Hopeless Bromantics

Season Five of Community, one of my favourite television shows, is Donald Glover's last with his final episode airing in the US last week. A fitting send off it may be, to allow Childish Gambino to more seriously pursue his music, but still a sad end to one most innocent, humourous and enviable bromances on television.

As tribute to the end of Troy and Abed, here's my top five television bromances, in no particular order, but of course starting with the bros in question.

Troy & Abed (Community)

Who'd have thunk a once promising football jock and a socially insulated movie geek would become this generations' representative bros? Apparently Dan Harman, creator of characters Troy (Donald Glover) and Abed (Danny Pudi).

Denny Crane & Alan Shore (Boston Legal)

Played by William Shatner and James Spader respectfully, these two Boston Legal-ites were less than decent characters most of the time, except, that is, when it came to each other. Their shared cigars and bonding over whisky on the balcony epitomised their relationship - wealth, arrogance, intelligence and in the end, bros. Well, in the end husbands, actually.

Kirk & Spock (Star Trek)

Yep, William Shatner features again!

Not that you'd really know it from the films, but Star Trek's Captain James T Kirk and Mister Spock (Leonard Nimoy) were definitely bros. Spock being the logical counterbalance to Kirk's emotion. So noted is their bromance that Kirk and Spock are the subject of reams and reams of fanfic, somewhere in a dark dark place on the internets. If that's your thing, go boldly.

JD & Turk (Scrubs)

JD (Zach Braff) and Turk (Donald Faison) are such great bros that they even sang about it, in season six episode My Musical. Scrubs has to have been one of my favourite shows for a very long time, and it needed the madness of JD and Turk's bromance to carry it. The greatness of Scrubs was its ability to balance at times serious and depressing realities of life and death in a hospital with the outlandish humour of JD's relationships with his friends, colleagues and bro. Happily it appears Braff and Faison continue to be bros, with Braff recently crashing Faison's Reddit AMA (ask me anything), and to be expected, hilarity ensued.

Sherlock & Watson (Sherlock)

While there has been many an incarnation of Sherlocks grace our screens, here I'm talking the BBC's version starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock and Martin Freeman  as Dr John Watson. Arguably, Sherlock is Spock to Watson's Kirk, but with Sherlock taking the lead, if that makes sense. Sherlock is reason where Watson is empathy, and together they form a whole. And if there was any takeaway from series three episode two The Sign of Three of the BBC's Sherlock it's that they are most definitely not just colleagues, they're bros. Best bros, in fact.

-Stevie O'C