revealed that he implanted himself into Drake so that he could return to all his clowning badness and take vengeance on all the familiar good people in the Batman-universe. He's the bad guy who dishes up all sorts of destructive chaos, but always with a smile.

2. Sylar (Heroes)-Sylar, or Gabriel Grey, is the villain you love to hate and hate to love. He's just so ... terrible! A villain known for eating his super-powered victims' brains, Sylar's a guy who apparently never listened when his mother told him not to play with his food. But this guy has back story that makes you almost-almost-sympathize with him. He witnessed his mother get murdered by his father, he's been hunted and shot at, he's tried to change only to be betrayed, and so on. But then you remember that he's tried to kill every single hero we've come to love on Heroes, including the teenaged cheerleader Claire Bennett, and he's got a conscious the size of a shriveled pea.

1. Benjamin Linus (Lost)-Ben is one guy you just don't ever, ever want to run into. When an assassin and former-torturer like Sayid warns you about a guy, you stay away from him! Ben will cross anybody to get his way, and probably will never feel sorry for it, even if he says he does. The one exception is when he allowed his daughter (who was actually his "adoptive" child after he kidnapped her from her real mother as an infant) to be shot ... but then, he allowed his daughter to be shot. More than finding out what exactly the Island is all about, probably the number one concern for Lost fans is whether or not Ben Linus will eventually get his.