The 20 Best Female Characters On TV In 2015

One interesting similarity came to my mind as I looked back on some of my favorite TV shows and characters that were sadly omitted from my Best of 2015 lists so far (TV Shows and Moments). Great shows - Veep, Homeland, Orphan Black - were barely edged out by the shows I liked ever-so-better, but there's one thing that they all had in common: abnormally compelling women characters. So I'm just going to cut to the chase here, because this list is longer than my usual ones (deservedly so): I'll get to talk about a handful of shows I missed out on the first few times, and I'll do it with a justifiable focus on all the women who crushed their respective performances. As usual, some inclusions will be a slight retread from my earlier lists, but they're just too good to omit. With the usual spoiler warning for some shows included, let's begin with number 20... 20) Bonnie Plunkett Actor: Allison Janney Show: Mom It takes a certain kind of laugh-track, multi-camera sitcom to successfully introduce serious storylines and pull them off; Mom may be the best in recent memory. The show's baked-in emotional streak (the premise is built off alcoholism, domestic abuse, and recovery) generated a show frothing for some sucker-punches and Allison Janney gave 'em to us in 2015, with some gulp-inducing sequences that occurred after a popular recurring character met their surprise end earlier in the year. Bonnie cried, daughter Christy (Anna Farris) helped all she could, and the Chuck Lorre elephant in the room gained some much needed heft thanks to jokes that felt all the more gut-busting due to the unspoken sorrow wallowing below the surface of every punchline. Ultimately, Bonnie grieved and grew, and her slow road to recovery felt all-the-more impactful thanks to Janney, who infused Bonnie's occasional traditional sitcom mom-ness with some much needed alacrity. 19) Rachel Goldberg Actor: Shiri Appleby Show: UnREAL "This is what a feminist looks like," declares down-and-out reality TV producer Rachel Goldberg's dingy T-shirt in the premiere of UnREAL. Rachel's feministic approach to life includes such gems as having an on-set meltdown in the middle of filming an episode of her uber-popular dating show "Everlasting," and then returning to work a few weeks later to Jedi mind-trick a gaggle of giggly women into performing borderline unethical actions all in the name of network ratings. It's the reason she's so fascinating to watch: she's audibly obsessed with being taken seriously as a functioning adult, but so relentlessly self-destructive she practically comes with her own detonator switch packed-in. Shiri Appleby gave the character a tangible grit (inside-out, two day underwear and all), her spectacularly manipulative scheming excited more than most superhero TV that bookended the show's summer run, and the back-and-forth conversational hot potato dialogue with boss Quinn (Constance Zimmer) fueled a show already overflowing with electric zip. 18) Liza Miller Actor: Sutton Foster Show: Younger Age is a prickly subject, doubly so for women, triply so for women in the workplace. Leave it to Sex and the City creator Darren Star to craft a comedy series around a 40-year-old pretending to be a 26-year-old and make it work. Foster's gangly, awkward turn as Liza Miller - divorcée turned plucky publishing assistant - fuels Younger's effervescent charm. Her sarcasm runs thick, her hair dye thicker, and just when you think the show is going to turn into some big vomit-inducing kumbaya age-is-just-a-number billboard for millennials angry at their parents, Foster clotheslines you with the whiz-bang energy of, well, a 26-year-old. 17) Emma Swan Actor: Jennifer Morrison Show: Once Upon A Time It was easy to go into Once Upon A Time's fifth season with a bit of trepidation. The season four Frozen arc was blatant corporate synergy, no matter how much Elsa reflects the show's inherent murky morality themes, and the subsequent "Queens of Evil" outing was ultimately little more than a reason for Rumpesltiltskin to turn evil... again. Thank the heavens (or Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz) for steering the ship straight this year, and giving its lead actor a suitably juicy spotlight. Emma's Dark Swan twist felt actually menacing and strange thanks to Jennifer Morrison's freaky visual alteration. She lurked and schemed and plotted like the best of 'em, and the show's set-a-timer-to-it predictability (amnesia flashbacks!) got a bit of renewed energy once her evil scheme came to light. The Disney-friendly show couldn't risk going there with her, so true darkness was only ever a cover for secret heroism - not to mention that happy ending winter