1. Joan Holloway (I refuse to refer to her by her married name.)  

Ugh, where to begin? I love and admire everything this woman is.   Joan is a woman living within a cage created by the era in which she lives and the body she was born into.  Joan knows that and wears her body and her sense of sexuality/sensuality as armor and uses it as a weapon.  The fact that Christina Hendricks performance continues to go unrewarded is probably one of the great injustices of the Emmy/SAG/Golden Globe awards.  For further evidence, refer to this scene (TW: sexual assault) 

2. Lady Mary Crawley-

I started watching Downton Abbey for Maggie Smith and Hugh Bonneville.  I stayed for Michelle Dockery and Lady Mary Crawley.  I honestly can’t think of another character that has transformed and developed as much as Mary.  I also can’t think about the recent season without crying.

3. Fiona Gallagher-

Ask any actress under the age of 30 and they will tell you the same thing.  The writing for women in their twenties is abysmal.  Young women on film and television are either smart and homely or pretty and dumb.  Or they have no real personality at all.  Fiona Gallagher is both comfortable being sexy and  a complete mess.  Her street smarts and natural intelligence are the glue that keeps her family together, and yet she still struggles with her insecurities and feelings of intellectual inadequacy.  In short, she’s a flawed, complicated, vulnerable, fully formed, human woman who happens to be under the age of 30.  She’s often a mess, but she’s a complete badass just as frequently.  

4. Cersei Lannister-

The most exciting about the whole Game of Thrones series for me has been watching the way the show has completely re-investigated Cersei as a character.  In the books, she comes across as a flat, stupid, two-dimensional super bitch.  On the show, it feels like GRRM has taken the opportunity (through his own episodes and through the show’s writers) to fix what he kind of fucked up with Cersei’s character in the books.  On the show, Cersei is still stubborn and ruthless, but we’re also given more of a window into the way she thinks and why she does the things she does.  And giving Cersei a soul and occasional moments of compassion didn’t make her any less ferocious.  The fact that Lena Headey’s performance also continues to go unrewarded makes me incomprehensibly angry.  I mean, the “Power is Power” scene alone, is Emmy worthy.

5. Sarah Silverman (on The Sarah Silverman Program)

Stephen Colbert gets a lot of credit for creating a character that’s an outrageous, polar opposite from who and what he actually is.  What people don’t realize is that Sarah Silverman has been doing more or less the same thing just as long as Stephen Colbert.  Except, Sarah Silverman and, by extension her character will say things that almost no one else will say.  Her character is so blithely stupid, self-involved, and prejudiced it defies believability.  Then, you listen to an actual racist person talk and realize that the Sarah Silverman character is closer to reality than we realize.  

Other favorites: Bel Rowley (The Hour), Lix Storm (The Hour), Sansa Stark (GoT), Leslie Knope (Parks and Recreation), Amy Pond, Zoe Washburne (Firefly), Willow Rosenberg (BTVS), Anya (BTVS), Alice Morgan (Luther), Niobe (Rome)

He is all that is man.  She is all that is woman.  My uterus hurts.