The worst men on television
A long-overdue increase in diversity widened the scope of who could carry a series, and as the progressive-minded incoming class of TV creators centred women, people of colour, and non-heteronormative characters, they used substantially adjusted narrative dynamics. From I May Destroy You to Pose to Shrill, these shows mined drama from external obstacles forced upon often flawed but essentially sympathetic lead characters dealing with a society stacked against them, rather than the solipsistic existential quandaries experienced by the privileged. There’s an optics angle to be considered as well, that a loathsome protagonist is a safer sell for a network when applied to the white men on the winning side of hegemony.
Where these characters have ended up
But if newly minted antiheroes aren’t exactly fashionable anymore, audiences are still enamoured by the golden oldies: the followings for the ’00s heavyweights only continue to grow, with the international lockdowns generating many reports on how and why The Sopranos has become a favoured binge-watch. All the while, antihero shows have kept getting the green light, albeit to more unabashedly populist ends. The political alignment of America’s four big networks – NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox – skews from centre-left to centre-slightly-further-right, and their relationship to corrupt, compromised men reflects an enduring affinity that the shows topping year-end lists are taking strides to unlearn. The police procedural still reigns supreme on network TV, its draw predicated in part on our at-times morbid fascination with all things seedy and lurid, a relaxed ethical stance that extends to the leading figures. While young-skewing sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine has reckoned with evolving attitudes toward policing, the likes of the mega-successful Law and Order franchise have stuck by their cops-on-the-edge. Christopher Meloni’s Elliot Stabler, a driven detective whose pursuit of justice often leads him to rampage over the line, now leads in his own spin-off series subtitled Organized Crime, bringing the hurt to the mob.
Stabler’s latest vehicle doesn’t lose much sleep over his various lapses, telling of a widespread disinterest within network shows in exploring difficult personal judgements over more pleasurable gawking at sinfulness. Not so far off on the moral spectrum is The Blacklist, a ratings smash on NBC for nine seasons and counting, in which James Spader plays the sort of character who inspired the phrase “love to hate”. As Red, the criminal mastermind tentatively working with the FBI to track down other public enemies, his air of arch villainy covers the occasional glimmer of humanity. But the lure of this show, along with the many others modeled after Silence of the Lambs’ twisted investigations (the short-lived Prodigal Son, starring Michael Sheen as a serial killer helping out his law-enforcer offspring, put a family-affair spin on the formula), lies in the perverse weekly thrill of tagging along with the bad guys.
