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Which TV shows could benefit from a character cull?

This article is more than 9 years old

After Orange Is The New Black sensibly ditched mopey fiance Larry (Jason Biggs), here are six other programmes that should shed some dead weight

Game Of Thrones
Stannis Baratheon

Stannis Baratheon.

After four wearying seasons of constantly cutting back to whatever the hell Bran is up to – spoiler: absolutely nothing interesting – the second Stark son is being sin-binned for all of season five. Thank the old gods, and the new! But among GoT’s sprawling cast, there’s another dramatic makeweight: Stannis Baratheon, the least engaging antagonist of them all – a stiff, humourless clod who can’t even convince himself that he deserves the Iron Throne. It’s weird because Stephen Dillane is a great actor, but the sooner Stannis’s entrails become ex-trails in a GoT mega-slaying, the better.

Girls
Marnie Michaels

Marnie Michaels (right).

Part of the push-pull appeal of HBO’s hipster angst-soap is wondering which of the core Girls quartet is most likely to make you want to bash your head against a wall week-to-week. It’s been a particularly rocky road with Marnie, a former super-striver now shacked up with her crusty songwriting partner. How best to explain Marnie vanishing? Perhaps a bit of art mimicking life, since Allison Williams recently took the lead in TV musical Peter Pan Live! During their next brunch, the other Girls could snark about how the absent Marnie is busy rehearsing for the first ever Williamsburg panto, alongside hot imports the Krankies and Barry from EastEnders.

Mock The Week
Andy Parsons

Andy Parsons (right).

It’s not just fictional characters who need to be chopped to make shows better. Over the last eight years on Mock The Week, Andy Parsons has slowly devolved from a three-dimensional person into a one-note caricature. Putting aside the James May shirts and musketeer beard, the up-and-down cadences of his abrasively nasal, cod-indignant routine have become so familiar, the actual words don’t even matter any more; it’s just a braying noise, an ululating waveform, a schtick that’s become stuck. A handy byproduct: ditching Parsons as a Mock The Week fixture could also free up a seat for a regular female panellist.

Mad Men
Betty Draper

Betty Draper. Photograph: Frank Ockenfels

It’s too late for any major retooling of the deluxe ads/fags/shags time capsule, with the second half of its seventh and final season imminent. But to paraphrase Ram Jam, Mad Men might have had some extra bam-a-lam if it had – wo-oah! – lacked Betty, since the inveterate moper, callous mother and unpredictable comfort eater seemed to drag the narrative away from husband Don, who everyone loves despite him being a bastard. The natural juncture would have been at the end of season three, when the Drapers consciously uncoupled: where’s a ride-on lawnmower when you need one?

Broadchurch
DI Alec Hardy

Alec Hardy (left). Kill him. Photograph: Patrick Redmond

This might seem like straight-up crazy talk, especially as one of the only things that’s actually been confirmed about the next season of Broadchurch is that David Tennant and Olivia Colman will return as glum-cop cufflinks DI Hardy and DS Miller. But one way this former heavyweight drama champ could recover from its second-season wobble would be to engineer a gripping narrative to power season three. With no warning, push Hardy off a cliff at the end of episode one: Miller finally gets that promotion – and can also righteously avenge his death.

Saturday Night Takeaway
Declan Donnelly

Ant and Dec. Photograph: Julie Holder

Ant and Dec are now so slick, frictionless and interchangeable, it’s almost impossible to imagine them apart – which is precisely why it would be interesting to attempt it. Imagine a Saturday Night Takeaway where the thing that was taken away was Dec. Would Ant be able to function independently or would his brain simply shut down all higher functions and revert to a fallback position, delivering pally feeder lines into empty space and leaving awkward pauses for his partner’s comebacks before an increasingly uncomfortable audience? After a lifetime worshipping Vic and Bob, this could be Ant’s masterpiece of anti-comedy.

Which telly types do you think should be kicked into the long grass? Have your say in the comments

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