(This has probably been discussed before. Mods: feel free to PM link to old thread and close this one.)
I’ve been catching up on American TV series during recent months. Dexter - hero is a serial killer Breaking Bad - Dad turns into murdering drug dealer Mad Men - lead role is deserter, womanizer, sexual pervert Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, … ???
I don’t disapprove. These shows are far more interesting than Father Knows Best. But in old series (e.g. Branded) if the hero seemed bad, he was actually innocent. When and why did this change occur? I’m curious what Dopers think about this change.
After World War One, anti-heros became acceptable in literature.
After World War Two, imperfect heros became acceptable in movies. (Film noir.)
During the 1970s, anti-heros were popular in movies, and imperfect heros became acceptable on TV.
During the 1980s, anti-heros became acceptable on TV. (J.R. Ewing on Dallas and Joan Collins’ character on Dynasty spring to mind.)
The first TV show I remember where the characters were flawed in a realistic way (as opposed to a J.R. Ewing, who was a cartoon-like, larger-than-life character) was Hill Street Blues (1981). Before this, in police/detective shows and westerns, the good guys were the good guys (Joe Friday, Marshall Dillon) and the bad guys were the bad guys and they were not continuing characters. They got killed, went to prison, or got run out of town at the end of the episode. The ensemble that showed up from week to week were good guys, period.
But in Hill Street Blues, I remember very distinctly not knowing from week to week which cast members were the good guys. Some of the cops, who were good cops and often heroic, did stuff Joe Friday never dreamed of. And the main character Capt. Frank Furillo (as a reviewer on the IMDB said) was likable precisely because he was flawed. How flawed? He was sleeping with the D.A. Prior to this, in my memory, heroes didn’t have personal lives, flaws, and they certainly didn’t have sex (or not blatantly outside of marriage, anyway).
Hill Street Blues showed flawed human beings in difficult situations who sometimes did the right thing and sometimes didn’t. This had not been done before on TV and especially not in this realistic style.
From there, it was a hop, skip, and a jump to anti-heroes, which the prior poster correctly says came into being in plays, novels, and film after WWII, but which did not penetrate the happy bubble of TV (dramas and sitcoms) for several decades.
Unless I’m mistaken “Anti-hero” and “Imperfect hero” are synonymous. An anti-hero is a protagonist lacking any of the essential heroic qualities, so a protagonist who is somewhat old or somewhat ugly are anti-heroes, not just villanous
The current trend, however, seems not to be simply “flawed” characters, but outright disgusting, cruel, and with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
I don’t mind shows like DEXTER, where the flawed main characters are least trying to do some good (although we only watched the first two seasons of DEXTER). We do watch JUSTIFIED, where again the flawed main character is at least trying to do good, right wrongs, etc. (“Ends justify the means” is not my philosophy, but makes for an interesting drama.) But we dislike shows like THE SOPRANOS or THE BORGIAS where the flawed characters are only out for selfishness and greed. The main characters are not “heroes” or “anti-heros”, they’re villains.
After the success of Sunday Mystery Movie (Columbo, McCloud, MacMillan & Wife), NBC branched out with edgier characters on Wednesday Mystery Movie in 1971. This included Banacek (George Peppard as a screwball wiseass who solved mysteries and boffed fabulous 70s babes), Madigan (Richard Widmark as a bilious police sergeant) and Cool Million (James Farantino as a somewhat amoral burglar/retrieval specialist, reminiscent of “gentleman burglars” like Raffles). The lineup also had more conventionally heroic (though butt-ugly) protagonists like Hec Ramsey (a detective in the Old West who brought scientific police techniques to bear on frontier bandits) and Quincy, M.E. (Jack Klugman as the granddaddy of CSI examiners).
I really got the sense that they weren’t so much foisting an agenda as trying to find a new winning formula, but Wednesday Mystery Movie pioneered the use of dodgy and unpleasant protagonists on prime time TV. It’s no accident that they tended to be detectives; Sam Spade and Mike Hammer had as much in common with the criminals they pursued as they did with their readership.
I think Dexter kinda shows the limits of this actually. The writers dialed back the serial killer thing even before the end of the first season. He went from a psychopath who couldn’t empathize with anyone but his sister, who it was suggested tortured his victims and who killed criminals not out of a desire for justice but because that’s what his father taught him to do. Now he spends a lot of time worried about the fates of his friends and families (and sometimes even strangers), kills people “because they deserve it” and does so quickly with a single stab wound to the heart.
He’s basically a vigilante killer now. Not exactly a great role model, but a long way from the original premise of a serial killer that kills other serial killers. I think the writers realized that audiences will accept a character whose a jerk (Don Draper), sliding into evil (Walter White), is a semi-moral operator in a highly immoral society (Rodriguz Borgias, Nucky Thompson). But a straight-up psychopathic murder-addict is probably a bridge to far.
An audience ever-increasingly jaded to violence (and sex) requires more shocks to bring in the higher Nielsen ratings to prompt sponsors to pay out the shekels to make a profit for the networks. Same with the movies.
Bonanza had Bad Guys, usually shot by Adam, and Good Bad Guys.
The Good Bad Guy is part of the plot to rob the Virginia City Widows and Orphans Bank, but something about the Cartwrights touches is inner Good Guyness. (OMG, if I get all that money, I’ll be able to afford to eat food, and get as fat as Hoss!) So he thwarts the plot, but because he is a Bad Guy, cashes in his chips while thwarting.
And the anti-Archie, Mike Brady, who aired at the same time, was considered ridiculously unrealistic even at the time (and even by the actor playing him).
Weird - the only main character on that show I don’t root for is the FBI neighbour guy who cheats on his wife and murders tied-up people. The married spies and the young double agent, I actually find myself rooting for more-and-more, and I don’t even see them as “bad guys” any more, I see them as good guys who just happen to be working for the “wrong” side. And three deeply, deeply damaged people. Which is an odd response because they try and play up FBI neighbour guy as deeply damaged too, by his time undercover with White Power groups, and it elicits not an iota of sympathy from me.
Clint Eastwood played a big part in the transformation with his spaghetti westerns. The major change was the anti-hero didn’t have to redeem himself at the end of the movie.
I don’t root for the FBI guy either. Early in the season there was a scene where Keri Russel’s character killed an innocent civilian because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That breaks the rules for me to root for someone.
I don’t think that has anything to do with it. You can have plenty of sex and violence without having an anti-hero, and an anti-hero without a lot of graphic sex and violence.
And its not exactly a new thing in, Richard III is every HS English teachers favorite example of an anti-hero, and ancient Greek drama and lit. was famous for focusing on the flaws of its subjects (“Rage, sing oh ye muse of the Rage of Achilles…”) Its just TV didn’t really start using it until the last decade.
I think its just a result of TV dramas becoming more serious and planned out, and less light and episodic. Prior to 1990 or so, even most of the dramas were pretty campy.
!! I think you’ve hit a big nail on the head! (Except for an occasional Thai soap opera, I watch TV series only via DVD’s or Internet so the cable/network distinction is transparent to me.)
Normally I’d always instinctively root for the Americans and against he Soviets. But the fact that we know that we win and they lose makes it much easier to be “on their side” when it comes to their day to day spying and so forth.