Despicable male antiheroes and the “prestige” drama

The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, probably others.

These kinds of shows, which brought a new critical prestige to television in the aughts and teens, shared a remarkable structural similarity. The protagonist is a man who does horrible things, and the viewer is “teased” between alternately sympathizing with them and wondering if they are in fact a heartless sociopath. For these three series in particular, the final season seems to come down on the side of the protagonist being irredeemable. The audience is supposed to feel chastised, I think, for ever rooting for them. (This was also how Richard Rorty thought Lolita toyed with the reader.)

I understand why this kind of character is fascinating. But I think the ubiquity of this archetype — the lovable sociopath — says something about American culture at the time it flourished. I think this kind of drama has also waned a bit in popularity which might say something too.

Yeah I think it has.

Al Swearengen in Deadwood is an interesting case - the show was always more about the community as a whole so not as limited to his psychology, but in opposition to the characters you cite he actually ended up far more redeemable than early eps made you think.

https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/assets/docs/books/1539/9a29ef8f9fa75c5ea604899ae944f5e1.jpg

from 2012 and i never read it: kotsko's sometimes good value on twitter tho

I think it became a mark of sophistication to have antiheros who were more interesting than the normies surrounding them. Like Tyrion and Tywin as opposed to Jon Snow.

And given the vast number of tv shows that didn't have antiheroes, this was at least novel for a time

wasn't J.R. Ewing of Dallas the first real asshole-villain to earn audience empathy in a TV smash?

https://whythebeatlesarestillrelevant.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/eddie-haskell.jpg

Oh hello, Mrs. Cleaver

well, him and ALF

Even in The Last of Us you have a pretty much actual hero, but he has a backstory of murder and stuff.

it kind of taps into the same vein soap operas do - you're fascinated about what fucked up thing so-and-so is going to do next. but it's more interesting than those because these are much richer characters portrayed usually by top notch actors.

part of the glut of them was probably a reaction to people getting tired of the one-dimensional 'good v evil' tales with relatively flawless heroes that they'd been spoonfed on television for decades. as with all things, it's a pendulum - when the world started to get even shittier, people didn't want to spend their free time with toxic people.

I'd still prefer people who watch and discuss these shows (at least, the ones that aren't stupid and actually realize you're not meant to white knight the antihero), than the glut of people who think quality programming = conflict free with wholesome, pure characters who act like you want your IRL friends to act.

obviously most of these characters weren't 'heroes' at all, really, and they did challenge you to watch television in which you couldn't root for the protagonist.

but it also resulted in some hilarious Reddit acrobatics w/ people finding new and novel ways to defend Walter White

The Shield gets overlooked in these discussions a lot, maybe because it didn't have the "prestige" of the shows that came after it (it ran 2002-2008), but it was the show that made FX's name as a network and it won some awards. It was really challenging stuff, because it wasn't just about a vicious antihero, it was also table-pounding copaganda in the "You need me out there!" vein. But it was fascinating because although some of the later seasons (there were seven) had a definite "How will Donald Trump Vic Mackey wriggle out of this one? Oh, there he goes" feel at times, the final season was absolutely crushing. He definitely paid for his sins, and people around him paid much worse.

You crossed it out but Trump is maybe the ultimate version of this figure. His shocking actions are played out in reality, but as he understands, it is a heavily mediated reality driven by narratives. And the people who like him often admit he is a bad person but appreciate his authenticity and the way they can enjoy his transgressive behavior vicariously.

And by “authenticity” they mean sociopathy, the way he has little regard for others. Americans think this is more “real” than other ways of being. Why?

Think the final series of Dexter may have been the death knell for this trope

Good call, or that show in general, just the most cartoonish version possible of this sort of thing.

I liked the first four seasons. but it was never a grounded show.

the problem is any time I'd talk to someone about Dexter, the average viewer would actually consider Dexter a hero because he was killing "bad people" and didn't seem to register that he's STILL A BAD GUY. He's a serial killer, he kills people while only requiring circumstantial evidence proving their guilt, and in a few cases, killed innocent people that he mistakenly thought were guilty. but even if he didn't - he's a SERIAL KILLER and he's not killing for any sense of justice, he just changed his M.O. to kill criminals at his dad's urging to avoid getting caught and help police 'take out the garbage'.

he's like the Punisher but more pretentious.

I'd also throw in Barry, Hannibal, the Americans, Jack Bauer, Glenn Close in Damages, Loki, Stringer Bell and Omar, ever character in Righteous Gemstones and other Danny McBride shows.

every

I think that Gandolfini's greatness as an actor means that while you don't "root" for Tony per se there's a certain tenderness you end up feeling for the character, don't get that with Draper (never watched BB).

the 21st century also brought in "lol our lead characters are all terrible people" into much lower stakes television, like Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where it played their terribleness for laughs.

I feel like audiences got tired of that trope a lot quicker than antiheroes in high stakes dramas (although obv not w/ Always Sunny, whose longevity was pretty surprising. I like the show a lot, or did at least for a while)

Worst show of this sub genre for me is sons of anarchy, where it’s kinda clear that the show runners believe those guys are truly awesome, just admirable apex predators. Probably also unlike the other shows, it had zero decent female characters despite having a ton of them.

Neanderthal, I think this was actually more established in comedy already? Seinfeld, Curb, Simpsons was supposed to be this but backfired...

I watched the first couple of seasons of Sons but bailed on it.

The spinoff show, Mayans MC, has been pretty fascinating, though, for a few reasons: 1) the protagonists aren't white; 2) (and this may well be related to 1) there's a tremendous amount of lurid, telenovela-level emoting going on; the characters are all working through emotional trauma — which is more of a current trend in TV drama than the whole vicious-antihero thing. For big mean badass bikers, they cry a lot.

