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Think of the characters you have loved most on television over the last twenty-five years. A mob boss in New Jersey. A chemistry teacher who started cooking meth. A corrupt detective. An advertising man living under another man’s name.
Now notice something uncomfortable. If any of them moved in next door, you would move out.
So why we love TV antiheroes is a genuinely odd question. These are not people we admire. Some of them are not people we would even forgive. And yet millions of us handed them years of our evenings, argued about them with friends, and felt something close to loss when their shows ended.
The usual explanation is that flawed characters feel more real than good ones. It is a comfortable answer. It is also mostly wrong.
Why we love TV antiheroes has little to do with the crimes
Run the test in reverse. If being bad were the ingredient, every villain ever written would be adored. They are not. Most villains are forgotten before the credits finish.
And plenty of characters people genuinely love are simply kind. A warm coach. A cheerful colleague. A patient teacher. Goodness is not the problem.
So something else is going on. The shows themselves tell you what it is, if you look at how they are built.
The Sopranos did not open in a warehouse or on a street corner. It opened in a psychiatrist’s waiting room. The first thing an audience ever saw was a violent man sitting down to explain himself to someone whose job was to listen rather than to judge. Creator David Chase, who drew on his own experience of therapy, built the whole first episode around that session, cutting between what Tony Soprano was doing and what he was telling his doctor about it.
That is not a scene. That is an engine. And it ran for six seasons.
Here is the part worth sitting with. The show did not make us love a criminal by making him charming. It made us love him by letting us hear the inside of him. The panic attacks. The mother he could never please. The things he could not say to a single person in his own life.
Access. Not badness. Access.
Which is a strangely tender thing to learn about ourselves. What pulls us in is not the crime. It is being let all the way inside another person, which is quietly the thing most of us want most and trust least. If the gap between the version of you that other people see and the one you actually live with is familiar, this short imposter syndrome assessment pokes at the same thing from the other side.
The pitch that gave the whole game away
When Vince Gilligan pitched Breaking Bad, he summed it up in one line: take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface. Mr. Chips is the gentle schoolteacher from James Hilton’s novel. Scarface is the gangster.
Read that pitch again. It is not the promise of a bad man. It is the promise of a journey, and it asked an audience to sign up in advance to watch someone become worse on purpose.
Nobody sells a show that way unless the thing being sold is the seat inside the change. Not the meth. Not the money. The seat.
The cost nobody wrote into the plan
Then something happened that no writer designed, and it is the most revealing part of the whole story.
Audiences did not just forgive Walter White. Large numbers of them turned on his wife.
Skyler White was, on any plain reading, the character behaving reasonably. She objected. She was frightened. She wanted the lying to stop. For that, the actress who played her, Anna Gunn, received such a volume of hostility, including a Facebook page devoted to hating the character, that in August 2013 she wrote about it publicly in The New York Times.
Gunn’s own reading was that the hatred revealed more about attitudes toward women than about the writing, and she described the character as having become a kind of Rorschach test. That is her account of it, and it deserves to be taken seriously.
It is worth noticing what the show’s structure was doing alongside that. When a story hands you one person’s interior and nobody else’s, the people standing in that person’s way stop reading as people. They read as obstacles. You have been living inside one man’s reasons for so many hours that the woman asking him to stop begins to sound like an inconvenience.
That is the hidden price of access. Proximity slides into allegiance. Being close to somebody’s private reasons makes it very hard to hold on to anyone else’s.
An older library made the same choice, and one different one
Prestige television did not invent this. It is a very late arrival.
There is a far older library, the one gathering dust on a lot of shelves, that made this exact editorial decision thousands of years earlier, and made it about its own founding figures. Its most celebrated king is also an adulterer who arranged a man’s death. Its first great patriarch cheats his brother and lies to his blind father. Its boldest disciple swears three times that he has never met Jesus. Its most influential missionary put in writing that he considered himself the worst sinner he knew of.
None of it was tidied up. There were long centuries in which someone could quietly have edited the shameful parts out. The embarrassing material stayed on the page.
And it does the thing prestige television later discovered. It keeps the interior. That king’s worst night is not only reported from the outside; the collection also keeps a song attributed to him about that very night, in his own voice, asking to be made clean. You are not simply told what he did. You are handed what it felt like from inside him.
