5) Kimmy Schmidt
Actor: Ellie Kemper
Show: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Listen, if I’m writing a Best of 2015 list in regards to anything TV, get used to seeing a certain kidnapped-into-a-bunker New Yorker. As the titular Schmidt, Kemper is a bit of a revelation: tortured yet buoyant, ditzy yet quick-witted, world-wearied yet unquenchably effervescent. The show just wouldn’t work without her; Tina Fey and Robert Carlock may be the brains behind Kimmy, but she’s the unbendable, unbreakable heart.
4)Â Peggy Blomquist
Actor: Kirsten Dunst
Show: Fargo
2015 was the year for questionable feminism if UnREAL and Fargo have anything to say about it. If UnREAL‘s Rachel uses the unspoken tenants of womanhood to justify the seedy depths of her job, Fargo‘s sunny disposition beautician, Peggy Blomquist, does the opposite: she thinks she can be better than where she sits stuck in the sleepy town of Luverne, Minnesota. She can grow, she’s right on the cusp of greatness, she just needs to spend a couple hundred bucks on a life-affirming conference to get her there.
“You’re a little touched aren’t ya?” Sheriff Hank Larsson (Ted Danson) asks when she explains that she simply has to leave town for the visionary conference despite the fact the police are investigating a murder she’s become entangled in. She is a bit touched, but Dunst pirouettes out of each corner you think her dunderhead of a character is going to be etched into. Peggy may be blind to reality, but her flaws make her real, and her grass-is-always-greener cheeriness – even in the face of a backwoods gangster war with blood spilling all around her – makes her a riot to watch, flaws and all.
