The Greatest American Antihero

Walter White is badder than ever, but has dark TV become a cliché?

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AMC

Breaking Bad

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Walt's choices might not be ones you would ever make. But his problems--medical bills, debt, midlife crisis--could be anyone's. That sense of audience connection, if not complicity, is the essence of the antihero genre. The Shield, about a corrupt but talented cop, asked what price we'd pay for safety. Deadwood and Rome asked whether great empires can be built by good men. The philosophy of antihero drama is that evil can be latent anywhere, in anyone, and that in some ways, we may accept or even depend on it.

Cable's antihero era began in 1999 with Tony Soprano, and since then we've had a decade-plus of real-life news about betrayed trust: bad mortgages, sexual abuse in colleges and churches, prisoner torture, business fraud. These stories involved some flat-out monsters (see Jerry Sandusky) but also a lot of enablers and go-alongers, bosses who didn't punish, colleagues who didn't blow whistles--people who weren't exactly evil but who found, when tested, that they couldn't make themselves be good enough. (Not unlike Skyler, who decided to stand by her husband and launder his drug money.) Were the rest of us, shaking our heads, better than them? Or just lucky that we never had to find out?

Antihero dramas let the viewer take a kind of moral test drive. Breaking Bad, in particular, was structured to show how smaller crimes become bigger ones, how omission becomes commission. Walt would cook meth with his former student Jesse (Aaron Paul), but he would never kill. Except for killing drug gangsters in self-defense. And except for letting Jesse's unconscious, heroin-addicted girlfriend die of an overdose to protect himself. And except for getting Jesse to shoot--in cold blood--a chemist Gus was grooming to replace Walt. (Jesse starts the show as an amoral punk but becomes more conscience-stricken as Walt gets colder.)

Breaking Bad has told this story with epic sweep, and its fifth-season debut is as unflinching as ever. But over the TV dial at large, the antihero genre is showing its age. Some of cable's more recent dark serials--like Starz's Miami mob story Magic City and its blustery political drama Boss--have felt lifeless and mechanically shocking. Several of TV's reigning antiheroes have an expiration date: Don Draper will run out of 1960s in two seasons, and both Damages and Showtime's Weeds (cable's other citizen-turned-pusher story) are starting their final seasons. After all these years, we get it: yeah, the world can be rotten. Edgy has started to feel like the new safe.

The antihero is probably here to stay on TV, just like doctors, lawyers and eccentric detectives. But like them, the archetype needs to evolve to stay interesting. Maybe it could be a little less anti and a little more hero: in Showtime's Homeland, CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) has deep flaws, but ultimately we want her to catch the bad guys. Ditto lawman Raylan Givens in FX's Justified (whose star, Timothy Olyphant, previously played rage-addicted antihero sheriff Seth Bullock on Deadwood). Maybe the antihero could be a little funnier--as with Louis CK's flawed but ultimately bighearted alter ego on TV's best comedy, Louie--and maybe a little less relentlessly macho: two of the past year's most compelling new antiheroines were Hannah Horvath and Amy Jellicoe on HBO's Girls and Enlightened, respectively, whose offenses are more social than sociopathic.

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