'Screw Ships' Prompt Has People Laughing About Michael vs. Toby, Martin vs. Pam, and Other Classic TV Rivalries
Even slightly more obscure examples of hilarity-ensuring disdain, including a beef with a baby and Elmo's pet rock feud, made the cut.
The relentless annoyance of constant shipping, even in ship-opposing situations wherein shipping makes little to no sense, may have mercifully met its match.
Instead, all thanks to a blockbuster X prompt that has since spurred enough replies to warrant articles like this one, our collective attention has turned to matters of disdain. Outright hate, even.
“Screw ships,” X user @oconnornews said in a tweet shared at the top of October, quickly garnering thousands of responses. “Give me two characters that just fucking hate each other.”
Expectedly, the prompt is exactly the same as one that also had some traction in April of last year.
Naturally, the largely one-sided antics on The Office between Steve Carell’s Michael Scott and Paul Lieberstein’s Toby Flenderson received multiple mentions, as did other classic TV examples like Martin Lawrence’s Martin Payne and Tichina Arnold’s Pam James (Martin) and Jerry Seinfeld’s Jerry Seinfeld and Wayne Knight’s Newman (Seinfeld).
Others shied away from the classics and instead offered up less obvious examples, ranging from beef with a baby (The Real Bros of Simi Valley) to two individuals who are not fictional characters but instead actual people (Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin from Netflix’s pandemic hit Tiger King).
To be clear, several pairings of this kind across TV are built atop the understanding that one or both parties actually harbor decidedly positive feelings about the other. Other examples, meanwhile, stem from a shockingly pure type of disdain one isn't likely to encounter very often. Raw, uncut, and completely unhinged.
In that spirit, we've highlighted a few roundly cited examples of beloved TV characters whose shared penchant for hate (or something very close to that) proved to be a winning formula.
