Nearly every successful television writer will point to character as the focal point of their creative process and how they measure success — if you can create compelling characters, then engaging scenarios and storylines will likely follow suit. In a statement echoing dozens of similar interviews with showrunners, Lost cocreator Damon Lindelof states, “It’s all about character, character, character. . . . Everything has to be in service of the people. That is the secret ingredient of the show.”1 Even as television writers, directors, and actors focus much of their energies into creating fully realized characters and designing plots and storyworlds around them, academic analyses of storytelling have focused far less on issues of character than on other narrative elements such as plot, world building, and temporality. This oversight is especially true for moving-image media such as film and television, where character tends to be taken as a self-evident given, wrapped up into conventions of performance and stardom, rather than analyzed as a specific narrative element.2 This chapter aims to add to this literature by exploring the vital role of character in serialized complex television, considering how characters are produced and how viewers engage with these figures.
While there is robust debate among narrative theorists and philosophers about the definitions and essences of characters, I am not particularly interested in considering whether a character is “real” (whatever that might mean) or exists solely within textual utterances, in the minds of viewers, or per the intentions of producers. I follow Jens Eder’s provisional definition of characters as “identifiable fictional beings with an inner life that exist as communicatively constructed artifacts” — in other worlds, characters are triggered by the text but come to life as we consume fiction and are best understood as constructs of real people, not simply images and sounds on a screen.3 This chapter considers television characters by looking at textual representations, contextualized within production and reception practices, and then focuses on the rise of antiheroes on many of the most prominent examples of complex television drama.
As discussed throughout this book, we can only understand the poetics of television storytelling within its specific contexts, where industrial norms and viewing practices help shape the creative possibilities available to producers. These contexts clearly differentiate serial television’s characterization from other media, especially compared to the long-form possibilities of literature. Television characters derive from collaboration between the actors who portray them and the writers and producers who devise their actions and dialogue. Performance is always a collaborative creative act, as actors embody the roles sketched out on the page; within television’s writer-driven production model discussed in chapter 3, this collaboration is most typically developed through preproduction work between actors and showrunners. In film production, the director is the chief conduit between a script and an actor, helping to guide a performance and shape it to the contours of the narrative whole, but the rotating array of television directors places that role more in the hands of producers, who are typically writers, or in some cases writer-directors, as with hybrid showrunners such as Joss Whedon, J. J. Abrams, and Vince Gilligan. In some cases, an actor also serves as a series producer, as with Timothy Olyphant on Justified or Laura Dern on Enlightened, while some actors are directly involved in the writing process, as with Men of a Certain Age’s Ray Romano, 30 Rock’s Tina Fey, or Girls’ Lena Dunham, all of whom created and ran (alone or in a team) their programs. Thus actors have varying degrees of creative authority and collaborative ownership of their ongoing characters, marking a difference from both the literary model of single authorship and typical film models of stand-alone character development rather than television’s ongoing serial performances.
This link between character and performer sets major storytelling constraints, especially when extratextual factors emerge, or what the invaluable TV Tropes website calls “Real Life Writes the Plot.”4 Although actors are typically contracted for many years to ensure their ongoing availability, sometimes an actor must depart sooner than the writers planned for a character — an actor might die, as with The Sopranos’ Nancy Marchand, or become too ill to perform, as with Spartacus’s Andy Whitfield. In the former case, the series portrayed Marchand’s character, Livia Soprano, as dying in the third season; in the latter, Whitfield’s titular role was recast with another actor for the second season when he was diagnosed with cancer, with no in-story reference to the character’s new appearance. Such recastings of a major regular character with a new actor are quite rare on prime time dramas, with a few notable instances such as Cagney and Lacey in the 1980s or more recently Pretty Little Liars, while they are somewhat more common on sitcoms (such as Bewitched and Roseanne) and even more so on daytime soap operas. Since most prime time dramas aim for a degree of naturalism and consistency in representing their storyworlds, recasting a character usually comes across as too artificial, as well as downplaying what the original actor’s performance may have contributed to the character’s identity. Certainly the most innovative and widespread case of recasting is Doctor Who, as William Hartnell, the original actor playing the Doctor, decided to leave the series in 1966; leveraging the program’s science-fiction premise, the writers created an “escape clause” that the character’s body regenerates when facing death, allowing new actors to take over the part, a process that has led to 12 different Doctors as of 2014. This recasting conceit allows the character both to remain a decade-spanning constant and to acquire new shadings of each actor’s performance style and reinterpretation, providing a wide range of connections and collective memories to generations of viewers.
