Do we like them?

Do we like Dwight Schrute?

A character from The Office (US) (2005-2013)

Our score: 7 out of 10. He's intense, tactless and a menace to office peace. He's also fiercely loyal, hard-working and oddly reliable in a crisis. We'd back him, and we'd keep the pepper spray locked up.

Dwight is a top salesman at the Scranton branch of the paper company Dunder Mifflin. He's also the assistant (to his mind, 'assistant TO the regional manager') to his boss, Michael Scott. He runs a beet farm and bed-and-breakfast, is a volunteer sheriff's deputy, and is a sci-fi fan. Britannica describes him as someone who takes any excuse to go on a power trip at work. The show is a mockumentary about the daily absurdities of office life, and Dwight is one of its main sources of chaos.

His faults are obvious. He is power-hungry, hopelessly short on social skills, and constantly sure that he's the superior person in the room. He sees rules and rank as sacred, and he'll enforce both, whether or not anyone asked. His running feud with Jim Halpert, who pranks him relentlessly, is one of the show's best long-running gags. Dwight is often the cause of his own misfortune, but he's also the victim of a lot of pranks.

What keeps him on the right side of our ledger is his heart. He's loyal to a fault, works harder than almost anyone, and has real skills, from salesmanship to farm know-how to preparedness for emergencies. Under the bluster he's gullible and often vulnerable, and he shows real affection for the people around him, even if he can't express it normally. He does plenty of damage with his schemes, but almost never out of real malice, so we score him a solid 7.

Over the series his long-held dream of running the branch pays off, and he finds love with Angela, whom he eventually marries. In the later seasons he shows more maturity and more care for his colleagues. He's a better person at the end than at the start, which pushes the score up.