I wrote an essay on the personalities of friends with Joachim Krueger and Leonard Chen for Psychology Today:

“In a somber mood, one might think that characters on U.S. American television are uni-dimensional. Sitcom characters in particular may be funny by virtue of being caricatures without depth. On Scrubs, J.D. is whiny, Elliot is insecure, Carla is domineering, Dr. Cox is psychopathically emotionless, and the janitor is janitorial. Perhaps we are stereotyping; by stopping after listing the first attribute that comes to mind, we are caricaturing the caricatures. One claim the Big-5 taxonomy of personality traits can lay to having depth is that it has, well, not 3 or 4, but 5 personality traits. With these traits being fairly independent of one another, describing each person on one more trait dimension adds complexity to the profile.”