10 Worst Sitcom Couples, Ranked

Even within sitcoms that aren’t well known for their romantic plot lines, TV comedies frequently showcase the ups and downs of being in a relationship. After all, many sitcoms live or die based on character interactions and humor mined from believable/everyday situations, and most viewers can likely relate, in one way or another, to stories surrounding falling in (or out) of love, as well as the challenges of sustaining a relationship.

However, not all sitcom couples are created equally, and there are numerous ways a couple can be considered wrong or even flat-out bad. It should be noted that while all the following romantic pairings can be considered flawed at best or genuinely terrible at worst, they’re bad for different reasons. Sometimes, couples are intended to be mismatched, and much comedy is mined from said pairings, while other times, the writing of a show can let a pairing down, or the chemistry between actors can be off. As such, some nuance is required when handling this topic; not all bad couples are bad in the same way, or for the same reasons. Get it? If you said “got it,” good.

10 Troy and Britta

While Community is, for the most part, an incredible sitcom, its six-season run (still waiting for that movie) certainly isn’t perfect, with the infamous gas leak year standing out the most in this regard. Community was always a cult show, even at its most popular, and frequently stood on the brink of cancelation throughout its run, with the temporary firing of showrunner Dan Harmon coming the closest to killing the show in its tracks, with the Harmon-less season 4 being the weakest season by far.

One part of the fourth season that doesn’t work is the pairing of Troy and Britta as a couple, with the writing probably being to blame. Donald Glover and Gillian Jacobs are usually fantastic in the show, but either their chemistry was off or the writers let them down, not giving them the ammunition needed to make their characters’ coupling believable. It’s best forgotten about, like most of season 4, in all honesty.

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9 Peter and Lois

‘Family Guy’ (1999-)

Given it’s a show of genuinely good highs and some rather upsetting lows, it might not be surprising to observe that the central relationship in Family Guy – that of Peter and Lois Griffin – is bizarre. It feels like a bizarro version of Homer and Marge Simpson’s dynamic, deliberately heightened even more, generally for comedic effect (for what it’s worth, the central marriage in The Simpsons walks a fine line between endearing and inexplicable).

Both at its best and at its worst, Family Guy is quite surreal, so it’s hard to get too angry about the fact that Peter and Lois’ marriage makes little sense, and thinking about why the latter is still with the former after a quarter of a century will lead to madness. Again, with some nuance, it’s possible to see the Griffins’ marriage as being preposterous in a funny way sometimes, and ignorant of all logic in a frustrating way at other times.

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8 Mark and Sophie

‘Peep Show’ (2003-2015)

One of Peep Show’s creators was Jesse Armstrong, who would later go on to create the still funny but somewhat more serious Succession, with both shows reveling in uncomfortable humor while exploring very flawed characters. Terrible people need love, too, might well be a takeaway one gains from either show, but it’s nevertheless hard to watch at times, especially when the characters are as messed up as they are in Peep Show.

Out of Mark and Jez, the show’s two main characters, the former gets the longest-term relationship in Peep Show, with a woman named Sophie, who was played by Olivia Colman before she had breakout success with shows like The Crown and movies like The Favourite. Mark and Sophie are intended to be terrible for each other, and that leads to much dark humor and discomfort. Fans of Armstrong’s work are likely well-acquainted with such feelings.

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7 Margaret and Frank

‘M*A*S*H’ (1972-1983)

The relationship between Margaret Houlihan and Frank Burns in M*A*S*H is an interesting one, because it’s kind of bad on multiple levels, all depending on one’s view of the series. For much of the time together, they’re clearly not intended to be an endearing or likable couple, but the comedy from such a pairing did wear thin after a while, and the show shifted once the relationship was well and truly over (Frank, as a character, only lasted until the end of season 5).

In Frank’s place came the more nuanced and less cartoonish character of Charles Winchester III, who didn’t care much for romantic endeavors and was flawed, but also had his redeeming qualities. Similarly, Margaret became more complex and human as a character once her relationship with Frank ended. It was arguably bad in two different ways, as a result, and for anyone who does subscribe to the notion that M*A*S*H’sfinal six seasons were generally stronger than its first five.

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6 George and Susan

‘Seinfeld’ (1989-1998)

As a show, Seinfeld largely seemed incapable of missing a beat, with it rightly being up there as one of the most acclaimed sitcoms of all time. It’s a relatable show in a unique way, given it focuses on tiny annoyances and inconsistencies found in everyday life, all the while being thoroughly unsentimental and cynical, but not in a way where it ever becomes depressing or upsetting to watch.

