This ends up playing out in true crime documentaries most often but I was wondering if there’s any more series that are very very morally ambiguous. I’m mostly thinking about possibly a crime show/documentary series where you really can’t tell in the end whether the person is guilty or not. I really wanted to see this in The Jinx, but it was pretty clear that robert durst did it and there wasn’t a lot of questions to be answered. I like the First 48 a little bit where I try to figure out while they’re interviewing someone if they did it or not, but sometimes the show can be pretty low production value and not have a lot of meat to it. You have to really search to find the good episodes.
Moreover, series where there’s no clear bad guy are really fun as well. In the Wire, there are very few truly BAD characters who are just mean to be mean. Everyone has their reasons for doing what they do, just like in real life.
My favorite one was called The Zero Effect (Bill Pullman at his best!) It’s a fantastic detective / mystery story. At the end, Ben Stiller’s character says, “There aren’t Good Guys and Bad Guys. They are all just a bunch of guys!”
Absolutely one of my favorite films. Like all mysteries, everyone’s got secrets and hidden motivations. The plots are all involve the loose ends are discovered and followed. Bill Pullman (Zero) masterfully manipulates the various characters.
I recall one L&O:SVU ep where a professor was charged with raping a student. Persuasive evidence both for and against his guilt was presented. It ended in that frustrating “The Lady or the Tiger?” fashion – the judge asked the jury foreman to read the verdict, roll credits.
IMHO, this exact idea is what Battlestar Galactica did that made it worthwhile. Leaving aside the silly big-picture ending concept, during the run of the show, nearly every character faced ugly difficult choices without a clearly correct moral alternative.
Also, the good guys in The Wire for the most part weren’t straightforward good guys either. Bunny probably came closest to a tragic hero. A lot of the cops, though, especially McNulty, don’t seem to care much about justice or law and order or avenging the dead. It’s all just The Game to them, too. One of my favorite scenes is McNulty’s reaction to the death of Stringer Bell. He’s crushed because he finally had enough to catch the guy, “and he doesn’t fucking know it.” It’s not that the justice system didn’t get him, but that he doesn’t know that McNulty had finally beaten him, that makes McNulty so upset.
Ethics in America, a ten-part series produced by Columbia University Seminars on Media and Society, and shown on PBS in the late '80s. Panelists are guided through various hypothetical scenarios intended to lead them to difficult moral or ethical choices. Panelists included Geralidine Ferraro and Antonin Scalia. Moderators were professors from leading law schools. Sample question: You are a reporter investigating humanitarian issues and become embedded with troops in an unfriendly country. They receive orders and set up an ambush of U.S. forces. Do you reveal your position at the certain cost of your own life?
Dilemma, an occasional radio series produced by the BBC. Panelists are guided through various hypothetical scenarios intended to lead them to difficult moral or ethical choices. Panelists include British comedians you haven’t heard of. Moderator is Sue Perkins. Sample question: World peace, or free bacon?
If you’re going to use an individual episode, Magnum, in the second season of Magnum, P.I.executes his antagonist in cold blood. End of part II of the episode “Did you see the sunrise?”
Rectify is available streaming on Netflix, and might also be available on Sundance. It’s about a man who was released, but not quite exonerated, by dna evidence after serving twenty years on death row.
The main character’s guilt or innocence is completely ambiguous for the first season and much of the second.
The show is primarily about how the characters adjust and handle things after the MC is released, so it might not fit the OP’s requirements.
The 100 has developed the same sort of vibe (once you get past the first couple episodes, which appear to have been created by scribbling some Battlestar Galactica plot summaries and Beverly Hills 90210 casting notes on the margins of a Lord of the Flies dust jacket).
One of the realistic things about Law & Order was that even when the accused person clearly did whatever the crime was, the prosecution still had to wrestle with what to charge the person with. Sometimes it was as complicated as whether or not to contest the defense’s assertion of insanity or self-defense. Other times it was more subtle-- lots of discussion over whether this or that point of the crime made it murder or manslaughter, and what they could prove vs. what they felt or even knew to be true. Sometimes they knew someone had committed first degree murder, but because a piece of evidence had been disallowed, the prosecutors ended up charging the person with second degree murder.
In the episode “Homesick,” where the first trial ended in a mistrial, the prosecutors changed the charges and the theory of the crime for the second trial in order to get a conviction the second time.
This does happen in real life. Personally, I think the Casey Anthony case was lost by charging her with first degree murder. If she’d been charged with manslaughter, she’d be in prison now.
The Sopranos is still the show I judge most others against. This is especially the case if the show im watching pretends to be a hard hitting drama. I really thought The Sopranos would change tv forever. Unfortunately its still good guys versus bad guys far too often in self styled gritty dramas.
In my opinion the main protagonist - Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) - is unambiguously a bad person. That is made clear from the first episode.
What made the show interesting was the way it showed how even an unambiguously bad person had their good points (devoted father for example) and could, at times, be useful when there was an even more violent or heinous criminal who needed apprehending.
In general terms I liked the show plus it gains a special place in the pantheon of great TV by the way it carried a single story arc from the first episode to the very last.
Hasn’t the entire run of The Walking Dead been a character study in Rick’s journey from Shining White Knight to “I’ll do whatever it takes”? I mean, we just watched The Good Guy propose killing a man in cold blood, ostensibly to protect a resident from a wife-beater, but we know that Rick wants more than a professional relationship with said wife… In a nutshell, Shane was the embodiment of moral ambiguity, and Rick killed him for it. Now Rick is Shane.
In the first season of Arrow, Oliver is hunting people down and killing them just because they’re on this list his dad gave him. As it turns out, yeah, they’re all bad guys, but he doesn’t seem to be burning the midnight oil researching anything. He just picks a name and heads out…