Why we love TV’s anti heroes

The word hero or heroic is routinely abused in the news, in sports reports and in conversation. A tabloid nonentity battles against drug addiction; a young substitute comes on and scores a winning goal in a crunch football match; someone gets me a ticket for a sell-out concert. The “H” word greets them all, In his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces the American mythologist Joseph Campbell defined one as someone who “towers in stature ... a boon bringer ... a personage of not only local but world historical moment”, and much more besides. How well do the heroes of TV drama conform to this archetype?

I believe TV drama to be a barometer of sorts to the age that gives birth to it. The heroes of today are radically different from those of two or three decades ago. They have evolved to represent a radically changed world. Look no farther than that family man Tony Soprano who, in one famous episode, while taking his daughter on a tour of possible future colleges, calmly murders a former partner in crime. Or The Shield’s Vic Mackey, who equally calmly shot a fellow cop — someone Mackey knew was gathering evidence against him — in the first episode of the series and spent the remaining five series covering it up. Or the cops in The Wire, whose morality is at times indistinguishable from that of the criminals they are pursuing. Or the self-interested “doctors” in Nip/Tuck whose livelihoods are predicated not on saving lives but on exploiting vanity. Mad Men’s Don Draper plays fast and loose with the truth in his professional life and then goes home and lies to his loved ones. But men want to be him and women ... well, they just want him. Nurse Jackie, starring Edie Falco, features a heavily medicated, dysfunctional nurse as its lead character. Family Guy’s patriarch is the gleefully brash and offensive Peter Griffin.

So what has happened to the world to provoke this wholesale reworking of hero DNA? Until fairly recently there was in operation a morally clear universe. There were never better baddies than the Nazis, and the causes, as well as the purposes, of the Second World War were crystal clear. There was an almost archetypically monstrous enemy, we were unequivocally the good guys. But now we’re fighting wars — Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, the War on Terror — where it’s far less clear who the enemy is, indeed whether there is an enemy at all, or even that we are the good guys. In fact, since 1945, most conflicts have had at least an element of moral ambiguity built into them: is it any wonder we have become somewhat confused, that the clarity of old when separating good from bad, right from wrong, is now at best murky — and that, as a result, our sense of what a hero might be has undergone something of a sea change? Linked to this crisis of confidence, too, faith in individual democratic processes and democratically elected leaders has been fading fast.

The 21st-century antihero is, correspondingly, taking over TV. It is most evident in the changing hue of police shows. On both sides of the Atlantic (Z Cars, Morse here; Columbo, Hawaii Five-O there), the police were unequivocally heroes — morally upright, untainted by even the whiff of corruption, and it went without saying that their own position and notions of absolute justice were as one. In their world, crime never paid, the system always worked and justice was never evaded. Nor did anyone even “take it into their own hands”. It was clear who the criminals were and they got their just deserts.

Other mainstream successes tended to the medical. Hospital shows such as Casualty or Holby City here and ER and Grey’s Anatomy in the US have a black-and-white view of their protagonists: gorgeous doctors who just want to save lives. There was, too, a commensurate predictability of outcome (bar the occasional bad apple, armed with a syringe or evidence-destroying box of matches). And then came The Sopranos. What heroic qualities does this violent, foul-mouthed, murdering, philandering mob boss possess? Yet Tony Soprano is a profoundly 21st-century creature. He hit the zeitgeist. He’s a businessman, an entrepreneur. And he’s in therapy. He’s troubled by his bad behaviour, conflicted. And, weirdly, that excuses a great deal. When The Sopranos launched at the end of the 20th century that made him a hero of our time. But is Tony the end of the line or the first in an emerging order, the crime boss as increasingly legitimate entrepreneur?

There is a ruthlessness about big business that often seems not so very far removed from the psychopathy of the sort of criminal embodied by The Sopranos. Some of Tony’s business ventures are quintessentially 21st century. Waste management, his front, may have something of the Victorian about it, but when he sets up new income streams through property deals or fake internet companies he is not so much the war lord of old as the innovative and commercially savvy businessman of the here and now.

The casting of Michael Chiklis as Vic Mackay was every bit as inspired as that of James Gandolfini for Tony Soprano. Just as audiences were able to connect with Tony because he was a family guy, so audiences connected with Vic because he was demonstrably good at his job, a great cop. Our empathy for him is every bit as troubling as our empathy for Tony. Vic did, after all, murder a colleague. For the audience it sets up a tension for the rest of the series. If he can do that is there anything he isn’t capable of? As in all good drama, this moment triggers a journey for Vic.

The Wire’s antihero, the cop McNulty, and its anti-villain, the murderer D’Angelo both, in the words of the author Anthony Walton, “rage in various ways against the strictures of the hierarchies in which they find themselves, but both lack any real power to effect change.

“Both,” he continues, “are ultimately horrified by the changes they do effect, the trail of wreckage and bodies in their wake.” It is in this way that they win our sympathy, even our empathy. These are not classic good guy/bad guy divisions. The moral compass is spinning on its axis.Both 24 and House have at their core men behaving badly. Jack Bauer of 24 is as much torturer as tortured, in body and soul. Yet we excuse him. And Hugh Laurie’s Gregory House, the misanthropic drug addict at the heart of the show, should be unforgiveable, but instead is universally adored and admired.

A recent article in Newsweek bore the headline: Too Much of a Bad Thing. It argued that because it appears that no one on TV can be truly good or evil any more, we’re suffering from what it called “an antihero overload”. It’s not just drama but comedy, too, from The Office to Curb Your Enthusiasm. “It’s starting to seem as if bad guys are the only good guys,” Newsweek continued.

In Britain there is a complex mix of heroes or antiheroes, especially in the shows that Kudos has produced. At the gentler end there are the Robin Hood-like con-men from Hustle. We love them because they steal from people worse than themselves, though it’s hard to dispute the fact that they are bad people who thieve for a living. If caught they’d go down for a very long time indeed. Then there’s Gene Hunt, adored by the viewing public, in spite of being a racist, misogynistic bigot who is, well, unequivocally bent. And finally, our Spooks, MI5 agents who in the name of some higher moral calling of their own imagining have cheerfully engaged in torture, extraordinary rendition and treason. Yet, episode in, episode out, they remain heroes for their huge audiences.

There’s no going back. I believe the classic heroes of old are no longer fit for purpose and never will be again. As The Wire’s creator David Simon wrote recently: “We are bored with good and evil. We renounce the theme. With the exception of saints and sociopaths, few in this world are anything but a confused and corrupted combination of personal motivations, most of them selfish, some of them hilarious.”

We see this every day in our politicians, our business leaders, our sports stars and our tabloid darlings. There are no more heroes, only — at best — antiheroes. That is the way of the world.

This is an edited extract from No More Heroes, a lecture to be given by Stephen Garrett, Oxford University’s News International Visiting Professor of Broadcast Media, on Feb 9 at St Anne’s College, Woodstock Road, Oxford, at 5pm. Garrett’s first lecture, How to Grow a Creative Business According to the Laws of Chance, will be given on Tuesday at 5pm at Green Templeton College, Woodstock Road. His second lecture, Why the Only Rule is That There Are No Rules, is on Feb 2, also at Green Templeton College at 5pm. His final lecture, Tomorrow Got Here Yesterday, is on Feb 16 at St Anne’s College, 5pm