Seinfeld is also a show where characters cycle in and out of relationships at an alarming rate, to the point where it’s surprising to see a girlfriend (or boyfriend, in Elaine’s case) last longer than an episode. George Costanza gets a long-term relationship, though, even getting engaged to Susan Ross before events transpire that make marriage no longer possible. Their relationship is a terrible and dysfunctional one that hilariously spans numerous episodes, and few sitcom “romances” have even been so effectively unromantic.

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5 Raj and Lucy

‘The Big Bang Theory’ (2007-2019)

The Big Bang Theory was a show that can certainly be critiqued for any number of reasons, though nothing will take away from the fact that it was exceedingly popular while it was on the air. And it was on the air for ages, spanning 12 seasons and close to 300 episodes, all centered on four intelligent yet socially awkward young men who gradually find their collective ways in life, and even find some success in the hard-to-navigate world of dating.

Of the four main characters, Raj is shown to be the most awkward around women, taking an especially long time to find success in dating. He does strike up a relationship with another socially anxious person, Lucy, but the time spent on their relationship is hard to watch, and not just because they’re both awkward. Lucy’s wasted as a character, seeming interesting at first but soon feeling under-written, not to mention shortly thereafter getting awkwardly written out of the show.

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4 Michael and Jan

‘The Office’ (2005-2013)

Even those who love The Office and consider it one of the most rewatchable shows of all time might well find themselves skipping over some of the episodes that center on the chaotic relationship between Michael Scott and Jan Levinson. Something like season 4’s “Dinner Party,” for example, is excellently constructed from a cringe comedy perspective, but it’s also quite mortifying to actually experience once, let alone be revisited.

Michael and Jan’s brief romance (at least in the overall run of the series) is certainly bad on purpose, but the show’s surprisingly uncompromising in how far it’s willing to go to show how bad these two are for each other. The Office is a show filled with both positive and negative romances, lasting all sorts of different spans of time, with Michael and Jan’s being the most uncomfortable of the lot.

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3 Ted and Robin

‘How I Met Your Mother’ (2005-2014)

Romance was always a prominent element of How I Met Your Mother, with that being made abundantly clear by the title and premise alone. As such, discussions surrounding the relationship drama experienced by the show’s main characters are likely going to be divisive, but hopefully it’s not too much of a stretch to say that Ted and Robin make a contentious pairing, at best.

Ted himself is a highly-flawed character, all the while remaining the central focus of the show, given he’s the one telling the story about meeting his kids’ mother and everything. They end up together by the end of the show’s infamous finale, all the while having had a tumultuous bond over the course of the long-running show. That drama could be compelling at times, but for the way the relationship concludes in How I Met Your Mother’s overall conclusion, it ends up leaving a bad aftertaste.

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2 Joey and Rachel

‘Friends’ (1994-2004)

The surprising development surrounding Joey and Rachel getting together in Friends does add some conflict and spice to the show in its final stages, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good relationship. Like with How I Met Your Mother, Friends had a focus on romance and opinions are going to differ regarding whether those relationships were good or not, but intentional or not, Joey and Rachel being a thing did feel strange.

They end up as friends by the end of Friends, which was probably for the best; an obstacle in the way of Rachel and Ross inevitably getting together for good after a great deal of will-they-won’t-they drama that Friends was always well-known for. So, for providing conflict and drama, this relationship might’ve worked, but as for being credible or emotionally rewarding, it wasn’t as much of a success.

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1 Lindsay and Tobias

‘Arrested Development’ (2003-2019)

Tobias and Lindsay are both especially flawed people in Arrested Development, a sitcom where every main character is horrendously (and usually hilariously) flawed in multiple ways. Generally, this was to the show’s benefit, though, as Arrested Development was at its best when such main characters made a mess of their lives, the Bluth family as a whole perhaps being the most dysfunctional in TV history.

Still, even with all the chaos and cringe-inducing character dynamics, few pairings were as hard-to-stomach as Tobias and Lindsay, who both continued to stay together even though it’s difficult to think of how two people could be more mismatched. This is very much the point, of course, and Arrested Development mined a good deal of comedic gold from the multitude of reasons these two characters should not have ever been together.

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NEXT: The Best TV Sitcom Couples, Ranked