Seinfeld is super nihilistic, maybe moreso than some of the other more serious shows mentioned itt

ost True. Even normal sitcoms often had "bad" characters that audiences loved-- Dan Fielding, Jason Bateman on Silver Spoons--but I think maybe Married With Children was the first show where everyone was supposed to be terrible?

Barry's whole thing for the last couple seasons seems to a commentary on this, ie let's take this head-on and unromantically show the effects of his actions and their consequences, despite his desire for some kind of redemption.

I wonder if Mad Men really fits the bill - I mean I would agree that advertising execs are as bad as meth labs and the mafia, but I never felt the writers were on the same page as me. Don Draper did some awful things (what he did to Lane was completely unforgivable) but he was often also sympathetic and morally on-side.

my theory of friends is that the writers began greatly to dislike their characters from the end of s1 really, and were on a bet to see how dislikeable they could get away with writing them and the audience at large not spot this

(the giveaway is ross, by some margin the most dislikeable character, and how he treats julie in s2)

the first doctor who (hartnell) is mostly an irritable treacherous cowardly weasel lol

Bojack Horseman to thread

Don Draper as a character is a philanderer and a dick some of the time, but also kind of a decent guy fighting against his own demons and insecurities, ones masked by his confidence and skill in the workplace. Which is basically the only place he’s usually totally on point.

also Homer Simpson in the Frank Grimes episode and beyond

Breaking Bad was one I kinda don’t have much enthusiasm for anymore, the show didn’t leave much room for hope, it was just a thriller with no breathing room and no escape for anyone caught in the narrative. Kind of left me feeling empty in retrospect.

Agreed, it was so enthralling at the time but doesn't seem to have aged well, it feels like most people don't want to go back to it (except for memes).

Don Draper as a character is a philanderer and a dick some of the time, but also kind of a decent guy fighting against his own demons and insecurities, ones masked by his confidence and skill in the workplace. Which is basically the only place he’s usually totally on point.

― omar little, Friday, April 7, 2023 11:12 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i thought the point of the finale was that he made peace with the fact that he wasn't decent? he couldn't value his commitments to others because he was too traumatized in his youth. all he can do is spin real human sentiment into sellable narratives. "buy the world a coke."

xps to mark s yeah in the very first story they have to ask him nicely not to kill a caveman with a rock. Then the third story is basically "the doctor enters a psychotic state for an hour and the other characters try their best to cope"

I think one of the antidotes to shows like this was something like Justified, which had a flawed lead character who was a good guy, and really a charismatic likable type. One thing I do remember about the show was how as it was coming to an end, everywhere online I was reading about how people were predicting multiple deaths, grim outcomes, etc. and in the end that just didn’t happen. Everyone, even the worst of them, had some hope and redemption. That final conversation in the prison, talk about being blindsided by unexpected emotion.

the first doctor who (hartnell) is mostly an irritable treacherous cowardly weasel lol

Think most Doctors up to Baker are cantankerous and unsympathetic a lot of the time; mentioned on another thread that they seem to connect to Sherlock Holmes and Steel from Sapphire & fame in a British archetype of "irritable man being a dick to everyone but also RIGHT".

i started googling bcz i was convinced there's major series in classic 60s TV that we're all overlooking and i found someone on a reddit thread making the case for GILGAMESH as a strong example

i thought the point of the finale was that he made peace with the fact that he wasn't decent? he couldn't value his commitments to others because he was too traumatized in his youth. all he can do is spin real human sentiment into sellable narratives. "buy the world a coke."

I don’t think that the takeaway is he found peace in being a terrible person, but that he found peace in being happy doing the thing he was good at and not seeking out something more. Ultimately I do think Don Draper is supposed to be regarded as a pretty decent guy albeit *extremely* flawed and flawed to his own detriment.

daniel that category includes pertwee and in fact baker (both bakers) but not troughton imo

The Wikipedia entry on tv antiheroes lists Yogi Bear, Fred Flintstone, Oscar the Grouch and Veronia Mars (for some reason?)

xp mark s -- Burnside in Sandbaggers is this type, though that's 1970s. You could theoretically do an alternate reading of The Prisoner, where "The Village" is good, and see Patrick McGoohan's character as this type ... I feel like one key precedent for the character type is the Cold War espionage narrative. ... and once the Cold War ended, this character type found itself in different settings.

But I think it's a mistake to just see television as a discrete thing and ignore its relationship to film. I also have the thought in mind that these television antiheroes were inspired by cinematic antiheroes of the 1960s and 1970s ... like, compare/contrast Harry Caul in The Conversation to Walter White in Breaking Bad or characters played by Clint Eastwood et al in Spaghetti Westerns ... and then in The Unforgiven ... look at Deadwood in the context of that movie.

Also, what's pretty lol to me is that The Wire was mentioned but no one mentioned McNulty as an example of this type. He definitely fits the bill.

I thought of mcnulty but he’s almost too much of a fuckup! Also because his moral compass is definitely heroic even if it’s self-serving. Though he does like to sleep around…

McNulty is the guy who can't operate under the rules of the fucked up system, more of a Jack Nicholson in the 60s type

If Don Draper qualifies, then McNulty does imo

Oh I forgot another Walter White ancestor… Michael Douglas in Falling Down

the number of people who used to talk about that movie about how D-Fens was a "working man's hero" before I ever saw it, swear to god

though he did kill a Nazi!

Oh I forgot another Walter White ancestor… Michael Douglas in Falling Down

― sarahell, Friday, April 7, 2023 9:00 AM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Milton from office space

(the giveaway is ross, by some margin the most dislikeable character, and how he treats julie in s2)

I read somewhere that Ross got more obnoxious as the series went on because Schwimmer was unpopular with the producers of the show. He made demands like wanting Ross to have non-white girlfriends, and later he was the one who said the actors should all get paid the same (and that amount should be very large). But I don't know how true that is.

