TV's 5 Worst Coworkers Of All Time, Ranked

One of the best things about TV is being able to enjoy things and people that would be a huge pain in the neck in real life. Instead of worrying about unwanted intervention from a mother like Emily Gilmore (Kelly Bishop), viewers can enjoy her elegant snark on "Gilmore Girls." Instead of cringing at the thought of dating George Costanza (Jason Alexander), audiences can laugh at his impossible expectations of the women he's going out with on "Seinfeld." TV gives people a chance to step outside of their lives and revel in the fictional plots of their favorite shows. 

That said, it's still fun to imagine what it might be like if a character existed in real life, especially in a professional situation. There are plenty of underrated workplace comedies and TV shows worth watching filled with great characters it would undoubtedly be fun to see everyday, but there are also some nightmarish figures on TV that would make any person's job unbearable. It's hard to choose the worst from among the many malicious and incompetent workers to ever grace our TV screens, but these five are especially egregious. From laziness to straight-up homicidal tendencies, they represent the gamut of humanity's worst.

Sort of the whole point of "The Office" is that everyone who works at Dunder Mifflin's Scranton branch is kind of terrible, at least in some way. Meredith (Kate Flannery) consistently gets drunk and makes crass comments whenever possible, Michael (Steve Carell) is needy and frequently inappropriate, Angela (Angela Kinsey) is aggressively judgmental and strict, and Dwight (Rainn Wilson) frequently puts people in the office at risk with weapons and over-the-top fire drills. All of the employees can be difficult, but Ryan Howard (BJ Novak) is the absolute worst employee and coworker at Dunder Mifflin Scranton.

Ryan seems like a somewhat normal guy in the first few seasons of "The Office." He's just a young temp for a while. Despite his lack of respect for Michael, he's largely inconsequential, though his relationship with Kelley is irritating from beginning to end. After Ryan becomes a big-time Dunder Mifflin executive in Season 4, he becomes a total nightmare. Ryan's arrogance doesn't go away after that, even when he disgraces himself and the company by committing fraud. After that, he shamelessly takes advantage of Michael's love for him and stays on the Scranton Dunder Mifflin payroll despite everything he's done and his Olympic-level slacking.

It should be noted that Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) was likely a much less bitter and harmful person before he sustained a permanent injury that caused him to develop an addiction to Vicodin (a powerful pain killing drug). That said, House's whole ethos, and the central driving tenet of "House, M.D.," is that "people don't change," and boy does House very much not change across eight seasons of prime time television. There was a time when Hugh Laurie's star-turn was considered one of the most exciting and popular shows on television, but "House M.D.'s" relevance faded quickly during its final seasons and since. House is a drug addict who believes that people don't change and that no one tells the truth, and every time he makes strides in dealing with his addiction, he inevitably relapses. 

When he's taking Vicodin regularly, House is efficiently cruel and happy to engage in risk when it comes to medicine. He is a constant headache for his boss, Dr. Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), thanks to his penchant for offending people and the many rule- and law-breaking behaviors he regularly engages in to solve medical mysteries. He is a terror to the diagnostic staff that works under him, especially Omar Epps' Foreman (who believes, in spite of House, that people can be good and that rules do matter), and he's even a bad colleague to his best friend, Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), arguably the only person in the show with whom House occasionally pulls punches. He's a menace, and it's hard to believe his diagnostic brilliance is worth the liability and torment of working with him.

Now, the series-wide joke of "30 Rock" is essentially that everyone employed at TGS with Tracy Jordan is terrible and probably unemployable in anything else. Frank (Judah Friedlander) is disgusting (look no further than the sun tea), Pete (Scott Adsit) has given up on rebuilding his self-esteem, Kenneth (Jack McBrayer) is a naïve, ageless page who remains ignorant of reality for most of the series, Liz (Tina Fey) is a judgmental workaholic, and Tracy (Tracy Morgan) is famously one of the most chaotic people alive. Everyone who works at or near TGS on "30 Rock" is flawed, but no one is more difficult to work with than Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski).

There are many questionable things that happen on "30 Rock," but the most offensive person on the show — by far — is Jenna. She is just as self-obsessed and chaotic as Tracy, but she's also violently insecure about her profession and value. Her jealousy is a recurring theme in the series, with gags about Jenna targeting blonde interns and advising attractive women not to pursue careers in acting. Liz bends over backwards, constantly, to make sure that Jenna feels special and valuable, and yet she is a target of Jenna's psychotic malice on more than one occasion. She's not smart enough to understand the logic of kindness or cordiality, but she is smart enough to unethically manipulate people into giving her what she wants. She's a nightmare colleague and only seems to get more awful the more famous she is by the end of the series.

A running joke throughout "Veep" is the universal hatred of Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons) by anyone involved in D.C. politics. Jonah has some of the funniest lines in the show ("Guys, when a sexual harasser dies we sign his sympathy card, that's how D.C. works"), but he's also one of the most dimwitted people on the series. He starts out as a a White House aide who acts as a liaison to Selina Meyers' Vice Presidential office and goes on to run an independent news site, work for many presidential candidates, and even serve a term as a congressman for New Hampshire.

Jonah consistently gets in his own way, and despite his unstoppable upward failure (he eventually becomes Vice President), he never becomes more likable or easier to root for. He's jealous, nosy, disrespectful, lewd, obnoxious, and selfish, and he's a terrible government employee. He casually sexually harasses most of his female colleagues at least once and even goes so far as to hit on Selina's own 18-year-old daughter, Catherine. He'd seem even worse if not for the moral repugnance of most characters on "Veep," but even accounting for that he's definitely the worst of the bunch.

It's likely not necessary to explain why Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) would be a terrible coworker for anyone, but this is a slightly different Lecter from the one audiences know from films like "Silence of the Lambs." "Hannibal" follows an avid criminal profiler named Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) who becomes an object of fascination to his new boss, a brilliant forensic scientist named Hannibal Lecter. Graham, of course, doesn't know about Lecter's homicidal tendencies, but Mikkelsen's Lecter was voted the creepiest TV character of all time for a reason. Despite Lecter's intact professional cover, he's still very much creeptastic in "Hannibal."

He might not be such a terrible coworker for just the murder/cannibalism thing. Look at Dexter (Michael C. Hall) from "Dexter"; he wasn't a difficult colleague, so it might be possible to work amicably with a serial killer. However, as soon as he realizes that Will is particularly fascinated by the psychopaths he's been trained to hunt, Hannibal fixates on him. Lecter launches a subtle, devious campaign meant to bring out Will's homicidal potential, and in doing so essentially drives him insane. It's pretty difficult to manage a workday while also trying to fend off a devil on your shoulder, and so Hannibal Lecter is definitely TV's worst coworker.