Despite some exceptions, recasting tends to disrupt a series, violating viewers’ ongoing commitments to the paired actor-character identity. More often than recasting, producers integrate an actor’s departure or other changes into the storyworld. Most typically, writers must work around actors with scheduling conflicts that limit their availability, creating episodes that omit or restrict a character’s presence, and must similarly shape stories based on actors’ contracts, as discussed with Veronica Mars in chapter 2. A similar circumstance is when an actress gets pregnant, as writers need to either integrate the pregnancy into the character’s arc, as with the landmark storyline in I Love Lucy or more recently Jennifer Garner on Alias and Charisma Carpenter on Angel, or attempt to hide the pregnancy through costuming, plotlines involving the actress mostly sitting down, or going on production hiatus, all of which were employed on Parks and Recreation during Amy Poehler’s pregnancy. When an actor decides to leave a program or producers fire an actor due to off-screen issues, the ongoing narrative must be shifted to account for this absence — one high-profile instance was Charlie Sheen’s highly acrimonious departure from Two and a Half Men, prompting the series to have his character get hit by a train and die. The Sheen case highlights that often viewers are well aware of the off-screen issues impacting a story, making real-life events function as a paratextual framework for anticipating and interpreting a series, as discussed in chapter 5.
Lost’s second season provides a good example of many issues blurring character arcs and real-world events; the season introduced “the tailies,” a new group of characters seated in the airplane’s tail section who landed on a different part of the island. Four tailies managed to rejoin the main group of survivors, although only Bernard survived past the third season. Both Ana Lucia and Libby were killed by Michael late in the second season, a surprising twist that resonated with fans’ extratextual knowledge that both actresses, Michelle Rodriguez and Cynthia Watros, respectively, had been arrested for drunk driving during production, leading many fans to speculate that their deaths were motivated by off-screen issues. Producers have attested that Ana Lucia was always planned to be a single-season arc and that they decided to kill Libby to increase the impact of Michael’s betrayal, not due to any actor behavior. The fourth surviving tailie’s fate was definitely dictated by off-screen issues: Mr. Eko was intended to play a major role in the ongoing story arc, but actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje disliked living in Hawaii and requested to leave the series for personal reasons, resulting in the character’s death at the start of season 3 and major shifts to the ongoing plan. Additionally, the young actor who played Walt, Malcolm David Kelley, had a growth spurt between seasons 1 and 2, making it implausible for him to portray Walt within the program’s compressed story time frame; Lost restricted Walt’s future appearances mostly to scenes in flash-forwards or apparitions, which Sawyer sarcastically calls “taller ghost Walt.” Extratextual factors can also help expand a character’s role, as Michael Emerson’s guest performance as Henry Gale on Lost was so compelling that the character’s arc was extended, turning out to actually be the leader of the so-called Others, Ben Linus, a central character who persisted until the end of the series. In all of these instances, real-world practicalities and possibilities of actors have direct impacts on the storytelling that transcend writers’ plans, complicating notions of creative agency and impacting viewer comprehension of ongoing narratives in ways that are unique to serial television.