finale could be seen leagues away - but Morrison embodied her Dark One persona so well while it lasted that she could easily top an OUAT villain list as much as a hero one. 16) Pamela Pilcher Actor: Melissa Leo Show: Wayward Pines Like the show she's in, Melissa Leo's Nurse Pam has more layers hidden under the surface than the initially steely facade she presents to the town of Wayward Pines, and the show's audience, in the first half of the season. She's our litmus test of weird for the hidden-bunker-in-an-abandoned-lot sized amount of weird this show throws at you. Fake cricket noise boxes? Not as weird as Nurse Pam. Creepy cult of teenagers droning on about the oncoming "Next Generation" of the quiet town? Decidedly weirder than Nurse Pam. As played with sneering menace - and eventually quiet grace - by Leo, Pam is more than the sum of her somewhat predictable villain-y parts. Every time she's on screen she dominates, chewing the eerie mountain scenery with delicious grit in the first half of season 1 and then earning the 10-episode run its most satisfying emotional payoff when she decides to betray her scheming brother, and the show's Big Bad, David Pilcher (Toby Jones). It's probably the out-there show's most earth-locked arc, but it succeeds on nearly every beat because you know Pam would do anything for her brother, even when that means it'll bring him harm. Maybe that's Wayward Pines' most surprising twist: it was a show built around blindsides that found its secret weapon tucked in its most traditional construct - the redeemed villain arc. 15) Carol Pilbasian Actor: Kristen Schaal Show: The Last Man on Earth There is a woman on The Last Man on Earth. Discovered by the titular dude at the pilot's end, Kristen Schaal brought the answer to the question everyone was asking the minute the show was announced: how long can this go on for? Twenty-two minutes, it turns out. But that's okay, because the off-beat, oddball humor Schaal brings to the show's world - not to mention the immediate friction between her and Will Forte - makes up for the loss of true experimentation that some tuning in might have been hoping for. Oh, dang prepositions, sorry Carol: for which some tuning in might have been hoping. 14) Donna Clark Actor: Kerry Bishé Show: Halt and Catch Fire The energetic girl-power jet fuel that lit a, well, fire under Halt and Catch Fire's second year is totally and utterly at the hands of Kerry Bishé and Mackenzie Davis' partners-in-crime story, which makes up a large part of the season. But here's the thing - Davis was a likable rebel from the get-go in season 1; she had a great arc this year but stayed the steady, stoic patron of technological revolution that she's always been. It was Bishé's sudden thrust into the spotlight (she was essentially a recurring nagging head in season one) that finally felt like co-creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers had something to say about the onset of in-home computer popularity, the burgeoning bootstrap start-up culture, and the women who were seen as weird pieces of that tech field pie. Bishé took all of this in stride, still sporting Donna's occasionally overbearing maternal instincts but pivoting them into a laser beam focused den mother role for a house of unruly coding slobs and leaving hubby Gordon (Scoot McNairy) home to nag and flirt with infidelity. Not exactly the most revolutionary metaphor for a show about a computer revolution, but it was done with enough well-executed enthusiasm for both female characters that the show never even felt like an on-the-nose hooray-for-feminism statement. It just felt like damn good TV. 13) Jessica Jones Actor: Krysten Ritter Show: Marvel's Jessica Jones Full disclosure: I've only seen five episodes of Marvel's Jessica Jones. It's more than enough to get what Ritter is doing with the role, which is the first full-female-led addition to the monolithic Marvel Cinematic Universe, not to mention the first with a female character's name in the title. Sad something like that can be seen as risky, but it was, and it more than pays off. Jones is every bit the scrappy underdog the MCU deserves, and her Hell's Kitchen sleuthing for the way to terminate arch-nemesis Kilgrave (David Tenant) fuels a personal vendetta-filled show where even indestructible characters feel frightfully, and masterfully, fragile. 