Mr. Wrong
a look at some fan favorite TV anti-heroes and why we love them
The Rise of the Anti-Hero
The show that started it all.
Technically, anti-heroes have been around for a while (assuming, of course, that classical Greek dramas fall under the category of “a while”), but The Sporanos is widely regarded as the show that started it all, breaking ground in the world of television by drawing its audience into the violent world of Anthony “Tony” Sporano.
Tony struggles to balance his two lives: one as a mob boss and the other as a family-man. Throughout the series he lies, murders, cheats on his wife, makes racist and sexist remarks, etc. — all of which are behaviors that tend to repulse an audience.
Quite frankly: he's not a good guy, and it shows.
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I spent last summer binge-watching my way through the series and, by the last season, I found myself constantly pointing out the fact that Tony never “gets better”, remaining the same terrible person that he was in the first season.
Yet, I didn’t stop watching. Despite Tony’s despicable behavior I was hooked, just as many others had been before me.
Characters like Tony Soprano had been seen and embraced by audiences before in films or in books, but movie theaters and books created a sort of buffer between the character and the real world.
“Conventional wisdom” had always suggested that these characters were not the sort of people American viewers would invite in their homes (Martin 4).
However, it could’ve been advertisers that had always been the ones to object rather than the viewers, and HBO didn’t have to worry about sponsors—thus The Sopranos was allowed to air with its charismatic and morally compromised lead character (85).
Tony Soprano became somewhat of a framework for other TV anti-heroes, and carved the way for characters like:
(Deadwood)
(Mad Men)
(The Shield)
(Breaking Bad)
It can even be argued that shows like Dexter and Game of Thrones, which were originally books, would have never made it on the air without The Sopranos.
But why do we like the anti-hero?
“Like” probably isn’t the right word to use here. If you met Tony Soprano in real life, you probably wouldn’t like him, much less root for him, and the same can be said for characters like Al Swearengen or Dexter Morgan.
This paradoxical behavior, cheering on the character but knowing you would hate that person if you ever met them in the real world, is sometimes called sympathy for the devil. But maybe “sympathy” isn’t quite the right word either.
After all, I don’t sympathize with Tony Soprano, and there are probably plenty of other people who don’t either, but we are fascinated by him.
We may not like him but we are undeniably fascinated by Tony Soprano (and characters like him). We keep coming back for more, knowing that they probably won't "get better". Even when we're disgusted and horrified by their actions our favorite anti-heroes continue to fascinate us.
The anti-hero draws our attention through other means beyond fascination; several other theories attempt to explain why we are so enthralled by such dastardly characters in spite of their horrible, and often murderous, actions.