No one reads 'Paradise Regained.' Everyone reads 'Paradise Lost.' The Devil is the best character of them all. You want to write about him. You don't want to write about some nice person.
Terrible timeline
' "Seinfeld" (1989-1998, NBC) ' "The Sopranos" (1999-2007, HBO) ' "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (2000-2011, HBO) ' "Six Feet Under" (2001-2005, HBO) ' "The Shield" (2002-2008, FX) ' "The Wire" (2002-2008, HBO) ' "Nip/Tuck" (2003-2010, FX) ' "Deadwood" (2004-2006, HBO) ' "House" (2004-2012, Fox) ' "Rescue Me" (2004-2011, FX) ' "Prison Break" (2005-2009, Fox) ' "Weeds" (2005-2012, Showtime) ' "Big Love" (2006-2011, HBO) ' "The Brotherhood" (2006-2008) ' "Dexter" (2006-2013, Showtime) ' "Californication" (2007-2014, Showtime) ' "Damages" (2007-2012, FX/Audience Network) ' "Mad Men" (2007-2015, AMC) ' "Breaking Bad" (2008-2013, AMC) ' "Sons of Anarchy" (2008-2014, FX) ' "Eastbound & Down" (2009-2013, HBO) ' "Nurse Jackie" (2009-2015, Showtime) ' "Boardwalk Empire" (2010-2014, HBO) ' "Justified" (2010-2015, FX) ' "Hell on Wheels" (2011-2016, AMC)
Ongoing shows
' "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" (2005-present, FX) ' "American Horror Story" (2011-present, FX ) ' "Game of Thrones" (2011-present, HBO ) ' "Homeland" (2011-present, Showtime ) ' "Scandal" (2012-present, ABC) ' "The Americans" (2013-present, FX) ' "Hannibal" (2013-present, NBC) ' "The Blacklist" (2013-present, NBC) ' "House of Cards" (2013-present, Netflix) ' "Orange is the New Black" (2013-present, Netflix) ' "Ray Donovan" (2013-present, Showtime) ' "How to Get Away with Murder" (2014-present, ABC) ' "True Detective" (2014-present, HBO) ' "Bosch" (2014-present, Amazon) ' "Better Call Saul" (2015-present, AMC)
TV's most wanted
Being bad has been good for business during award seasons. Here are some of the most lauded series with a dastardly lead. ' "The Sopranos" - Emmys (21 wins/112 nominations), Golden Globes (5 wins/23 nominations), Screen Actors Guild Awards (8 wins/26 nominations), Peabody Award (2001/2001) ' "Breaking Bad" - Emmys (16 wins/58 nominations), Golden Globes (2 wins/7 nominations), Screen Actors Guild Awards (3 wins/11 nominations), Peabody Award (2008/2014) ' "Mad Men" - Emmys (15 wins/105 nominations), Golden Globes (4 wins/12 nominations), Screen Actors Guild Awards (2 wins/12 nominations), Peabody Award (2007) ' "Game of Thrones" - Emmys (14 wins/59 nominations), Golden Globes (1 win/3 nominations), Screen Actors Guild Awards (8 wins/26 nominations), Peabody Award (2011) ' "Seinfeld" - Emmys (10 wins/68 nominations), Golden Globes (3 wins/15 nominations), Screen Actors Guild Awards (6 wins/17 nominations) ' "House" - Emmys (5 wins/25 nominations), Golden Globes (2 wins/9 nominations), Screen Actors Guild Awards (2 wins/7 nominations) ' "Dexter" - Emmys (4 wins/25 nominations), Golden Globes (2 wins/10 nominations), Screen Actors Guild Awards (1 win/9 nominations), Peabody Award (2007) ' "House of Cards" - Emmys (4 wins/22 nominations), Golden Globes (2 wins/7 nominations), Screen Actors Guild Awards (1 wins/4 nominations), Peabody Award (2014)
Whatever happened to the laugh track?
To be sure, it's not joined the dodo quite yet and still contributes its merry, canned guffaws to network TV sitcoms like "Mike & Molly" and "The Big Bang Theory." Stray just a few channels away from the safety of major network convention, however, and it's the Wild West all over again.
