And Skyler's not alone. Rita on Dexter, Lori from The Walking Dead, Abby in Ray Donovan, all seem to be just standing in the wings somewhere, already glaring and ready to pop in and bring the whole damn room down at a moment's notice.

Quick, everyone stop looking like you're having fun.

Their actions often don't even make sense, but since these characters are so poorly drawn from the beginning we're used to them acting only as irrational, bitchy foils to the male protagonist.

Why It Needs to Stop

Television writers seem to think that a strong female character equals self-centered and overbearing, and that's a bad thing. It doesn't have to be this way. Shows like The Americans and House of Cards feature much more nuanced writing for their female leads. That those characters exist for a purpose beyond riding their respective husbands' backs makes them and the shows they're on stand out among their peers, which is actually kind of sad, when you think about it.

As a married couple in The Americans, Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys) occasionally fight and disagree with one another, but these tensions are much more balanced since both characters are written on equal footing (they're both Russian spies).

Claire (Robin Wright) from House of Cards is such a strong, independent woman, not even Frank's annoying camera asides can faze her. While their relationship creates conflicts for her husband, her actions have some semblance of purpose beyond the "she's always bitching about something" trope lazy writers love to lean on these days.

... to Stockard Channing's high school senior on the wrong side of 30 in Grease ...

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This is what your mom has always looked like.

... movies and TV shows have a longstanding tradition of filling roles for teens with much older actors. Fox's Glee, the hourlong iTunes ad for awful karaoke music disguised as a television show, is one of the biggest offenders. Mark Salling was 27 when he started playing 15-year-old high school student Noah "Puck" Puckerman ...

Glee.Wikia.com
That's his "I need someone to buy alcohol for me" face.

... and he wasn't the only member of the glee club whose voice had already dropped an octave by the ninth grade. His good buddy, 15-year-old Finn Hudson, was played by another 27-year-old, Cory Monteith. Teacher/glee club mentor Mr. Schuester, played by doe-eyed, baby-faced Matthew Morrison, is only four years older than those "students" in real life.

Glee.Wikia.com
Father figure.

The problem is more apparent with male actors. In real life, girls generally mature earlier, while boys do most of their filling out during the college years. Friday Night Lights, for example, is a show about how we love our small-town high school football heroes so much, we let them keep playing until they're nearly 30. With his fully developed physique and backward creeping hairline, Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch), a 25-year-old high school sophomore when Friday Night Lights debuted, looked a little long in the tooth to be legally roaming the halls of Dillon High without pushing a mop and bucket.

Meanwhile, co-star Minka Kelly (a year older in real life) makes for a much more believable teen girl.

Why It Needs to Stop

Not only is it distracting when the adults and "kids" look roughly the same age, it also sets up false expectations for teens. Most male high school students aren't broad-shouldered, deep-voiced men sporting a five o'clock shadow by fourth period. Yes, real-life teenage actors come with their own set of unique issues that make casting adults more appealing. Besides occasionally being saddled with nightmare stage parents, younger actors are subject to restrictive laws that limit filming times and require on-set classrooms. But it can be done. The Disney Channel regularly casts age-appropriate young stars, and their shows look much more realistic, even if they're completely unwatchable.

By the time Kick-Ass 2 rolled around, though, the actress who plays Hit-Girl (Chloe Grace-Moretz) was 15 -- too old to pull off the "potty-mouthed kid" shtick.

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Past her prime.

She needed a more age-appropriate storyline that acknowledges her transition into full-fledged teenage girl. According to her, the original Kick-Ass 2 script was deemed too male-centric to carry this off, so new screenwriters were brought in to add some estrogen to an otherwise testosterone-laden film. Tasked with creating "a more female side" for Hit-Girl, the new writers apparently took this as meaning "ratchet up the cattiness factor to level ridiculous" and called it a day. Instead of focusing on what Hit-Girl could accomplish now that she's older, stronger, and presumably wiser, the writers chose to trot out a tired retread of the Mean Girls dynamic as the main sub-plot for Hit-Girl's alter ego, Mindy Macready.

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She's the soon-to-be jerk on the right.

For a character that's supposed to be girl-positive, Hit-Girl/Mindy spends most of her free time hating every female in her general vicinity. First, there's a slumber party where Mindy acts as if she's been invited to pick nits out of other girls' hair rather than just hang with them. The requisite falling out between Mindy and the popular kids is as confusing as it is boring. Everyone loves Mindy because her dance routine rocks (it doesn't).

Wait, now the same group of girls hate her and show up to shame her for being "date ditched" in the woods.

Either the writers were doing so much blow they forgot to even give a reason for this about-face, or they really hate teenage girls. Even in the context of the same movie, the popular person's actions are often less obnoxious than the outcast we're supposed to be rooting for. Fresh from the "date ditch" humiliation, Mindy extracts her revenge with the "sick stick," a device that induces spontaneous nausea and diarrhea. After causing a few less-popular minions to projectile vomit, Mindy turns the device on the most popular girl in school, who pukes and shits herself in front of all her classmates.

Girl Power!

Why It Needs to Stop

Sorry, there are good reasons why certain people are more popular than others, and it's usually because they are likable and have good personalities. While there's the occasional outlier who gained their position through unearned advantages, for the most part pro-social skills are what build friendships and lead to peer acceptance. In fact, having a good personality may even improve your physical attractiveness. What's less likely to help are revenge fantasies. Sure, a montage of the outcast teen learning empathy and conflict resolution to gain a better social footing in high school would be a snooze-fest, even if it was set to a Giorgio Moroder soundtrack, but there has to be a better way to write teen characters without relying on the tired cliche that popular and attractive equals mean.

However, the mother-child pairing in Oliver Stone's Alexander takes it to another level. Fresh-faced Angelina Jolie plays mom ...

telegraph.co.uk
Seems fine so far.

... to a weather-beaten Colin Farrell ...

dailymail.co.uk
Come on.

... who in real life was born not even a year after Jolie. Following this trajectory, we can look forward to future movies where mothers are played by women even younger than their onscreen offspring.

Casting females too young for a role doesn't stop with the kinder-mom. Vulture charted the relative ages of male movie stars and their female love interests, and the results are something out of the "World According to Wooderson" playbook. Male actors get older; their female co-stars stay the same age. Matthew McConaughey was supposed to be playing a sleazeball, right?

Why It Needs to Stop

Not only are these casting choices distracting, they also marginalize women. As we've mentioned before, Hollywood is tough on women. There are plenty of talented, attractive actresses of all ages that can fill these roles. Continuing to let the superficial (age) outweigh anything else a female has to offer is detrimental to female actors vying for these roles and to the audiences who consume the final product.

Nearly 25 years ago, Roger Ebert wrote an essay on why a young Julia Roberts was always paired with much older, wealthier men onscreen. What it boiled down to was the stranglehold middle-aged white men have on what gets churned out and fed to the masses. Unfortunately, a quarter of century later, not much has changed.