I don’t think that the takeaway is he found peace in being a terrible person, but that he found peace in being happy doing the thing he was good at and not seeking out something more. Ultimately I do think Don Draper is supposed to be regarded as a pretty decent guy albeit *extremely* flawed and flawed to his own detriment.

― omar little, Friday, April 7, 2023 11:24 AM (fifty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

he's not a sociopath like tony soprano, it's true. i am on season 5 of the sopranos now and, while enjoyable, i think it is somewhat overrated. i find myself annoyed and disgusted with the characters and really do not have that much sympathy for tony, who subscribes to a mafia code of ethics that treats certain human lives as disposable. since the pathos doesn't work for me, the show plays as an extremely dark comedy, and it does work in this way, but the much touted psychological richness of the characters seems screwy idk

a character like carmela is just ridiculous to me. she is scandalized by the fact that her husband isn't faithful but not that he kills people.

I mean it starts out not that much different than any mob media before it branches out into more artistic territory. the gimmick being they gave Tony a code that made him appear to be a mobster with a secret heart of gold, but you quickly see how his code is bullshit and how he breaks it all the time, and it's just the way he legitimizes his criminal lifestyle.

dude just ruins lives, that's his real career, ruiner of lives.

xpost a lot of mobster's wives are like that!

she does wrestle weakly with his sins, she tells him in the first episode he's going to Hell when he dies, and then goes to the shrink talking about her guilt about being complicit in his lifestyle, but recoils when the shrink tells her to leave him, because she'so nly willing to confront the cognitive dissonance in the form of seeking absolution, not actually changing

a character like carmela is just ridiculous to me. she is scandalized by the fact that her husband isn't faithful but not that he kills people.

― treeship., Friday, April 7, 2023 9:23 AM (one minute ago

would you feel this way about a wife of a cop?

depends on which cop. the cops in my hometown mostly gave out vouchers for a free slice of pizza to kids who wore their helmets when riding their bikes.

carmela's inner conflict over her husband's "work" just seems stupid. she knows where the money comes from yet she tries to pretend she is above it, above him. she never makes the connection that anthony jr is acting out because his father is someone whom he could not possibly respect.

cool, what's the name of the show about cops that mostly give out free pizza to kids?

These people are hypocrites! I can’t believe the writers haven’t considered this *updates IMDb goofs page*

xpost millions of people make rationalizations and compartmentalize things like that every day

at a certain point, it stops being a compelling inner conflict for me as a viewer.

i'm not saying the rationalizations aren't realistic.

fwiw tho I do love Gandolfini and feel empathy for Tony six seasons did feel a bit much for the concept, so I sympathize with treeship here.

These people are hypocrites! I can’t believe the writers haven’t considered this *updates IMDb goofs page*

― michel goindry (wins), Friday, April 7, 2023 12:37 PM bookmarkflaglink

irl lols

I mean I do generally prefer the “flawed heroes who occasionally fuck up” model to “evil men with complicated backstories” — Engrenages for example which is like The Shield if Vic Mackey was a good guy.

remember The Commish

a character like carmela is just ridiculous to me. she is scandalized by the fact that her husband isn't faithful but not that he kills people.

― treeship., Friday, April 7, 2023

But even libs think this way.

"He's my neighbor, he picks up my kids from school, how could he have molested children???"

It’s wild to me that chiklis was 27 when the commish started.

lol wow.

I couldn't get past the first two episodes but isn't that show Succession just an ensemble cast of despicable antiheroes or ... idk?

― sarahell, Friday, 7 April 2023 16:31 (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Never seen it but yeah it’s an eg of the phenomenon of fiction featuring characters who aren’t morally exemplary continuing to exist aiui

― michel goindry (wins), Friday, 7 April 2023 16:35 (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I feel like ppl experience Succession in a much different way - thinking rich kids are cool is much more taboo in '23 than thinking mobsters or unreconstructed trad males are cool when thosr shows premiered so while ppl might have some secret affection for the characters the discourse as I see it is mostly "it's a great soap!"and "come enjoy these horrible wankers being terrible to each other". Anyway there's a thread for this? :)

― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 7 April 2023 16:41 (seventeen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i guess i don't see too much difference between "horrible wankers being terrible to each other" and feeling empathy for a misunderstood sociopath ... as in I have trouble understanding people who are "too good" for the latter but who enjoy the former? If neither is appealing, then I definitely get that.

― sarahell, Friday, 7 April 2023 16:58 (forty-one seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

Sarah I don't think it's about feeling too good for anything, it's that the main motivator for shows like Succession from what I can tell is schadenfreude, and I don't see that as a big part of Sopranos/Breaking Bad/Mad Men. It is for the comedies mentioned itt tho.

(sorry, know this is getting quite off-topic)

There's a writer I like, a Chinese woman who has spent the last 20 years in the UK, and I read a review of one of her books that said sth like "this is completely unbelievable, the character makes decisions that don't make any sense" and it's funny because the book is basically her lightly-fictionalised diary and those are the actual decisions she made.

think there is a problem right now with people being unable or unwilling to imagine anything beyond their own narrow experience, best example being the DHOTYA shitbags on Twitter, maybe for another thread though.

The despicable male antiheroes shows don’t present the sociopaths as misunderstood at all but yeah that’s the main difference in reception xp

the "this decision doesn't make any sense!" dorks also seem to want characters to exist in a world where everybody acts consistently with their personality and don't ever have out of character moments.

xxp - people don't get that enough IRL?

Succession is closer in spirit to something like The Thick of It maybe? Corridors of (corporate) power, cringe comedy, etc.

the fucked up family dynamics are a larger part too and more incisively portrayed than the usual arbitrary passing mentions they get in a lot of the other shows ITT.

