Top 10 Sitcom Characters With Surprisingly Tragic Backstories
#10: Jung “Kim's Convenience” (2016-21)
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Jung Kim is the son of Appa and Umma, who run the titular Kim’s Convenience store. Jung doesn’t work in the family store though, and in fact he also barely talks to his father. As a teenager Jung committed some petty crimes and spent some time in Juvi. He also stole from the family business, which was the final straw for his father, who kicked him out of the house. Jung is now in his mid-20s and has turned his life around, but when the series begins, his relationship with his father hasn’t recovered.
#9: Punky Brewster “Punky Brewster” (1984-88)
In case you forgot, Punky wasn’t just the cute little girl with a big smile and two different coloured shoes. How she was left without parents is a sad and tragic story you may have forgotten. You see, when Brewster was a little girl her father walked out on her and her mother. And while that would be hard on any kid, Punky was then abandoned by her mother in a mall while they were shopping for groceries. Punky and her dog find refuge in an empty apartment in a nearby building and it’s there that she finds the grumpy old man who will eventually love and adopt her.
#8: Perry Cox “Scrubs” (2001-10)
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Given his tough-love style and abrasive nature you might have assumed that Dr. Percival Ulysses Cox, M.D. had a tough childhood. And you’d be right. Perry Cox grew up with an alcoholic father who would throw bottles at his head and a mother who would do nothing to protect him from it. While Perry grew up to be a doctor and a caring hardass, his sister Paige sought solace in religion. Cox loves his sister but they butt heads a lot, and when she is around it’s a reminder of the awful childhood that he’s tried to put behind him.
#7: Leonard Hofstadter “The Big Bang Theory” (2007-19)
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Leonard grew up in New Jersey, the child of academics. This probably helped guide him on the scientific path he chose as his career, but his domineering, unloving mother was definitely something he needed to overcome when it came to his relationships with women. Not only did his mother not show him any affection, but she also used Leonard as a thing to study and wrote about everything he did in her best-selling books. Leonard has always felt inferior to his siblings and has longed for any approval and affection from his mother – so much so that when he was a child he built a robot that could hug him.
#6: Creed Bratton “The Office” (2005-13)
Creed is one of the most mysterious characters on “The Office” and his backstory has to be taken with a grain of salt. In one episode he claims to have been born in 1925 and since we’re pretty sure he isn’t 80+ years old, we can assume he sometimes likes to stretch the truth. So, did he spend time inside an iron lung as a child? Did he spend time in prison? Did he kill a man named Creed Bratton and assume his identity? Has he been involved with multiple cults? If any of these things are true it's enough to make the list. If they are all true he should probably have a list all to himself.
#5: Britta Perry “Community” (2009-15)
Britta Perry lived a very active and varied life before ending up at community college. She was a foot model, she traveled to Africa, she joined multiple activist groups and was tear-gassed at rallies. But we have to go back to her 11th birthday to get at the root of Britta’s tragic story. Because, as was implied on various occasions, that’s when Britta encountered “an eager-handed man in a dinosaur costume”. Making it even worse, her father took the man’s side against her. And she isn’t the only member of the study group with parents who didn’t protect them. Jeff Winger’s dad was an abusive alcoholic who abandoned him when he was a young boy.
#4: Jared Dunn “Silicon Valley”
On Donald Dunn’s first day of work, Gavin Belson starts calling him “Jared” and it sticks. However, there’s a chance, albeit very small, that Jared is actually his real name. Because, as Jared mentions in season three, his first Child Protective Services worker never found his birth certificate. Jared moved through the foster care system throughout his childhood, living in poor conditions which he’s said he paid for “with endless, backbreaking chores and things no child should see.” And that doesn’t even get into the constant bullying he experienced throughout his primary and high-school days.
#3: Charlie Kelly “It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia”
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Charlie Kelly’s tragic backstory dates back to before he was born when his mother tried to terminate her pregnancy, but it didn’t work and he was born three months later. His mother also had to keep his birth a secret from his dad, Frank, who was married to someone else and would have made her abandon him. It’s also strongly implied that his uncle Jack was abusive and traumatized him. Charlie’s half-sister Dee didn’t have it easy either. Frank was a terrible father to her, they had a Nazi grandfather, and her scoliosis meant she had to wear a backbrace, leading to the schoolyard nickname “The Aluminum Monster”.
#2: Kimmy Schmidt “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”
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There’s a good reason they call her “unbreakable” and it’s not because she’s a big fan of M. Night Shyamalan’s follow-up to “The Sixth Sense.” No, it’s because she suffered through a horrible event that would have easily “broken” many others. When she was in eighth grade Kimmy was kidnapped by Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne who imprisoned her, and three other women, in an underground bunker for 15 years. Even though she went through something that could easily ruin someone’s faith in humanity, Kimmy comes out of it with an optimism that even a decade and a half in captivity couldn’t break.
#1: Phoebe Buffay “Friends”
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As with Kimmy Schmidt, Phoebe Buffay is the most optimistic character on the show, even though her story is the most tragic. Where do we begin with Phoebe? Of course we have to mention that her biological mother gave her up, her father abandoned her and her adoptive mother took her own life. Then there was her time living on the streets where she had to resort to mugging people and she got hepatitis when a pimp spit in her mouth. And we can’t forget that she also stabbed a cop - but only because he stabbed her first. Along with Ms. Schmidt, we think Phoebe Buffay deserves to be called “unbreakable” for how well she emerged from those hard beginnings.