Then it does one more thing, and this is where the old library and the new one part company.
It does not turn the person who objected into the villain.
A prophet named Nathan walks in and tells that king, to his face, that what he did was evil. The story never frames Nathan as an obstacle. It never invites you to find him tiresome. He is right, the text lets him be right, the king agrees with him out loud, and the king is still kept.
That is a harder trick than anything on television. Hold the entire interior of a person’s failure. Excuse none of it. Do not stop loving them. Most of us can manage one or two of those at a time. Something bigger than us appears to manage all three at once, which is a quietly staggering thing to notice on an ordinary evening. If that particular knot is a live one for you, there is more on it in this piece on forgiving yourself for hurting someone you love.
What this changes the next time you press play
None of this means the shows are bad, or that you should feel sheepish about loving them. They are doing what stories have always done, and doing it extremely well.
But it is worth knowing what the pull actually is. You are not drawn to those characters because you secretly approve of what they do. You are drawn to them because you have been let all the way inside a person, and that almost never happens anywhere else. Not at work. Not in most friendships. Sometimes not even at home.
Which may explain why so many people feel closer to a fictional criminal than to the person sitting on the sofa beside them. It is not that we love bad people. It is that we are starving to be known, and a television show will let us practise it for free.
So the next time you catch yourself defending someone who does not deserve it, that is probably the reason. And it might be worth wondering who in your actual life you have ever let all the way in.
If pulling shows apart like this is your idea of a good time, we built a free AI assistant called TV & the Bible that will do it with whatever you are watching right now. It opens in ChatGPT.
Frequently asked questions
Why do viewers root for antiheroes on television?
Viewers root for antiheroes mainly because these shows grant sustained access to a character’s private thoughts and reasons, not because audiences approve of the behaviour. Series such as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad are built to keep an audience inside one person’s point of view for dozens of hours, and that sustained intimacy produces attachment. Villains who are never given that interior access are rarely beloved, which suggests the active ingredient is closeness rather than immorality.
What is an antihero?
An antihero is a central character who lacks the conventional qualities of a hero, such as courage in a good cause, honesty or decency, while still occupying the protagonist’s position, so the audience follows the story from that character’s side rather than against it. The term long predates television and appears throughout literature. Well-known television examples include Tony Soprano in The Sopranos and Walter White in Breaking Bad.
Did audiences really hate Skyler White in Breaking Bad?
Yes. Anna Gunn, the actress who played Skyler White, wrote about the hostility in The New York Times in August 2013, describing a volume of abuse that included a Facebook page dedicated to hating the character. Gunn argued that the reaction reflected attitudes toward women more than it reflected the writing, and described the character as having become a kind of Rorschach test.
What made The Sopranos different from earlier crime dramas?
The Sopranos, which premiered on HBO in January 1999, built its story around its lead character’s sessions with a psychiatrist. Creator David Chase structured the first episode around a therapy session, cutting between events in Tony Soprano’s life and the account he gave his doctor of them. Earlier crime dramas generally observed criminals from the outside; this one gave the audience a running account of one criminal’s interior.
Is it unhealthy to enjoy shows about morally bad characters?
There is no good reason to feel guilty about enjoying antihero drama, because the appeal comes from narrative intimacy rather than approval of what the character does. One side effect is worth being aware of: when a story supplies only one character’s inner reasoning, the characters who oppose that person can start to register as obstacles rather than as people. Noticing that pull is usually enough to keep it in proportion.
Over to you
Which television character have you defended in an argument that, on reflection, you would not actually want to sit next to on a long bus journey? And do you think shows that park you inside one person’s head for years are doing something valuable, or something slightly risky? Tell us in the comments. We read them.
Share this
- Turns out we do not love TV antiheroes because they are bad. We love them because we have been let inside their heads, and that almost never happens in real life. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/entertainment/why-we-love-tv-antiheroes/
- Just read something that reframed twenty years of television for me: The Sopranos opened in a therapist’s office on purpose. The genre was never selling crime. It was selling access. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/entertainment/why-we-love-tv-antiheroes/
- The Skyler White backlash makes grim sense once you see the mechanism: spend enough hours inside one man’s reasons and the person asking him to stop starts to sound like an obstacle. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/entertainment/why-we-love-tv-antiheroes/