Succession is one of those rare shows with not a single character who is in the least bit sympathetic. All of them are completely odious.

thank you both, omar & jim

It's been a long time since I've seen it, but I wonder how (if at all) Oz fits into this. I'm not sure one could argue for any "anti-heroes" being in the cast (just various shades of awful really), but even the most detestable characters showed their humanity at some points. It sometimes seemed a bit farcical to give a guy a "sympathetic" storyline after he slashed someone's throat the previous week...

This is where the dark comedy of the sopranos comes in for me. He chops a guy up in a bathtub one minute and the next minute he is in the therapists’ office.

Or like with the aforementioned guy who was chopped up — he was even worse! He beat a woman to death for no reason. And yet when his son is in the hospital all the mobsters feel for him.

Oz and Deadwood (and the Wire) lack the singular Tony MontanaSoprano protagonist for dumb guys to latch on to IMO.

I'm rewatching Breaking Bad and aside from flashes from Jesse it's seasons deep before anyone in the cast seems to have a redeeming quality to them, Walt's more of a two-dimensional sociopath than anyone in the Sopranos (how anyone could have the same "oh he's a badass" reaction is beyond me) - the plotting and acting are still great but it's a grind to get through.

It was unique in a way. It had the most endless boring stretches in bland Albuquerque suburbs and then a few moments of tension that escalated into extreme terror. It was very good at that kind of unexpected shock, but that is the kind of show I find difficult to watch

I have no idea how we could think the antihero prestige drama is on the wane when Yellowstone is on its second spinoff show with an insane budget

The moral calculus is a little different but at one point characters in the original series explain how their family's been dumping bodies in the same spot for a hundred years!

Homer Simpson started all of this yall

Hello Mr Thompson

I'm not sure one could argue for any "anti-heroes" being in the cast (just various shades of awful really),

there were sympathetic characters on Oz -- the guy in the wheelchair, Beecher was fairly sympathetic, the old guy, the digger who was his roommate for awhile, the brother with brain damage ... I'm not sure how much we really were supposed to feel for the neo-Nazis when they had their vulnerable moments (I certainly didn't) but ... i think milo's right about the dynamic being different in re the ensemble cast vs. the one solo dude

rooting for a "bad" character is a nice fantasy. it's just a tv show, have a little fun and indulge in the allure of evil

paradise lost has a lot to answer for

didn't finish the series but when i watched the sopranos i was definitely rooting for tony soprano to get away with all his crimes

Treme coming at the height of Mad Men and Breaking Bad was an interesting contrast - suffused with decency and humanism but it was a bit of a flop, maybe because it didn’t have a way to ratchet up the tension.

I don’t mean to be flippant but I think it’s ok to root for a fictional bad person, even a very bad person, without it being a Judgement On You The Viewer. Like, it’s a very 2010s/20s idea to have everything measured against your own personal morality/purity.

Perhaps Dons/Walters/Alicia Florricks/Olivia Popes/Kendall’s sins and redeemable qualities are just exaggerated expressions of our own multitudes. Undeniably there’s a very 2000s trope in this but sometimes I also think this antihero analysis is also just a reductive way of saying “complicated fictional character”.

Also e.g. the Count of Monte Cristo (gets up to some really sketchy shit in the name of revenge but Dumas ultimately seems to be on his side), Charlie Brown (sometimes Schulz really seems to hate him)

I think this kind of drama has also waned a bit in popularity which might say something too

I feel like The Sopranos is more popular now (possibly due to a lot of leftist interpretations of the show) than ever

I agree it's ok to root for the bad guy sometimes but that argument seems much more relevant in a thread about, say, 30's gangster movies or Diabolik comics than these shows imo. Sopranos and Mad Men are both very explicit, almost didactic, about what a sad shell of a man their respective protagonists are. There's vicariously exciting aspects to both but I think a lot less time is spent on those than on the characters being depressed and angry at their lives. So I could see wanting Tony to get away with his crimes at the end of S1, but by S6? What for, so he can continue to be a ball of misery and resentment? Death would be a sweet release for him afaict.

Would the dudes in White Lotus (I only saw the second season) count? They often seemed terrible but complicated and nuanced.

I'm reading Gogol's'Dead Souls' at the moment and Chichikov is definitely an antihero, although it's probably supposed to read more as satire? He's frequently referred to literally as 'our hero' as he's being a sketchy scammer all over town.

I mean, Shakespeare is packed with antiheroes, right? Richard III is like a template for a lot of these terrible dudes.

Chichikov is funny as fuck when he's in self-justification mode even though he deeply down knows what he is doing is wrong iirc.

I think there's also a subtext to Dexter where "being a serial killer" can be read as metaphorical for "non-normative behavior and impulses" ... like, there is a fair amount of humor in it that is based on "weird guy really trying to fit in"

Funny that BB and Dexter both had a cop character who was on to the antihero, and both were killed by someone even worse.

Dexter had several cop characters that were on to him as the seasons went on ...

I had to take three runs against Succession before I could properly watch it - I think Trump being out of power was a prerequisite.

Anyway I was expecting a family of Donald Jr style failsons but all three kids (not Alan Ruck obvs) have their relatable moments. If you came out of the show being, like, “Logan is my guy“, I might worry though.

just about every ilx thread on a film or tv show i've ever read, the discussion has primarily focused on whether the main characters are morally good or bad people, with the default consensus typically that they're bad. always seemed weird to me. you're not santa claus or saint peter, and even if you were these people don't exist, you're free to think or feel any way about them with no consequence. go nuts

otm

i guess there's a personal question about how much you enjoy the adventures of dislikeable characters but yeah, otm

close thread

Was anyone itt saying you couldn't, though?

it's case by case for me but tbh nowadays i really can't vibe with ladsy macho shite for more than the length of a film

weirdly enough i'm not sure Tony S himself falls under the category of ladsy, macho. man was vulnerable

He would fall under that category in-universe but doesn't for the viewer because we are privvy to all the moments of vulnerability that he keeps hidden from his cronies.

