The year in scripted television provided viewers with many memorable moments — and characters.

Here are our favorite series characters, spanning several genres and broadcast platforms, who made watching their shows really interesting.

This good-natured, hangdog, well-intentioned dad elicits empathy in trying to understand his boy-genius son, Sheldon (Iain Armitage) and the rest of his wacky, unpredictable family, who he loves dearly. But don’t underestimate him — he can fire off a zinger with the best of them.

Oozed creepiness and menace from the get-go — and the ride got even scarier as each episode unleashed a bit more of Meehan’s cold, calculating cruelty as it seeped through his facade of psychotic cheerfulness into open warfare that spelled his doom.

A character who started out as a rich, self-centered, spoiled Kardashian-like caricature is still … self-centered and spoiled, but has lost her Kardashian-ness and is now much more human: lovable, funny and, yes, even sensitive at times while acclimating to life in the podunk town of Schitt’s Creek. Catchphrase: “Ewww, David!”

This sadistic, fanatical, middle-aged pedagogue — who delights in physically and mentally torturing the enslaved young women of Gilead — has shown some cracks in her evil veneer of late. But in a weird way, she’s the most riveting, fascinating character living in this show’s bleak, dystopian universe.

The sisterly friendship of these bffs in a small, insular Italian town is colored by a range of emotions ranging from love to jealousy — and underscored by Lenu’s astute observations of the enigmatic Lila via her intermittent voiceover narration.

— Michael Starr

This assassin can be vicious — killing a man with one thrust of her poisoned hat pin into his eyeball — or perversely funny, mimicking a child eating a bowl of ice cream and then knocking over the dessert as she sashays out of the restaurant. And has a cold-blooded killer ever been so chic in keeping viewers intrigued?

This emcee at competitive drag balls has the oratorical skills of a Harlem preacher, the merciless eye of a fashion critic and the ability to eviscerate with one lash of his scythe-like tongue. A mesmerizing mixture of old-fashioned showbiz pizazz and vulnerability.

This waitress at a rundown diner lives with her mother and doesn’t remember her previous life as a caseworker at a facility that pretends to help US veterans to transition back to civilian life. Heidi was moving in her moral ambivalence and memorable in her rebellion against a sinister Department of Defense and her connection to a soldier (Stephan James) she was fond of.

Never cross this backwoods woman, who blew the head off a drug cartel kingpin for calling her a redneck and, in Season 2, poisoned her husband, Jacob (Peter Mullan), for making a deal to turn over some of their land for the construction of casino. Scary and utterly unpredictable.

The real Tilly Mitchell is doing time in the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for her role in the upstate prison escape of David Sweat and Richard Matt. As a character in Ben Stiller’s Showtime series, she was a naive, conniving operator driven by frustration, lust and boredom to do insane things while putting her own life in jeopardy — making her inadvertently fascinating.

— Robert Rorke