12) Loretha "Cookie" Lyon Actor: Taraji P. Henson Show: Empire Empire hasn't even been on an entire year, and the sprawling, bickering Lyon clan at its center feels about as detailed and richly explored as shows two times older. The beating, intoxicating heart of that ideal is embodied in full leopard print with the Lyon family matriarch, Cookie. Lee Daniels and Danny Strong (Empire's co-creators) can sometimes write scripts too energetic, too frenetic, generating a head-spinning, alliance-shifting show that can be hard to fully invest in with such silly twists, but Henson anchors the chaos. She's the classic rough-and-tumble momma bear but Henson jumps into the role with such enthusiastic gusto she earns every face spit, hair pull, and bitch slap she gets to dish out. Sometimes all at once. 11) Selina Meyer Actor: Julia Louis-Dreyfus Show: Veep I'm not always all-in with HBO's Veep. The show can downright cut me down in gut-busting one-liners, but entire episodes have occasionally left me cold (this year's format-breaking testimony episode bordered on annoying). But my favorite moments from the show have one common denominator: Julia Louis-Dreyfus' eternally exasperated VP Selina Meyer. She's a character so high-strung and over-the-top in her preternatural perplexity that she makes the political maneuvering her and her staff must take to survive in Washington D.C. look downright sane in comparison. Louis-Dreyfus drops so many pitch perfect character details into Meyer's bloody battle to the top of the POTUS VIP list that she fuels a show otherwise a bit too preoccupied in generating of-the-moment satire than being consistently entertaining, like its deserving-of-all-those-Emmys star. 10) Arya Stark Actor: Maisie Williams Show: Game of Thrones Everyone's been asked the same question: "Gun to your head, who's your favorite Game of Thrones character?" So you should know my inner turmoil in selecting one of its enormously enjoyable female leads for this list, but Maisie Williams' Dark Arya turn in the show's otherwise inconsistent fifth season had me as enraptured with the series as any other year. On her own and confused in the towering, mystical city of Braavos, Arya's arc gave 2015 Game of Thrones its best WTF moments: washing the bodies of the dead, the Hall of Faces, and her eventual brutal assassination of Meryn Trant. Williams hopscotched down Arya's badass-in-the-making origin story with true grit, never resorting to annoying kid precociousness and proving that a show as grand as this is still endlessly fueled by the "no ones" who populate its hellish world. 9) Olivia "Liv" Moore Actor: Rose McIver Show: iZombie So it's Veronica Mars as a zombie, who cares? Creators Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright knit a show with such a brilliantly odd world (a soda company churns out the main villains here) and instantly need more of 'em characters, you get the reason why nearly 100,000 people were willing to shell out the dough just to see Kristen Bell's classic sleuth again. Here's to hoping we don't have to deal with series revivals anytime soon with Thomas' newest show, because McIver as the titular Liv Moore (just go with the puns) is as much the enthusiastic, sarcastic narrator and protector of the dear, dark city of Seattle as Veronica was for Neptune. McIver just gets to be a completely different version of her character every week, thanks to the rules of zombiehood in iZombie, which state that each time a brain is consumed, the zombie adopts the dominant personality trait of the brain's former owner. It's classic case-of-the-week stuff but thanks to McIver's masterful mental wardrobe changes, and a dollop of existential peril thrown in for good measure (who are you really if you become a different person every time you eat?), iZombie just feels new and different and special with every new brain. 8) Leslie Knope Actor: Amy Poehler Show: Parks and Recreation There shouldn't be any special excuse needed to celebrate Amy Poehler's optimistic-until-the-apocalypse Parks Director Leslie Knope. She has been consistently brilliant since the show's 2009 premiere, and Parks and Rec itself finally caught up to her comedic sprinting as the years went on. The final season was no different (despite my qualms with that time jump): Poehler dominated a year full of petty rivalries, Gryzzlboxes, and enough character-ending montages to justify a Kleenex box or three. Leslie and hubby Ben (Adam Scott) retained their indelible chemistry, and the show as a whole remained its weird, frustrating self (you can only milk a joke out of Pawnee's idiocy so many dozen times). "You did and said exactly what I thought you were going to do and say," Leslie admitted to an unmoving council member early in the season. "And that's oddly comforting." Leslie was the blinding eclipse of enjoyment at the show's center, but, honestly, I'd say the same for the Pawnee Parks Department as a whole. 