Blood is spilled; booze and blow abound. Promises are broken and backs stabbed. Corruption is rampant. Sometimes, all that's just during the opening credits.
Laughable? Perhaps not, but audiences love it.
Fans of shows like "Breaking Bad" and "Mad Men," both on AMC, say they don't long for a return to the black-hat/white-hat days of yore. They would rather spend their time watching gray-hatted antiheroes like Walter White and Don Draper skirting the line between legal and illegal, moral and immoral.
On May 17, "Mad Men" will conclude a seven-season run that helped fill AMC's trophy case with a host of Emmys and other awards. Fans say they'll miss the philandering and occasionally reprehensible antics of its stylish ad executive Don Draper, but they will continue to support TV's fixation on shady characters who stray far from the straight and narrow.
"Many of us know people who are good but sometimes do bad things," says Jake Kenyon, 33. "It's a more accurate reflection of reality. We want to see/hear stories about people that fail and make bad choices. Perfect people are boring."
Following in concrete shoe prints
A Chattanooga-based web developer and graphics animator, Kenyon says he began rooting for TVs reprobates about a decade ago after watching "The Wire," HBO's gritty dramatic cross-section of Baltimore. Another of his early detours into seedier territory was Showtime's "Brotherhood," which follows the entwined lives of two Irish-American brothers - one a career politician, the other a career criminal.
But the antihero whose mold all others seek to fill, he says, is undeniably Tony Soprano, the central character of HBO's celebrated Mafia drama "The Sopranos," which ran from 1999 until 2007.
"The audience doesn't root for him or even really like him, but [they] can empathize with his situation and the pressures he has," Kenyon says. "I didn't even watch the series until around 2009, but it didn't feel dated and was still relevant."
Today, in the face of all the series that followed it into the moral no-man's-land, "The Sopranos" may not seem all that unusual, but when it premiered in 1999, it was a novelty. Presented in the well-trod framework of a family drama, it focused on a father figure and ruthless mob boss - played to Emmy-winning acclaim by James Gandolfini - who made no bones about his criminal activities and intentions.
Critics praised the show for its no-holds-barred portrayal of a leading character who was compellingly non-heroic - an antihero, through and through.
"[Series creator] David Chase's groundbreaking masterpiece asked us to empathize with the most human of mobsters (and monsters)," write TV Guide critics Bruce Fretts and Matt Roush, who placed "The Sopranos" atop their December 2013 list of the Best Series of All Time.
"The Sopranos" won a slew of awards and made waves in the TV industry. And, over the last 16 years, its success spawned a veritable rogues gallery of copycat disciples, from the troubled homicide detectives of "True Detective" to the mentally unhinged CIA liaison of "Homeland" to the drug-dealing queenpin of "Weeds."
The rot beneath the gilding
In 2010, writers for U.K.'s The Guardian newspaper suggested that "The Sopranos" was a watershed moment for American TV, altering its perception abroad from being a home of formulaic programming to a breeding ground for dramatic masterworks.
"In outline, 'The Sopranos' is not especially original - stepping into the shoes of two classic Mafia movies, 'The Godfather' and 'Goodfellas' - but its radicalism was in the application of this subject-matter to a weekly domestic drama," writes The Guardian's Mark Lawson. "'The Sopranos' was the first [show] to hit these extraordinary new notes in American television."
Domestic critics have hailed the flood of gritty, antiheroic programming that followed "The Sopranos" as The Golden Age of Television. In a 2014 piece justifying this label, New York Times media columnist David Carr cited the high narrative bar set by complex antiheroic dramas such as "The Americans" and "Justified" on FX and the Netflix original "House of Cards."
"The growing intellectual currency of television has altered the cultural conversation in fundamental ways," Carr writes. "The three-camera sitcom with a laugh track has been replaced by television shows that are much more like books - intricate narratives full of text, subtext and clues."