If the off-screen lives of actors can constrain a series, they can also open up interesting resonances. As explored by many scholars of stardom, actors serve as sites of intertextuality, merging viewer memories of previous characters and knowledge about off-screen lives to color our understanding of a role. This intertextual resonance can be heightened through serial narrative, as our engagement with actors stretches out over time and we can witness a star’s persona change within the gaps between episodes. For instance, George Clooney was not well-known when debuting on ER in 1994, but his popularity grew and he soon became a major film star, transforming how he was viewed on ER and framing his departure in 1999. Stars also bring resonance from previous roles, as with knowledge of Alan Alda’s iconic role of antiwar doctor Hawkeye Pierce on M*A*S*H as well as Alda’s own left-leaning activism, both of which undercut the conservative politics of his character Republican Arnold Vinick on The West Wing, making him a more palatable figure within the program’s core liberal sensibility. Michael J. Fox’s star persona as a likable leading man in the 1980s and 1990s transformed drastically following the onset of Parkinson’s disease; in the 21st century, he has appeared in smaller recurring roles on series such as Scrubs, Rescue Me, and The Good Wife, as well as launching his own series The Michael J. Fox Show in 2013, always playing characters that foreground his disability in ways that clearly cater to viewers’ extratextual knowledge. In such instances, viewers approach characters with a wealth of star-connected contexts from both on- and off-screen references that help shape storytelling practices, highlighting the centrality of actors in constituting characters within serial television.
Viewers bring more than star discourses to their assumptions about characters, of course, as many viewers are well versed in television conventions that guide their narrative expectations. Murray Smith identifies recognition as one of the chief components of character engagement in cinema, as film viewers differentiate between characters and other figures, whether they be inhuman objects or humans who do not rise to the level of character, such as background extras in a group scene.5 For serial television, recognition also means viewers differentiating roles within a program’s ongoing ensemble, where characters are positioned in fluid but meaningful tiers of primary lead characters, secondary supporting characters, tertiary recurring characters, nonrecurring guest characters, and background extras. These tiers have industrial meanings, as actors’ contracts, placement in credits, salaries, and long-term availability all impact how a character functions in an ongoing story. Narrative surprises can be foiled by credits — the fan-favorite Buffy character Spike was added to the cast of Angel in season 5, a revelation that is not made until the final moments of the first episode, but the actor James Marsters appeared in the episode’s opening credits as a member of the ongoing cast. Similarly, Lost episodes frequently saw characters who had been killed in the main time line appear in flashbacks or in other alternate time lines, but viewers paying attention to an episode’s opening credits would know which characters would return from the dead that week. Producers are aware of this, striving to confound viewers by keeping surprise appearances out of the credits until the end of the episode, but such matters are dictated by legal matters, guild negotiations, and contractual stipulations that typically override the impulse for narrative surprises, providing another example of industrial constraints shaping creative decisions.
Such credit spotting might be a fringe phenomenon for die-hard fans, but most viewers know basic precepts of serial storytelling that set expectations for characters — most crucially, we all assume that main characters are bound to stay on their programs and highly unlikely to die or depart the story, unless motivated by off-screen factors. This is particularly true of title characters, as we cannot imagine Seinfeld without Jerry or House, M.D. without Dr. House. But viewers usually assume that the core cast of characters will be a stable foundation throughout a series run, and it is quite exceptional when main characters depart a series unless it is for their own spin-off. For stories with life-or-death stakes, this knowledge colors our narrative experiences, as we assume a degree of character safety that runs counter to threats and dangers within the storyworld. Dedicated fans are well aware of conventions such as “red shirts” — named for the costumes worn by crew members on the original Star Trek who were typically fated to be the first killed on any mission — that help shape narrative expectations for how a story might progress. To counter such expectations, many complex programs have killed off major characters early in their runs to raise the dramatic stakes, as seen on Angel, 24, and Heroes, among many others, although such deaths are almost always of second-tier supporting characters rather than the core heroes, who usually remain safe until the program’s final season. Serial television can struggle to create dramatic stakes in the face of viewers’ knowledge that the fictional jeopardy facing lead characters is highly unlikely to come to pass, an aspect discussed more in chapter 5.