7) Gretchen Cutler Actor: Aya Cash Show: You're the Worst Cash is expectedly reliable as ever in You're the Worst's second year. Cutting, scathing, and deeply honest in dealing with the nascent relationship between her and Jimmy (Chris Geere), Cash also got one of 2015 TV's best twists: Gretchen is a diagnosed patient of clinical depression. Funny sitcom shenanigans most definitely do not ensure (well, occasionally), but Cash's deep dive into Gretchen's dark spiral was in-the-moment fascinating, not to mention actually kind of shocking. And that's coming from the show where someone attempted insemination-by-microwaved-condom in the same season. 6) Carrie Mathison Actor: Claire Danes Show: Homeland The one constant in a show somewhat inconsistent in its holy shit greatness and brow-furrowing frustration, Claire Danes' bipolar CIA analyst Carrie Mathison is the reason to get sucked into Homeland's terrorism-fueled plots, and why you'll stick around for everything else. This year she found solace with a hot lawyer in Berlin, but - duh - evildoers came knocking and she once again had to connect photos with yarn on walls to discover the truth behind some scandalous leaked CIA documents. To delve into those secrets, Carrie had to submit to her disease, the show treating bipolar disorder with simultaneous nuance and hilarity (she basically gains superpowers by relinquishing her meds to delve into her bipolar obsessiveness), but Danes wrangles Carrie with such honest abrasiveness you never once question the ability for her to exist in Homeland's world, or our own. 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) 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. 3) Alison Hendrix Actor: Tatiana Maslany Show: Orphan Black The first name I jotted down when the idea for this list came to me was Tatiana Maslany. I didn't know where she'd rank or what I'd say, it was just a guttural, obvious addition to anything to do with women on TV in 2015. The second I sat down to write, though, I realized with a shock that I'd have to actually choose which Tatiana Maslany to represent her brilliance: street punk? Scientist? Bob-rocking boss? Scorpion?! I'd forgotten, like I do every year, every episode nearly, that she is her show's own supporting cast. None beat Alison Hendrix in my book. Orphan Black's resident desperate housewife takes the world of clones and Neolutionism and crazy religious cults in stride and gives the show its weekly dose of richly dark humor (she kills a woman with a scarf and a garbage disposal at one point and somehow turns it into a comedic set-piece). As Alison, Maslany revels in the tightly wound soccer mom's antics, perfectly playing off Sara's brashness and Cosima's optimistic viewpoints (which, again, is the same actor playing off herself). This year, Alison got into a political race for school trustee, hatched a drug-and-bath-salts side business, and generated one of the show's most vertiginous nesting-doll-of-personalities sequences. Clone Club, meet your VIP. 2) Rebecca Bunch Actor: Rachel Bloom Show: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend See Kimmy Schmidt for my justification in including the same show on yet another 2015 listicle. I can't help it, Rachel Bloom's head-spinning turn as Rebecca Bunch is the entire reason these year-end lists were created. She is every clichéd adjective in the book: entertaining, spirited, nuanced, over-the-top, and a bull's eye dart of tight-rope balanced humanity and, you guessed it, craziness. Her quest for the heart of eternally clueless Josh (Vincent Rodriguez III) may be ultimately fruitless, but the self-discovery-slash-musical journey we're taking along the way with her is the antithetical "Golden Age" TV pill that every single doom-and-gloom fueled anti-hero needs to take. 1) Camille Braverman Actor: Bonnie Bedelia Show: Parenthood Listen, everyone on Parenthood rocked, the women especially: Lauren Graham's plate-spinning Sarah, Monica Potter's devastating Kristina, Mae Whitman's lovable punk Amber. There's a reason the show felt like a real family for six seasons, and it's the fact that everyone on screen wasn't afraid to not only be endearing, but scream-into-a-pillow frustrating. However, when considering the show's final run of episodes earlier in the year, I have to give top honors to Bonnie Bedelia's matriarch Camille. She and husband Zeek (Craig T. Nelson) finally got some center stage spotlight in the final season thanks to their search for a fulfilling "third act," paving emotional speedbumps into a season beset with terminal dread from the get-go. But it was Bedelia's honest and stern acting captain of the wily clan that made anything she did, said, or tearily preached turn from a sappy motivational pillow and into a shotgun of televised devastation, heartbreaking reaction to the finale's big set-piece reveal very much included.