The 5 Worst Gilmore Girls Characters, Ranked

Amy Sherman-Palladino's beloved series "Gilmore Girls," which ran from 2000 to 2007 and spanned seven seasons (and spawned a four-episode revival), is set in the small and fictional Connecticut hamlet of Stars Hollow, a place that's home to all sorts of colorful characters. Even though we spend all of the show's run-time with either Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham), her precocious daughter Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel), or both of them, the show's frankly enormous ensemble is always a major focus, particularly because Stars Hollow is a ... unique little town that takes part in tons of weird traditions where everyone gathers in the same place at the same time. This is all to say that there are a lot of characters on "Gilmore Girls," and some of them suck.

As a caveat, this list of horrible "Gilmore Girls" characters is about characters who are either annoying, mean, terrible, or a combination of those three things; whether or not these characters actually move the plot ahead, which most of them frankly do, is immaterial to the matter at hand. Also, Lorelai, Rory, Lorelai's parents Richard and Emily (Edward Herrmann and Kelly Bishop), and major players like Paris Geller (Liza Weil) and Sookie St. James (Melissa McCarthy) will all be excluded from this list, both because they're great — justice for Paris, honestly! — and because this list is reserved for characters who slot into supporting roles. Now that we've got all of that out of the way, here are the five absolute worst characters ever featured on "Gilmore Girls," ranked — and whether or not they show up in that revival, 2016's "Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life."

After Rory starts dating her third serious boyfriend of the series Logan Huntzberger (Matt Czuchry) in the show's fifth season, she ends up meeting his parents Mitchum and Shira Huntzberger, played respectively by Gregg Henry and Leann Hunley. Here's the problem: Shira, moreso than Mitchum, is predisposed to dislike Rory and disapprove of her relationship with Logan based on something as frankly ridiculous as social standing, which is made even more ridiculous when you consider that Rory comes from the wealthy and established Gilmore family (as she tells Logan, "My ancestors came over on the Mayflower!"). Shira makes it quite clear that she doesn't think Rory is suitable for her son, so as an "apology," Mitchum, a newspaper magnate, offers Rory an internship at one of his local papers. Naturally, Mitchum can't even make that situation work and ends up telling Rory that she doesn't have what it takes to ever become a journalist; Rory's reaction is to freak out and steal a yacht, which isn't great, but the point here is that Mitchum is not a nice guy, as further evidenced by the way he treats Logan.

Aside from the beautiful and scathing takedown Emily delivers to Shira after she finds out that the Huntzberger matriarch doesn't think Rory is good enough for Logan and the fact that Rory's yacht thievery leads to a pretty lengthy plotline about her personal growth, it's painful to watch the Huntzbergers on "Gilmore Girls," because they're just so incredibly awful. Shira does not show up in "A Year in the Life," but Mitchum does, and guess what? He's still a jerk!

The lore behind "Gilmore Girls" is that Lorelai got pregnant when she was just 16 years old and set off on her own to raise Rory, separate from her wealthy but judgmental parents; as Rory's father, Christopher Hayden, played by David Sutcliffe, isn't always an important part of her life. Sure, he shows up in Stars Hollow from time to time (sometimes on a motorcycle) to flirt with Lorelai and see his kid, but nobody would ever make the mistake of calling Christopher a "good" "father," and he manages to end up in an identical situation during the narrative of "Gilmore Girls" after his girlfriend Sherry Tinsdale ("Twin Peaks" alum Mädchen Amick) unexpectedly gets pregnant. Christopher does a marginally better job being a present father for his second surprise daughter, but let's just say his track record in general is ... spotty.

More to the point, Christopher, who also comes from a family with quite a bit of money (yes, that's a big trend on "Gilmore Girls"), is just sort of a big spoiled brat. A deeply inconsistent man who shirks responsibilities and freaks out at people whenever they call him out on his nonsense — especially Lorelai, who knows him better than pretty much anybody — Christopher is never a welcome presence on the series, and it's considered by most fans to be a major series low when he and Lorelai briefly wed in Season 7. Christopher (and Sutcliffe) returns for "A Year in the Life," but it's mercifully brief and consists of a single scene where Rory asks for permission to write a book about her life as a Gilmore girl. Hilariously, the scene is about Christopher being a cruddy dad and accepting that he'll be represented as such in print.

