Caroline Channing is one half of the central duo in 2 Broke Girls, serving as the main co-star alongside Kat Dennings’ Max for the entire run of the series. Most fans naturally gravitate toward one or the other, and for me, Caroline never came close to knocking Max off the top spot.
In the very first episode, we learn she grew up extraordinarily wealthy, but her father turned out to be a spectacular con artist who ended up in prison with all of his assets seized. No hidden chest of gold had been planned for this scenario, leaving Caroline suddenly homeless and broke. Through a combination of circumstance and necessity, she ends up working at a diner and eventually moves in with her new coworker, Max.
Their most memorable shared venture was Max’s homemade cupcakes. What began as a small side project in their apartment eventually grew into a storefront and later a rent-free space in a shop window for an extended stretch. It was hard to watch in the end because they genuinely invested so much effort and had real moments of success, but the cupcake business just fizzled out.
Of the two characters, Caroline ironically had the more memorable string of romantic storylines, though “memorable” in this case tends to mean eventful in the worst ways. Her lowest point was probably the French cooking instructor who was dating her while still “happily” married to someone else. My personal favorite of her relationships, though, was Candy Andy.
Her best relationship in the show by a wide margin was still the platonic one with Max. In the tradition of The Odd Couple, they were opposites in almost every way, yet somehow clicked perfectly. They worked together like peanut butter and jelly.
That is not to say the friendship was frictionless. For a good portion of the series, the dynamic felt more like sisters than friends, with all the pointless fighting and competition that comes with that territory. Both of them made their share of mistakes and contributed to their own problems, so even with my obvious bias toward Max, I cannot pin the rough patches entirely on Caroline.
One thing I found genuinely difficult to accept was the premise that she could not leverage her existing social connections to find someone wealthy enough to restore her old lifestyle through a relationship and complete the hypergamy. The entire series is built around them chasing financial success, and while for Max that was always an aspiration she had never experienced, for Caroline it was simply a return to what she already knew. I sympathize with the loss up to a point, but having never been rich myself, there is a limit to how much I can relate.
Toward the end of the series, she is in a relationship with a guy named Bobby, which is acceptable, if not especially exciting. The show then brought Candy Andy back to compete for her affection, and she chose Bobby, a decision I was not entirely on board with. Not that it matters much, because if the series had continued, they probably would have found a reason to complicate things again anyway. I suppose we can assume she and Bobby eventually made it work, and with any luck, Caroline moved out of that awful apartment in the process.