More generally though I think there's often a secret element of vulnerability in a lot of stuff that gets tagged as macho precisely because the character's standing as avatars of masculinity allows them to express sentiments and affections that would otherwise be taboo - I see this in John Wayne's movie persona, the films of Chang Cheh, a lot of Bollywood...I've always been struck by how much Robert DeNiro's screen presence in the 70's feels like a lost child, though tbf he didn't do many films that could truly be described as "laddish".

" guess there's a personal question about how much you enjoy the adventures of dislikeable characters but yeah, otm"

New board description?

weirdly enough i'm not sure Tony S himself falls under the category of ladsy, macho. man was vulnerable

― zing me with your best zhot (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 9 April 2023 bookmarkflaglink

He did therapy. Before it was fashionable to do so.

he has panic attacks, although iirc it was a very fortunate panic attack that meant Tony B was in the wrong place at the wrong time rather than Tony S

If you came out of the show being, like, “Logan is my guy“, I might worry though.

It helps that Logan is not really a main character in Succession. We almost never know what he's really thinking. I am really hoping that the makers of Succession can resist the (presumably pretty strong) pressure to bring us Logan Roy: Quest for Power.

just about every ilx thread on a film or tv show i've ever read, the discussion has primarily focused on whether the main characters are morally good or bad people, with the default consensus typically that they're bad. always seemed weird to me. you're not santa claus or saint peter, and even if you were these people don't exist, you're free to think or feel any way about them with no consequence. go nuts

― flopson, Saturday, April 8, 2023 7:10 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

The shows invite the audience to wrestle with this question. It’s a deliberate narrative strategy. This thread is asking why this strategy is/was so popular.

Idk I've not personally felt like ILX gets hung up on a "good/evil" binary like, say, the rest of the internet, who often label a show or movie problematic if it has a character who is a bad person in it.

"Good/bad" are meaningless labels, but discussing the flaws of a character is interesting to me from a "how does their character line up with their stated beliefs" type discussion or debate how they wound up that way

Whereas it's not interesting to make moral judgements on a character for an exercise in Puritanism

otoh, meeting someone who idolizes a fictional character that is a piece of shit because they took the wrong lessons from the story is a good barometer that I should avoid this person.

I.E. all the right wing assholes with Punisher stickers on their car

Northern Exposure is an interesting one. I used to think Joel was the hero when I was a kid, much less so upon rewatching. Although it’s also about the diminishing returns of Rob Morrow’s performance

Nevermind male sociopaths. This stuff is too long. Sixty hours of your life with this stuff? It takes Pasolini 90 mins to do better.

Chuck Jones does it in 5!

I partially take back my earlier critiques of The Sopranos. Season 5 is masterful.

I think the show improves when Tony’s rage gets out of hand. It’s no longer a question of sympathizing with him or making excuses for him in your mind—you just observe him, both his humanity and his inhumanity.

Northern Exposure is an interesting one. I used to think Joel was the hero when I was a kid, much less so upon rewatching. Although it’s also about the diminishing returns of Rob Morrow’s performance

I wish this was streaming somewhere, it was the first adult show I watched regularly (aside from MASH reruns) with my grandma. I'm sure that it's not as good as my memories but it's still got to be pretty weird.

it is notoriously not streaming afaik, never has — one can buy complete series DVDs for 40 bucks. nice gift

lmao but mostly sad that there was a legit "Walter Write did nothing wrong" movement circulating online. he was such an obvious bad guy like two episodes in. by Season 4 he starts saying stuff like "I'm gonna run over this baby"

Nevermind male sociopaths. This stuff is too long. Sixty hours of your life with this stuff? It takes Pasolini 90 mins to do better.

― xyzzzz__

look, i'm not a christian myself but i think you're being a little hard on jesus christ here

I think there's also a subtext to Dexter where "being a serial killer" can be read as metaphorical for "non-normative behavior and impulses" ... like, there is a fair amount of humor in it that is based on "weird guy really trying to fit in"

― sarahell

this reading is kind of interesting to me because growing up my particular sort of, uh, non-normative behavior and impulses were portrayed in the media as something that pretty much only serial killers did!

i guess the implicit question here is... is there a way for a cishet white man to exhibit "non-normative behavior and impulses" _without_ being a sociopath?

there used to be a record label called DFA where you could do that

xxpost I mean the moment Elliott offers to pay for his medical treatment and he says "no" is pretty much where even the dumbest of fans should have said "hmm maybe his motivation is something other than his family".

it's like they originally go with the "oh fuck, what an indictment of the insurance industry, guy with cancer has to sling to get chemo", and then immediately provide an easy, crime-free solution to the problem only a few episodes later, if only he could swallow his pride.

For me, it's not a question whether the character is "good" or "evil." Villains can be played very effectively--Heath Ledger comes to mind immediately. I just struggle with a show in which I not only cannot sympathize with any of the characters, but in which many/most of them make me actively uncomfortable and on all of whom I wish nothing but disaster.

These kinds of shows, which brought a new critical prestige to television in the aughts and teens, shared a remarkable structural similarity. The protagonist is a man who does horrible things, and the viewer is “teased” between alternately sympathizing with them and wondering if they are in fact a heartless sociopath.

― treeship

see i guess the issue for me is that culturally, people who are classified as "cishet white men" are pressured into doing shitty things. i spent a long time trying to figure out how to be a "good" cishet white man and i never managed to figure that out. that's what interests me about shows like 24 where jack bauer is over and over put into these contrived situations where oh he just _has_ to torture somebody. it's like a metaphor for masculinity, normative masculinity keeps contriving these situations to pressure "good men" into doing shitty things. that's what interests me about the "despicable antihero".

