5 Worst How I Met Your Mother Characters, Ranked

Carter Bays and Craig Thomas' beloved CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother," which ran from 2005 to 2014 and spanned nine seasons, featured quite a lot of characters while we listen to the interminably long story of how a guy named Ted Mosby met his wife. As Ted — who's played onscreen by Josh Radnor and voiced, in his older years, by the late Bob Saget — tells his son and daughter precisely how he met their mother Tracy McConnell (Cristin Milioti) with a lot of tangents along the way, we get to know Ted's main group of friends, which includes tightly knit couple Marshall Eriksen and Lily Aldrin (Jason Segel and Alyson Hannigan), Ted's on-again, off-again crush Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders), and his womanizing, suit-wearing buddy Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris).

Through the central gang, we meet a ton of supporting characters as "How I Met Your Mother" expands its world, and by the time the series comes to a close, it's sort of a running gag that the show has almost too many supporting players (a Season 9 episode titled "Gary Blauman" is basically about where all of these crazy characters ended up). So which ones are the very worst? First things first: this list can and does include main characters as well as supporting and tertiary players, so don't think that Ted, Marshall, Lily, Robin, and Barney are totally safe from judgement. (Well, out of all of them, Marshall is.) Without further ado, here are the five absolute worst characters in the history of "How I Met Your Mother," ranked from "pretty bad stinker" to "the worst of the worst." (Honorable mentions do include Abby Elliott's odious Jeannette, Kal Penn's creepy therapist Kevin, and Jason Jones' screenwriting karate master Tony.)

Ted dates a bunch of questionable ladies throughout "How I Met Your Mother" — the aforementioned Jeannette fits neatly into that category, as does another, lower entry on this very list — but unfortunately for actress Jennifer Morrison, her character Zoey Pierson is one of the worst. (Yes, she's worse than Stella Zinman, Sarah Chalke's dermatologist who leaves Ted at the altar.) In Season 6 of the sitcom, Ted, an architect who's supposed to design a new building to be a part of New York City's skyline, meets Zoey as she protests the destruction of an ancient building called the Arcadian, which is set to be bulldozed to make way for Ted's new designs. Because Ted is a sap and a huge sucker, he finds himself drawn in by Zoey and ends up joining her cause eventually and falling for her, even though Zoey is already married (to a bombastic and genuinely delightful character known as the Captain, played by an always welcome Kyle McLachlan). 

Zoey and Ted's relationship never really rings true — partly because, if we're all being honest, Morrison and Josh Radnor don't have a ton of chemistry to begin with — and even though Zoey ends up leaving the Captain for Ted, they're too alike and frankly irritating to make it long term (and that stupid building the Arcadian, which is apparently filled with vermin, ends up coming between them in the end anyway). Morrison is an excellent actress, but the show never gave her enough to work with as Zoey, and she ended her time on the show as one of its most irksome players.

Throughout "How I Met Your Mother," Robin Scherbatsky, a Canadian native who moves to New York and becomes part of Ted's core group of friends, dreams of being a successful TV news anchor. During her very first job at a local New York station, Metro News One, she meets their main anchor Sandy Rivers (Alexis Denisof, the longtime husband of main cast member Alyson Hannigan), and to say Sandy is gross is a massive understatement. Sandy is lecherous, unpleasant, often unfunny, and absolutely inappropriate under any normal standards (frankly, a lot of his jokes wouldn't fly much past 2005), and while Ted is fighting for Robin's affections in the early seasons, Sandy presents himself as a very unlikely rival. 

Sandy leaves Metro News One for CNN, opening the door for Robin to become the network's lead anchor, but in Season 6 of "How I Met Your Mother," Robin unfortunately reunites with Sandy when he joins her in the newsroom at World Wide News. Unfortunately for quite literally everyone, Sandy hasn't changed a bit and spends pretty much all of his time on-screen either tormenting Robin or making women around him really, really uncomfortable. In that Season 9 episode "Gary Blauman," we learn that Sandy, disgraced due to his treatment of women in the United States, moved to Russia to become a news anchor but hasn't changed a bit. It's a dumb ending, but hey — at least Sandy Rivers is no longer the scourge of the in-universe New York journalism scene.