A particularly interesting case of the relative safety of lead characters is Game of Thrones, in which the character who appears to be the main protagonist, Ned Stark as played by Sean Bean, is executed toward the end of the first season. Importantly, the television program is based on a series of novels, with Ned’s shocking death portrayed in the first book published in 1996 — by the time the television series aired in 2011, anyone who had read the novels or followed their critical coverage was anticipating Ned’s demise. Nonetheless, there was a good deal of backlash from unaware television fans shocked by Stark’s death, with viewers pledging to boycott the program or cancel HBO, although the high ratings for the second season suggest that these were mostly idle threats. As eloquently summed up by a fan on EW.com, “Most of you who think this was some sort of brilliant move or something don’t understand the difference between a book audience and a TV audience. . . . TV audiences need to invest in characters. Most of the other characters I don’t care much about. While the show will probably still appeal to the ‘wow’ crowd, its mass appeal just got beheaded.”6 This comment highlights the different expectations between novels and television: novels do typically create bonds to characters — and reportedly readers of the Game of Thrones novels were similarly outraged when reading about Stark’s death — but there is a long history of novels killing off main characters, and the Game of Thrones books’ multiple focalized structure decentered Ned as the main character. For television, actor embodiment creates a different type of parasocial bond; when coupled with the medium’s long-established norms and industrial cues such as credits (Bean got top billing in season 1’s opening credits) and actor reputations, viewers expect more safety and long-term commitment to main characters. Thus it is telling that one of the very few examples of a death of a leading character early in a television series was a literary adaptation, and it is unlikely that the program would have tried such a twist without the novel’s established precedent.7
Lost plays with many of these conventions of character tiers and fates, initially planning to raise its stakes by ending its two-hour pilot with the death of the heroic lead Jack Shephard; ABC objected, fearing it would quickly alienate its audience. Instead, the series surprisingly killed off numerous characters throughout its run, typically second-tier characters such as Boone, Shannon, and Ana Lucia, with occasional deaths of more central characters in highly dramatic fashion, as with Charlie’s heroic death at the end of the third season. While Lost posed greater risks for its characters than most prime time programs do, it still kept the core group of Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke, and Hurley on the series throughout its entire run. Lost played games with viewers and their knowledge of red shirts, often including dialogue referring to the arbitrary distinction between named characters central to actions on the island and the background extras who rarely did anything but murmur assent or carry out chores at the camp, with such reflexive lines typically spoken by Hurley, the embodiment of the knowing science-fiction and comic-book fan. Toward the end of the first season, Dr. Arzt emerged as a new character from the nameless crowd, becoming differentiated by being named, going on a mission with the main characters, and speaking dialogue that called attention to his shift from the background — but Arzt’s emergence was a fake-out, as he was dramatically blown up just as he was becoming a distinct individual, in a winking nod to audience expectations. Other background characters were occasionally differentiated from the ensemble in playful ways, such as main characters confusing the names of castaways Scott and Steve, or Neil getting the derisive nickname “Frogurt,” enabling viewer recognition while also marginalizing him as insignificant, before killing him with a flaming arrow to the chest.
No Lost episode plays with character expectations and norms more than “Exposé,” an almost parodic rewriting of island history to include background characters Nikki and Paulo. In the third season, the two figures had been identified as supporting characters, by receiving names, speaking dialogue, and having the actors’ names added to the credits, but they served little dramatic function within the ensemble. Lost’s producers claim that they elevated these two characters in response to fans wanting to know more about the background characters, but they quickly realized that they could not fit them into the ensemble seamlessly.8 “Exposé” simultaneously weaved the characters into the core ensemble’s history by including them in flashback scenes to previously seen moments and dramatically killed them by burying them alive (and bringing back Arzt to highlight their doomed status). The episode is a distilled example of the operational aesthetic, as we engage at the level of storytelling discourse, considering how the revisionist history of island life resembles fans’ rewriting of canonical events, scribbling in the margins of the established storyworld. For fans who disliked the divisive episode, the lack of continuity disrupted what had already been established — “Exposé” presented new information about already-established events but did not seem to contribute toward the greater mythology. But for fans willing to play the episode’s storytelling game, its ludic pleasures stem from the willful knowledge that the episode is marginal to the point of being almost noncanonical, playfully tweaking fans’ forensic obsessions for continuity and coherence and shining a light on characters’ functional roles and hierarchies.