Pressured because "there's no time" to do things legally.

For me, it's not a question whether the character is "good" or "evil." Villains can be played very effectively--Heath Ledger comes to mind immediately. I just struggle with a show in which I not only cannot sympathize with any of the characters, but in which many/most of them make me actively uncomfortable and on all of whom I wish nothing but disaster.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux)

like, i spend my life surrounded by people like this and i think overall it is _good_ to be confronted with such characters, sometimes i feel like if i can't escape people like that nobody else should be able to either, not because i want other people to hurt like i am hurt but because people like this are a _problem_ that we need to work together to... find ways of _healing_. (i don't trust "solutions".)

Pressured because "there's no time" to do things legally.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux)

but the pretext could really be anything, there's an infinite array of excuses for bad behavior and none of them stand up to scrutiny, imo

Right, because we are supposed to want them to commit these acts. It's a form of collective revenge strategy.

*fantasy, not strategy

Are there any despicable female antiheros?

we had one as Prime Minister for 10 fucking years

Gemma from Sons of Anarchy

elizabeth from the americans, much more zealous and less conflicted about doing bad things for the cause than her husband

Are there any despicable female antiheros?

― m0stly clean (Slowsquatch)

only in contexts where you have female _characters_. you find them in real life, just like you find the character represented by the "despicable male antihero" in real life, but they're underrepresented in media just like women in general are underrepresented in media.

Right, because we are supposed to want them to commit these acts. It's a form of collective revenge strategy.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux)

and for me it's more than that, it's a _blame shifting_ strategy, it's DARVO, it's a way of framing the oppressor as the victim. you don't understand, i had to torture that person! they were a terrorist who was going to murder half of new york! it was _pre-emptive self-defense_. i've seen it again and again, normative masculinity bullies men who are just trying to be decent human beings into doing awful shit, and then normative masculinity blames the people they're doing the awful shit to.

i mean, look at incels, perfect example. these asshole guys tell men that women won't love them unless they treat women like shit, and this turns out to be wrong, and then those same asshole guys tell them well that's the women's fault, maybe you should just go your own way. guys like that, i alternate between sympathizing with them and wondering if they are in fact heartless sociopaths.

so even if guys don't necessarily have a lot of insight into what they're doing, for me, seeing these portrayals, seeing how they reflect actual people, has helped me to understand what motivates them, not just on an individual but on a _systemic_ level, and what the results of those systems and social pressures are. seeing michael chiklis on screen is... helpful when it comes to trying to conceptually understand that All Cops Are Bastards (which is an idea a _lot_ of people still _really_ struggle with).

Usually you have female villains and not female antiheroes. Probably Cersei Lannister and Carmela Soprano are two examples of near-antiheroes though I'd say CL falls halfway between villain and antihero and CS doesn't directly do much antihero shit as much as she doesn't really object strenuously enough to antihero shit.

Probably a vv solid example of a female-led show which had complexity across the board was GLOW, which of course got the Netflix treatment and canceled between their penultimate and intended-to-be-final season. I wouldn't say it had characters doing vile things which we watched w/glee but rather complex flawed characters.

Joelle Carter's Ava in Justified is a pretty strong female character with shades of the antihero, but unlike Boyd when given the point of no return choice she winds up doing the right thing as opposed to the wrong thing.

I didn’t make it past the first season but Ruth on Ozark?

xps the female character type who most resembles (and to some extent replaced) these guys in terms of cultural relevance is the "hot mess" who is irresponsible and morally questionable but softer and much more #relatable than the glowery dudes before her. there is a lot going on in all this that I'm sure has been thoroughly unpacked already in 100s of tweets and thinkpieces over the last decade

Cersei Lannister was a straight-up villain.

A straight up villain in that show was that Bolton failson, Cersei was given some shades of tragedy and she paid a cost for her duplicity, which kinda tempered her villainy. plus ultimately the way the show ended probably made her mildly more sympathetic. Whether or not the show ended poorly (it did) she was not just purely true evil. An antagonist for sure but in the end she was maybe kinda sorta on the right side, obv of course that's bc the show ended the way it did.

Yeah, but I wouldn't call her an antihero.

She's got some of those traits, after she's been degraded and outcast by everyone in power around her and she has her revenge I don't think we're meant to feel much pity for her victims or previously have felt she was getting what was coming to her. We may have even been rooting for her a bit. I mean of course that's also because of one key element of rooting for antiheroes, which is having them in opposition to even more worse complete villains.

The Good Place was a show all about changing a despicable female antihero into a good person

Elizabeth on the Americans fits as a female anti-hero.

thread summary: toxic masculinity still sells

Philip does his share of despicable things but Elizabeth was way more hard core. Yet she still managed to elicit some sympathy.

Never saw the show but keri russell is innocent

we are supposed to want them to commit these acts. It's a form of collective revenge strategy.

This was the dishonesty at the heart of Se7en, where the audience is purportedly meant to be shocked and dismayed by the lead character's act of revenge, while the movie wouldn't have any point if he didn't act.

huge disagree tbh, i think on a first watch it sets up a huge tension as to what Pitt's character will do and when he does pull the trigger it's tragic, a defeat

excuse my late night repetitiveness

Yes, if you see the film as a tragedy, then the action is an inevitability arising from the character's flaw. I don't think the film supported that weight and, while it pays lip-service to the evils of rage and revenge, it gives the audience the satisfaction of seeing the villain slain.

the female character type who most resembles (and to some extent replaced) these guys in terms of cultural relevance is the "hot mess" who is irresponsible and morally questionable but softer

this thread has gotten interesting in the sense that it makes me wonder about whether what we choose to watch is also causing blindspots here? ... Outside of the basic "most shows' main characters are cis-men" therefore there are going to be way more male heroes, anti-heroes, big bad villains, etc ... but outside of that ... maybe it's the algorithm or just people's flawed memories ... but ... geez ...

