There’s been this trend recently.  I’ll go so far as to blame JMS (Babylon 5) for starting it, but I suspect it has it’s roots even deeper.

There’s been a long history in media (games, movies and TV) where the secondary characters are there simply to provide comedic relief.  Even in a show with an ensemble cast, you usually have two main characters.  They might start out as one set of characters, then shift as the fan favorites become clear, but generally you have just a few leads that are the bad*sses of every episode.  Even if they are in a story with a “specialist” (say, the bomb-squad guy) one or both of those heroes magically (sometimes by random chance, sometimes because they are just that bad*ss) can do the exact thing that will save the day.

But over the past, say, five years, the shows I’ve been keeping an eye on have been making EXCELLENT use of their secondary characters.  When someone is good at something, the writers are less protective of their heros.  The guy on the team who is a professional sniper gets to take the shot, the “hero” gets tasked with something else.  The background character who spent seven years hunting down child slavers in the Sudan knows what she is talking about when twenty-five kids show up half-dead in a cargo container.  The The “B-Team” is kicking some serious *ss, and the writers are letting them do it.

As a recent example, we have Fusco from Person of Interest.  Somewhat pudgy, seriously jaded, reasonably good a physical comedy, he was a dead-ringer for the “funny” guy.  And he does a fair pass at comedic relief every so often.  But most recently, with the more serious turn in the show, when Fusco does show up, there’s some seriousness involved.   Rather than devolving into a doughnut eating punchline, they’ve exposed a very hardcore cop over the course of multiple storylines.

It makes the show as a whole more interesting, not only because we have more characters that are worth our time, but it really strikes the core point of having an “ensemble” cast.  Every character has strengths and weaknesses, and as we learn what those are, it give the writer a new tool to work with.