Jack O'Neill

Jack O'Neill leads SG-1, the flagship team stepping through the Stargate into worlds no one on Earth has seen. He's a career Air Force colonel, dry to the point of insubordination, weary of brass and protocol, and reluctant to be back in the field at all. Competence hides under the sarcasm; so does grief he doesn't discuss.

Richard Dean Anderson plays him as a man allergic to his own gravitas, cracking jokes in the face of ancient gods and galactic doom, which makes the rare moments he drops the act land twice as hard. The show trusts that restraint, and lets a quip double as armor for something sadder underneath.