Glenn Close on Damages, as well as Gemma Teller on SoA (someone did mention her upthread). ... one could make a case for Annelise Keating on How to Get Away With Murder ... Viola Davis is so fucking good in that.

oh and related to that -- Famke Jannsen -- in that vampire/werewolf/total OTT show (forget the name) but ...

The last thing I felt was "satisfaction" at the end of Seven

Like I don't even see how it plays to that. It has none of the elements that you typically find in a revenge fantasy.

Spacey isn't defeated - he sacrifices himself. Pitt doesn't "win", he is manipulated. And Pitt's wife is dead purely due to the bad luck of being married to him. There's no release.

yeah i don't think ppl were that anti-Gwyneth at the time

it's pretty much a "forget it, Jake" type of ending

Glenn Close on Damages

I periodically think about watching this show. Was it good?

I liked it quite a bit ...

i did too

Damages rules

even though there are diminishing returns after the first season

at least watch the first season

Glenn Close is incredible

but i would argue that over time that show turns into a character study, and less of an indictment? it never pulls any punches about the horrible things Patti Hewes does, but it makes you understand why and she's such a towering character and Close just out-acts everyone around her. it's hard to come away thinking she's uniquely dastardly; it's more like the world is utterly fucked and that creates some dastardly behavior.

also don't skip the second season because timmy o(lyphant) is brutally hot in it.

maybe i'll rewatch Damages

back up everyone, hold up, somebody mentioned Hemlock Grove

yes!!! Hemlock Grove ... and ... oh i forgot Timmy O was in Damages ...

this thread has gotten interesting in the sense that it makes me wonder about whether what we choose to watch is also causing blindspots here?

Thank you -- this is a fucking boring thread.

Are there any despicable female antiheros?

― m0stly clean (Slowsquatch), Saturday, April 15, 2023 2:10 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Joan Crawford as Crystal in The Women (1939)?

Betsy Lou in Elaine Dundy's The Old Man and Me (1963)? According to the author, she wrote this in part as a female version of the Angry Young Man character--I don't think I've seen any discussion of this genre upthread?--prevalent in London.

This was the dishonesty at the heart of Se7en, where the audience is purportedly meant to be shocked and dismayed by the lead character's act of revenge, while the movie wouldn't have any point if he didn't act.

― Halfway there but for you

look

i know i overthink things, ok? i know i overthink things.

but to me the underlying moral framework of _se7en_ is just so _fundamentally flawed_, it only _works_ if you implicitly buy into the christian neoplatonic moralism at the heart of western imperialist culture

and to me if you look, particularly, at the pre-gregorian list of eight cardinal sins (yes i'm looking at the wikipedia article as a source here), you see for instance acedia defined as a sin. now acedia isn't a word used in the present day. the present-day concept it maps most closely to, though it's not a 1:1 match, is depression. i really think that the anglosphere in particular needs to come to terms with the systemically toxic and abusive legacy of christian morality, a morality which is victim-blaming. to define something like depression (revised by pope gregory into "sloth") as an _individual moral wrong_ is just a clear sign of the fundamental moral perversion represented by christian morals and ethics. you can also see this in say something like "gluttony". as someone who is obese, as someone who has struggled with her weight, it's a _continuous_ frustration to me that obesity is classified as a _moral weakness_ which people who are fat possess. fat-shaming is built into christian ethics and that's just monstrous, totally monstrous. and that's not even getting into the whole bit where evagrius ponticus defines sex work as a sin. and so a movie like _se7en_, its whole supposed moral core is just rotten, completely rotten. it doesn't matter what the main character does or doesn't do. what matters are questions far beyond what the film is willing to consider.

and that, to me, is the fundamental failure of the "despicable male antihero", the framing is fucked, these supposed moral quandaries are a result of _refusing to even ask the right questions_. which is why the value of these shows to me is the way they open the possibility for us to reject wholesale the false and pernicious morality such shows are based on.

All male antihero shows are just shows about Donald Trump to me now, and therefore unwatchable.

i guess the tl;dr is that the real villain of se7en is _christian morality itself_, and any attempt at individual moral action which fails to acknowledge or confront this larger evil is foreordained to failure.

Well, I guess the "moralist" in the story is the villain, he's the one enforcing punishment for the sins. So in that respect the film defies Christianity, but its humanism isn't sufficient as a replacement ideology.

Is Se7en actually about a despicable male antihero? 24 certainly isn't, I mean Jack Bauer is despicable to me but the show views him as straightforwardly heroic imo.

I just brought it up in answer to something someone else had said, not to apply specifically to the thread.

Are there any despicable female antiheros?

Does Gene Tierney in Leave Her To Heaven count?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sZYx2x3l3I

I've watched the first two episodes of Damages and it's pretty good! Some people in it who I remember from Billions.

Late to this thread so sorry if I’ve missed something, but Despicable Female Antihero Pixie Dream Girls:

Alexis Carrington Colby Whateverthefuck (Joan Collins) on Dynasty

Abbie Cunningham Ewing (Donna Mills) on Knots Landing

Angela Channing (Jane Wyman) on Falcon Crest

Different degrees of reprehensibility and charisma but perhaps noteworthy in this context.

Atia of the Julii? Or is she just too much of a villain?

Gene Tierney is a great shout!

Late to this thread so sorry if I’ve missed something, but Despicable Female Antihero Pixie Dream Girls:

Alexis Carrington Colby Whateverthefuck (Joan Collins) on Dynasty

Abbie Cunningham Ewing (Donna Mills) on Knots Landing

Angela Channing (Jane Wyman) on Falcon Crest

Different degrees of reprehensibility and charisma but perhaps noteworthy in this context.