As previously mentioned, Ted has pretty bad taste in paramours, and the first canonical example of that on "How I Met Your Mother" is Karen, his college girlfriend played in just three episodes of the series by "That '70s Show" and "Orange is the New Black" standout Laura Prepon. (Yes, Karen is only in three episodes of the entire series, but she's annoying enough in those three to be included here, and she's mentioned whenever anyone talks about Ted's worst girlfriends.) During Ted, Lily, and Marshall's time as underclassmen as Wesleyan University, Ted finds himself in on-again, off-again situations with Karen, an unbelievably pretentious blowhard who won't stop correcting people's pronunciation, talking about fine wines from Bordeaux, and quoting the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. She's a nightmare, but unfortunately, anyone reading this probably knows the exact type of person Karen is meant to mock.

To make matters worse, Karen is mean. She cheats on Ted (and other partners) all the time — literally, she cheats on Ted any time she wants to end their relationship — looks down on Ted's friends and views herself as intellectually superior to them, and is just generally odious. When Ted finds out that Lily has been meddling in his relationships for years in the Season 4 episode "The Front Porch" — so named because Lily wants to eliminate any partners of Ted that she'd hate to share a front porch with in her old age — he's angry, but it's easy, as a viewer, to breathe a sigh of relief and be grateful for Lily's admittedly inappropriate interference.

With the utmost respect to the very funny Chris Elliott, his character Mickey Aldrin — Lily's estranged father who builds a relationship with her again throughout later seasons of the show — basically ruins every single episode of "How I Met Your Mother" that features him in any way. Mickey, who's obsessed with creating terrible-sounding video games to the point that his obsession made him an absent and neglectful father to a young Lily, resurfaces in the traditional "Slapsgiving" episode of Season 5 and ends up spending Thanksgiving with Ted, Lily, Marshall, and Robin; he's annoying in this episode, and throughout the other 10 episodes that include Mickey, that does not change.

Clearly, Mickey's inclusion in later seasons of "How I Met Your Mother" is a effort to build out the world of the show and put a focus on Lily's childhood as she prepares to become a mother (Marshall and Lily welcome their first child, son Marvin, at the end of Season 7, and Lily finds out she's pregnant with their daughter Daisy towards the end of the ninth and final season). That doesn't mean Mickey has to suck so hard, though; at some point, he manages to burn Lily and Marshall's inherited suburban house down because he's such an inept idiot. The show eventually figures out that Mickey, a guy obsessed with games, can be a good caretaker to young Marvin while Lily and Marshall pursue professional goals — an admittedly strange choice in hindsight considering that he was such an abjectly terrible father to Lily — but the show would have been better off had Mickey never been a part of it in the first place. 

In the world of "How I Met Your Mother," absolutely nobody is worse than the protagonist himself: Theodore Evelyn Mosby. (Yes, that's his real middle name.) To be blunt, Ted is a whiny, entitled adult brat who can't take "no" for an answer and, throughout the course of the series, ends up derailing and ultimately ruining Robin's life. Okay, sorry — let's back up.

Ted can be a good friend — although his selfish nature does usually get in the way of that too — and apparently, he's a good architect. That's the list of Ted's redeeming qualities. In the "cons" column, the entries are endless. Ted is usually pretty crappy to his girlfriends, from breaking up with one girl, Natalie (Anne Dudek) on her birthday twice (and forgetting the second time) to cheating on his perfectly nice long-distance girlfriend Victoria (Ashley Williams) with Robin in Season 1. When it comes to Robin, Ted really leans into the emotional terrorism. Knowing full well, when they start officially dating at the end of Season 1, that Robin wants to travel the world as a journalist instead of getting married and having kids — two things Ted unequivocally wants — Ted thinks that he can basically wait out Robin's long-held dream. When this doesn't work and they break up, Ted spends quite a lot of the remainder of the series pining over a woman who's way too good for him. (Also, during that initial run of their relationship, Ted makes Robin give up her five dogs because he's allergic. Disgusting!)

The fact that Robin and Ted end up together at the very conclusion of "How I Met Your Mother" is a disgrace and insult to Robin, and it's because Ted Mosby sucks. The series, which unfortunately stars Ted, is streaming on Hulu now.