Kevin McDonough, a TV columnist for United Features Syndicate and the writer of "Tune in Tonight" which appears daily in the Times Free Press, says the legacy of "The Sopranos" wasn't just its antiheroic unconventionality, but its introduction to TV of a literary depth that was unusual to audiences weaned on "must-see" network programming.
"'Mad Men' is really literary fiction, and TV was never literary fiction; it's more like mass market paperbacks," he says. "It's a miracle sometimes when you can take the complexities and nuances of literary fiction and do them in genre fiction."
In recent years, antiheroes and antiheroines have made their way to the big three networks via shows such as ABC's "Scandal" and the brand-new "American Crime" and NBC's "The Blacklist." The kind of storytelling that "The Sopranos" pioneered, however, could only have started on cable, where the restrictions of convention and audience expectation - not to mention the benchmark of success - were less restrictive, McDonough says.
"'Breaking Bad,' in the grand scheme of things, was probably watched by 3 million people, which is huge for AMC but would have been cancelled off CBS before Thanksgiving," he says. "Many of these shows were about cable and what cable could do.
Empathy for the Devil
Fans of antiheroic TV say they feel drawn to its morally ambiguous characters, who are more complex and whose motivations are less rigidly aligned with social conventions.
Rossville resident Brian Lake says he loved "Breaking Bad," which finished its five-season run in September 2013, because it presented the slow transformation of an otherwise loving family man into a ruthless villain, even as he attempted to rationalize his actions. The decline of Walter White (Bryan Cranston), he says, was more interesting because it didn't feel contrived.
"That character, and show itself, plumb the psychological depths of what we all, possibly, are capable of in dire situations," Lake says. "In many ways, I thought the series played out like a Shakespearean tragedy. Or [to give] a more contemporary comparison, like some of the Cohen brothers' best films, in which the easiest solution to a problem spirals quickly and violently out of control."
There's a kind of catharsis inherent in watching an antihero at work, says Dr. Brian O'Leary, the head of the psychology department at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Audiences, he says, feel a sense of vicarious freedom from watching Frank Underwood's underhanded power brokering in "House of Cards" just as they do from seeing Harry Callahan dispense unsanctioned justice from the barrel of a .44 Magnum in "Dirty Harry."
"You feel like they're doing the wrong thing for the right reason," O'Leary says. "We're socialized to think that certain things are ethical and moral and that there's a right and a wrong. That doesn't necessarily mean that we'll always agree with the societal norm."
But on the whole, he says, antiheroes tend to be somewhat redeemed by the fact that their actions, when they occur outside the law, tend to be directed - in Robin Hood fashion - against people who are even less likeable.
"I'm watching 'The Blacklist' right now, and he [main character Raymond "Red" Reddington," played by James Spader] is a self-serving narcissistic pig, but he's always knocking off people who are worse than he is," O'Leary says. "No matter how bad the antihero is, the other person somehow deserved it."
More than nothing
Although many fans of the TV antihero point to "The Sopranos" as the origin of TV's love for the dark side, there are some critics who suggest its seedy underbelly first showed itself a decade earlier in NBC's runaway hit "Seinfeld."
Ostensibly a run-of-the-mill sitcom about a quartet of everyday New Yorkers, the lead characters on "Seinfeld" were all reliably spiteful, narcissistic and self-serving. They lied and slacked off, jostled for power and took advantage of the less fortunate.
The sitcom ended its nine-season run in 1998. In 2000, Larry David, the show's co-creator alongside Jerry Seinfeld, went on to write and star as an antiheroic version of himself in the long-running, semi-autobiographical "Curb Your Enthusiasm."
Despite being off the air for almost two decades, critics say the legacy of "Seinfeld" still resonates in the callous antiheroic characters of black comedies such as "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" and "Six Feet Under."
"['Seinfeld's' writers'] serene belief that characters did not have to be likable as long as they were interesting foreshadowed a change in TV drama that wouldn't settle until the late '90s," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in a 2014 editorial for New York Magazine.
"'Seinfeld' was definitely not lovable [and] went out of its way to provoke, baffle and offend. It seemed to loathe the idea that audiences might get too comfortable with it."
Contact Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6205. Follow him on Twitter at @PhillipsCTFP.