― Josefa, Sunday, April 16, 2023 2:01 PM (yesterday)

hell yeah -- and this also brings us back to the idea upthread that shows with a female antihero are either written as melodramas (soap operas) or get categorized that way more often, as opposed to ones with male antiheroes.

I had an obliquely referred to earlier suggestion of Laure Berthaud in Engrenages, comparing it to The Shield, but she's probably more the Gallic mcnulty vs being the white hat Vic Mackey.

she is very much the McNulty

I think it can be easy to overthink and overmoralize about the male antihero character. To a certain extent, the purpose of TV and any fiction is going to be fantasy and escape. The antihero is unencumbered by the conventions and morals that most of us feel obligated to live by, and therefore gets to do things we fantasize about doing but won't or can't do. Little different than a superhero in that sense, or a porn star.

Putting that aside, I also think the Sopranos is doing something interesting with the other characters' relationship to the antihero, and in particular Carmella. I suspect this may tie in to the foreign policy allegory that, tbh, I've often had a hard time grasping the purpose of. In a sense, the American Empire is Tony and we are all Carmella - living fat off its evils while tsking at its excesses. Always living in a state of semi-blindness and denial while remaining dependent.

*tbc, a superhero may be encumbered by a moral code, but is also unencumbered by normal physical limitations. So I'm just making the comparison in the sense that both offer an object of fantasy projection, albeit a different fantasy.

Again, I think there's plenty of entertainment that provides the escapism of protagonists unencumbered by moral limitations but these dramas are patently not that - Tony Soprano, Don Draper, etc. are encumbered as fuck. The moral handwringing is built into the writing, it's not a neurosis of the audience.

I’m thinking now of Mare of Eastown where Mare is a hero cop who still does things like planting drugs on her grandson’s mother to get her arrested.

Has anybody in this thread been watching the FX show Snowfall? The protagonist, Franklin Saint, is one of the darkest antiheroes around — honestly, he's just a villain, the guy who invents crack cocaine in Los Angeles and who partners up with a CIA agent in the 80s to get cheap product — but the series finale aired last night and his collapse/comeuppance is pretty goddamn devastating, and thoroughly justified.

where does a character like Amos Burton from The Expanse fit in here? He's not really an anti-hero because he is very much on the side of the good guys, and slowly tries to be a better person, but he's also deeply morally compromised and takes a ton of glee from finding any excuse possible to murder someone.

where does a character like Amos Burton from The Expanse fit in here? He's not really an anti-hero because he is very much on the side of the good guys, and slowly tries to be a better person, but he's also deeply morally compromised and takes a ton of glee from finding any excuse possible to murder someone.

― Muad'Doob (Moodles)

the way you describe the character makes him sound a lot like me tbh

Have you left a trail of dead bodies in your wake?

one, and wouldn't you know it, Phil Collins saw it!
--------------------------------------------------------

went to see phil collins in '82 and it was great but when he started playing "in the air tonight" he put a big spotlight on me and then the cops came and arrested me. turned out i'd murdered somebody a couple years previously and phil saw the whole thing and wrote the song about me, and i wound up doing twenty for it, so i never saw the end of the show.

the phenix horns were great that night, though.

― rushomancy, Sunday, September 13, 2015 3:10 AM bookmarkflaglink

where does a character like Amos Burton from The Expanse fit in here? He's not really an anti-hero because he is very much on the side of the good guys

Amos is a secondary character ... so it isn't really the same dynamic? And he's also kinda "comic relief" in a bleak way ... like Omar on "The Wire"

100% a "a man must have a code" dude

I have been meaning to intrude here but I cannot see how Omar is an anti-hero— he’s probably one of the only redeemable characters on that show.

Omar is straightforward heroic, yes. Unless you view every lawbreaker as an anti-hero.

idk I can see murder being a line?

I can see the similarities between Amos and Omar, and I agree Omar is not an anti-hero, but Amos' code is far more muddled and obscure, and it often boils down to doing what the captain or Naomi tell him to do because he trusts their judgment better than he trusts his own. The show is structured so that he never really hurts anyone who doesn't have it coming, but it also makes clear that he wouldn't hesitate to hurt good people if they get in his way at the wrong time. Omar is depicted as a kind of Robin Hood figure right from the start, while Amos stumbles around for many seasons trying to sort out what is the best way to be.

idk I can see murder being a line?

I don't think either Amos or Omar are despicable by the logic of the shows and how their characters are created within that ...

like in terms of Wire characters, Stringer is closer to this type than Omar. but I don't really see any character in The Wire as really "fitting" here because the show isn't so much about character/people as it is about systems? idk ... compared to Walter White?

yes, no one in The Wire has enough autonomy or agency to truly fit this role. And a lot of this stuff is the actual thematic substance of the show itself, like the courtroom scene with Omar for ex

Sure sure, I heart Omar, I was just saying that I can see a point of view where killing means you're not a hero.

You'd probably watch a lot of Ted Lasso

Omar's code is that he doesn't kill anybody not in the game, and being 'in the game' means you implicitly consent to possibly being shot at one day. whereas Avon's crew is creating and maintaining addicts, killing people directly and indirectly (including civilians). so I see that argument.

but by the same token, there are kids in the street that idolize him and take the wrong lessons from what he does. which isn't to say Bunk's little lecture wasn't pretentious and hypocritical as hell but....

ultimately Omar has more of a moral compass than most of the bangers in the series.

The end of the Tucker Carlson series was pretty surprising, but I'm not sure he got a satisfying enough comeuppance

"you got the briefcase, I got the bow tie, it's all in the game though, right?"

"You've got the briefcase, I've got the bow tie, let's make lots of money."