Scribblings from the Mitchy Side

I have been saved of thinking of actual content for today's (leap year!) post by sabaceanbabe's timely meme :D

1. Leave a comment to this post!
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Post the names of five fictional characters whose names begin with that letter, and your thoughts on each. The characters can be from books, movies, or TV shows.

sabaceanbabe gave me the letter "P".

Now it doesn't say if the names have to be first name or surname so I'm going to cheat wildly and use a combination of both :D

1. Parker (Leverage - TV) - Best thiefy character on TV at the moment. She's so unapologetic, it's a refreshing change, and her "relationship" with Hardison has been written superbly.

2. Lieutenant Tom Paris (Star Trek: Voyager - TV) - the "bad boy" of the ship. Could have been a completely two-dimensional character and in the first season, almost was, but Robert Duncan McNeil played him so well, that the character developed actual layers. And I'm a sucker for the "character gone bad but is redeemed" trope :D

3. Penelope Garcia (Criminal Minds - TV) - Best. Geek. Ever! Seriously, I wanna be Penelope when I grow up :) She gets all the good lines too :D Another character that was never meant to be part of the permanent cast, until the show aired it's first season and the fans went nuts. Credit to the writers for following the lead of the brilliant actress, Kirsten Vangsness, who took what easily could have been a cartoon character and made her multi-dimensional. Huzzah!

4. Peter Burke (White Collar - TV) - What can I say about this show that hasn't already been said? Nothing, but I'll say it anyway. Smartly written and superbly acted - Peter Burke could have been a total stuffed shirt, a caricature of the Upright FBI Agent. Instead, he's actually a character you can believe his subordinates would follow to the ends of the earth and his relationship with his wife has been superbly created to be very real. One of the best written characters on TV at the moment (with Neal Caffrey).

5. Jackie Payton (Nurse Jackie - TV) - I may come back and replace this later but I was struggling to come up with a fifth character. Jackie is prolly the most unlikeable leading character in a TV series that I've ever watched (and yes, she's worse than House). Yet the show is so well done that it's kept me watching and I'm eagerly awaiting the start of season 4. I think (and this is a huge tribute to Edie Falco) the reason I keep watching is that the character does occasionally show redeeming features - she will do anything for a deserving patient - and, at the same time, you're waiting for all the lies and cheating to catch up with her and bring her world crashing down around her ears. By all accounts, Season 4 is going to be the season where this happens, so that's one reason I'm really looking forward to it.

Edited because I can't spell "Kirsten Vangsness" to save my life. *sigh*