What about House MD? He is always breaking the law, by for good reasons.
I’ll second or third Battlestar Galactica, which contains many protagonists making many difficult and perhaps wrong moral choices. My favorite show of all time, easily.
He is trying to do the right thing by his kids.
He was a victim of a psychopathic mother who abused him.
He feels guilt and horror at some of the things he does.
He is no Michael Corleone.
By being a terrible role model, then getting pissed when they emulate him? By physically and constantly verbally abusing AJ? By ordering the murder of Meadow’s friend/boyfriend? By constantly lying to them and then getting pissed when they call him on his lies? He may want to do the right thing by his kids, but that doesn’t make him morally ambiguous.
Being a victim does’t necessarily make you morally ambiguous.
I think you would be hard-pressed to demonstrate that whatever guilt and horror Tony feels for his actions is a running theme in The Sopranos. He fucks around and never really cares about Carmella. He kills his best friends because it’s what’s best for him. In the very first episode Tony is smiling and laughing gleefully as he runs down a guy who owes him money. In one of the last episodes his subconscious expresses in a dream with Dr. Melfi how incredibly relieved he is that he killed Christopher. Not much changed in between those episodes. That’s who Tony is. Self-serving, deceiving and morally bankrupt.
And I don’t mean that in a what-a-terrible-show-it-is way. The Sopranos is the definition of fucking awesome. But I think people who think there is a battle inside being waged by the Good Tony and the Bad Tony are victims of how wonderful the writing, acting and directing are. We feel compelled to root Tony as this fun-lovin’, mischievous rascal but he is so larger than life and magnetic that we forget that he’s really a cold blooded, muderous thug. That goes a long way for him being an anti-hero, but it does not make him morally ambiguous. He is a bad, bad dude.
There wouldnt have been a series had he not been ripped apart by his own ambivalence. The series opens with him visiting a psychiatrist. He both is trying to save his family and ripping it apart. He is able to do this via personality doubling: The mechanism that allowed Nazi killers and gangbangers to be both murderers and functioning and loving family members.
Dude, that is what Nazis and gangbangers tell themselves, that is not what they look like to any rational outside viewer. It is an excuse they dream up to cleanse them of the sins they commit but don’t want to admit, to make themselves think they aren’t really all that bad. Are you saying the Nazis aren’t really all that bad? Genocide is mitigated because they love their family? The question isn’t Does Tony think he’s morally ambiguous? because that tells us nothing- of course he thinks he’s basically a good guy at heart. The question is Do you, as the outside viewer, think he is morally ambiguous, as evidenced by his actions?
And “ripped apart by his own ambivalence?” Are you watching the Bizarro World Sopranos? In the beginning, he doesn’t even really want to be in therapy at all. He’s only there because his family doctor recommended it for his panic attacks.
Tony lies to Melfi all the time, he’s rarely honest about himself in therapy. Please explain how lying to his therapist equals trying to save his family. Anyway, he rarely takes what she says to heart unless he can use it as a business strategy. Like he said to his coach in one of his dreams, he has her wrapped around his finger, totally shining her on, just like he does every single person in his life. Did you watch the episode near the end where Melfi finally realizes that her therapy is useless for sociopaths and in fact only serves to validate them? Because that’s why Tony kept going to see Melfi- it has nothing to do with moral ambiguity.
When you consistently pick the options that are designed to hurt others or protect yourself at almost any cost, you are not morally ambiguous. How often does Tony pick the options that cost him?
Read The Nazi Doctors by Robert J Lifton to learn more about personality doubling and other defense mechanisms bad people (and even the rest of us) use to protect ourselves.
He really doesnt want to be in therapy? But he is.
He has panic attacks? Why? What is bothering him?
We all lie about ourselves. At least he is trying to examine his life.
Were he simply unambiguous evil he would have dumped his family, killed both his Mom and his Uncle and never entered therapy.
OK, perhaps I should have been more clear…early Breaking Bad.
It’s frequently mentioned in articles/blogs/discussions about this very topic. I would say 2nd to only the Sopranos, which also fits your description IMHO.
He didn’t want to at the beginning, but then realized he could apply what he learned from Melfi to be a better criminal, not a better moral person. He is in therapy to both exploit Melfi’s training into making him a better criminal and to validate that all his evil actions are in the right. What about that is morally ambiguous?
Since the reason is mostly left vague in the series, if you have any direct evidence that it is because he is morally ambiguous, please post it.
The difference is, and you’ve seen the show so you should know this, Tony lies constantly to the people who are closest to him. How can you ever hope to meaningfuly examine yourself if you lie constantly? Empty, meaningless actions do not make Tony morally ambiguous.
He stays with Carmela to continue the charade that he is a good Catholic and a decent family man, 2 things we all know he is not. He keeps Uncle Junior alive as a lightning rod to draw away government heat from himself. He tries very publicly to kill Livia and is thwarted. Think that would be good for his business, Tony going back to complete the job when everyone is already spreading rumors about him?
It seems to me an inescapable conclusion that Tony has extremely duplicitous, sociopathic and murderous tendencies and that almost every action he takes is entirely self-serving, often to the detriment of others. The question being asked isn’t What made Tony that way? The question is Is Tony a morally ambiguous person? So in your next reply, please do not try to explain away the evils of Nazism by noting Hitler was a vegetarian and an animal lover; instead bring some specific examples of what makes Tony a morally ambiguous person.
Chicago PD is sort of a brighter cheerier version of The Shield. Gravel-voiced Sgt. Hank Voight isn’t above roughing up suspects and has quite a stash of questionable money, that he usually uses to help people he thinks deserving.
Charlie Crews in Life was a police detective that was framed for murdering a family and went to prison. In the meantime his wife divorced him and remarried. He was basically a good guy but he wasn’t above constantly harassing his wife’s new husband, and he was fairly ruthless in his pursuit of the people that framed him and murdered the family.
How about Sleepers?
Well, I am actually going to finish watching the last 2 episodes tonight, so maybe that was a spoiler…but so far I can only think offhand of one person he killed who clearly didn’t fit the code, who he had wrongly concluded was a killer (though granted he seemed to get over his regrets at that awfully quick).
I can think of a couple situations (trying to avoid spoilers here, but if you want to refresh my memory you can use a spoiler tag) in which he captured people who were going to turn witness against him, in one case with the pretty clear intention of killing her, but in both cases others intervened to save him from having to do the actual killing, and in both cases he was clearly very troubled by the thought of killing an innocent person.
Princess Mononoke The woman who run the mill that is destroying the environment has many good qualities. She employs lepers and buys other women out of prostitution and gives them honest work.
Princess Mononoke herself is a bit nuts.
Blake’s 7.
The Federation is indeed corrupt and in need of revolution, but Blake’s an absolute Bin Laden-level terrorist. Blowing up the Federation’s central control station will kill trillions of people because it does things like control the heating on colonized ice planets? Eh, no problem, all the death and destruction will disrupt things enough to allow revolution to happen.
And, of course, Kerr Avon had a whole episode essentially dedicated to his willingness to literally dump his shipmate out an airlock to save his own hide.