From Bender's beer-fueled nihilism to Data's quest for humanity, television has spent decades using robots to ask the most human questions. A new ranking of TV's greatest mechanical characters has sparked debate about what makes a great screen robot — and why we keep building them.
The Guardian's list places Futurama's Bender at the top, a choice that acknowledges the enduring appeal of a character who is simultaneously amoral and impossible to dislike. Bender's catchphrases have entered the language, and his defining trait — a complete rejection of the moral seriousness that usually accompanies fictional robots — made him the anti-Data at a time when Star Trek's android was the gold standard.
Data himself places second, representing the opposite tradition: the robot who wants to be human. Brent Spiner's performance across seven seasons of The Next Generation and four films turned what could have been a gimmick into one of television's most affecting characters. Data's attempts to understand humour, friendship and love gave the show its emotional core.
The list spans genres and decades. Doctor Who's Cybermen and Daleks represent the threat tradition — machines that have discarded or suppressed humanity. Westworld's Dolores and Battlestar Galactica's Cylons occupy the more modern territory of robots as an oppressed class, reflecting contemporary anxieties about artificial intelligence and consciousness. And The Good Place's Janet, a repository of all knowledge in the universe who is definitely not a robot, makes the cut as television's most creative subversion of the form.
What unites the best of them is not their technology but their writers' understanding that robot stories are always stories about us.
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