The only good thing about TJ, a "Gilmore Girls" character with no name and no apparent purpose played by Michael DeLuise, is that he doesn't show up in "Gilmore Girls" all that often. As the boyfriend-turned-husband of Liz Danes (Kathleen Wilhoite) — sister of main character Luke Danes, love interest to Lorelai and reliable coffee shop owner played by Scott Patterson, and mother of Rory's second big boyfriend Jess Mariano, played by Milo Ventimiglia — TJ is ... useless. He's unbelievably stupid (that's not editorializing, he's quite literally written to be a doofus), ill-mannered, rude to Liz, incapable of doing basically any job for a living, and even the timbre of his voice totally sucks. From him waxing poetic about the "tights" he wears to his medieval themed wedding to Liz to the episode where he insists on running around Stars Hollow and yelling, "I'm in Escrow!" because he put an offer down on a house — while it's abundantly apparent that he has no idea what Escrow is or means — the sight of TJ on "Gilmore Girls" is eternally unwelcome. 

TJ is not funny, he's not charming, and he's not endearing. He is just unbelievably and entirely annoying. There's one piece of good news here, which is that TJ doesn't show up in "A Year in the Life," and neither does Liz. Whew! TJ-sized bullet dodged!

We've already briefly discussed Logan Huntzberger and Jess Mariano, two of Rory's great loves on "Gilmore Girls," so that only leaves one: Dean Forester, played by Jared Padalecki. Even as Rory transfers from Stars Hollow High to Chilton Academy at the very beginning of the show, she strikes up a relationship with Dean, a newcomer to Stars Hollow High who recently moved to the small town from Chicago, and even though Lorelai and Rory spend a lot of time insisting that Dean is a "perfect" first boyfriend for Rory, he is definitively anything but. Example: when Dean tells Rory that he loves her for the first time, and thanks to her own personal fears and issues, she isn't ready to say it back, so Dean breaks up with her. Dean is jealous, easily irritated, not always nice to Rory, and usually downright annoying, but he becomes actively horrible in the Season 4 finale of "Gilmore Girls" and into its fifth season.

In the Season 4 finale, "Raincoats and Recipes," Rory, now a student at Yale, loses her virginity to Dean. The problem? Dean is already married to a Stars Hollow girl named Lindsay (Arielle Kebbel). After Dean and Lindsay split, Dean and Rory stubbornly try to make things work only for their relationship to fall apart for the third time, and a bitter Dean ends up telling Luke that Lorelai will never stay with him long term (which isn't even true!). Dean briefly pops up in "A Year in the Life" and, like Christopher, gives Rory permission to write about him in her book. It's a mercifully brief appearance, and despite Dean being a total wet mop, it is a little nice to see Padalecki all grown up.

The most annoying and awful character on "Gilmore Girls" is the Stars Hollow town selectman Taylor Doose (pronounced "doo-see"), played by Michael Winters ... and it's not a close race! Not only does Taylor constantly say things and drop hints that his moral compass dates back to the 1950s — like comments about unmarried women like Lorelai that aren't particularly nice, just as one example — but he's just an unrepentant jerk who always thinks he knows best, even when it's pretty clear that he barely knows anything about anything. From demanding that everyone in Stars Hollow spend inordinate amounts of time participating in those aforementioned weird traditions — like the time that he decides Rory will be the town's "Ice Cream Queen" even though she's really busy at Yale and then has a snotty little fit when she can't actually do the random job he's assigned to her — to basically wanting to control everything that happens in Stars Hollow, Taylor is, without question, the absolute worst. 

Taylor is, obviously, part of the rich tapestry of "Gilmore Girls," and it makes sense to have a character this weird and uptight as a local politician. Still, he just sucks. It's relatively safe to say that, if Taylor Doose were real, the residents of Stars Hollow would start holding a ceremony eerily similar to the one depicted in Shirley Jackson's famous short story "The Lottery" and immediately rig the system so that Taylor was the first person chosen.

"Gilmore Girls" is available to stream now on Netflix and Hulu, and "Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life" is available on Netflix.