Why do television series place such weight on the stability and safety of core characters while relegating others to the ephemeral periphery? There are industrial incentives to associate a program with actors who can be used to promote the series, serve as its public face, and be contractually committed to appear for years at a fixed salary. Creatively, most programs are so defined by their core characters and their web of relationships that replacing them becomes a challenge without losing what drew fans into the series — this is especially true of comedies, in which ensemble dynamics are usually what distinguishes a given program, with character replacements or additions often proving troubling. Serialized dramas might be based on a high concept or complex plot, but the character ensemble at its core is usually what hooks in viewers, as typified by the failure of series such as FlashForward, The Event, or Reunion to create sufficiently compelling characters to ground their enigma-driven storytelling. The large ensembles of daytime soap operas maintain stability through anchor characters who might live their entire lives on decades-spanning dramas, mirroring the time line of viewers at home, even as other characters in the ensemble might come and go (or be recast).9 Episodic procedural dramas are the most common type of programming with a rotating cast of characters, as long-running series such as Law and Order and CSI can replace characters with some frequency. Such replacements are less disruptive since storylines depend on weekly cases with a core setting and tone, while each character plays a functionary role in the organization, with drawn-out character relationships relegated to tertiary plotlines. Even on such procedurals, viewers do become attached to particular characters and relationships, leading to some characters remaining for many years or to a franchise creating other iterations more committed to a stable cast of characters, as with Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
Television’s character consistency is more than just an industrial convenience, as one of the primary ways that viewers engage with programming is to develop long-term relationships with characters. The term for such engagement dates back to early mass communications research in the 1950s: parasocial relationships.10 While parasocial relationships between media consumers and on-air personalities, be they real-life celebrities or fictional characters, have often been pathologized as an unhealthy inability to distinguish between reality and media, they can instead be viewed as an active, participatory facet of media consumption, with fans choosing to engage with a media text and extend its reach into their own lives. We should not presume that caring deeply about characters is a sign of unhealthy boundaries but embrace it as a central component of storytelling — we temporarily give part of ourselves over to a fiction to produce intense emotional affect. Murray Smith offers a detailed theory of such engagement with characters, framing it as a clearly demarcated process of imagining oneself in relation to fiction, rather than muddling the boundary between reality and fiction.11 Smith’s approach to engagement highlights how films cue us to recognize, align with, and forge allegiances with characters, a convincing model that needs to be expanded for the temporal dimensions of serial television.
As discussed in the introduction, watching serial television is a long-term process, stretching over time with interceding gaps. A viewer’s character engagement will necessarily extend through these gaps, as dedicated fans will think about and discuss characters, imagine what the characters might be doing outside the presented episodes, and perhaps even produce their own paratextual extensions for characters, such as fan fiction, fake Twitter accounts, or remix videos. Officially produced paratexts can also fill serial gaps, including in-character blogs, commentaries found on podcasts and interviews, and character-based merchandise. Such ongoing parasocial relationships are heightened for television, where typical domestic viewing literally invites characters into your home, often for regularly scheduled visits over the course of years. Fans will frequently develop sincere emotional attachments to characters, designating particular figures as their “TV boyfriends/girlfriends” or cultivating hateful (but often pleasurable) antipathy toward a character. Such investments are much more commonplace than the rare instances when a viewer blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality, resulting in behaviors such as stalking; the norm for most viewers is a playful engagement in which the fictional frame is treated “as if” it were real, attaching honest emotions to representations that they know to be fiction.
Viewers can imagine relationships between themselves and fictional characters, but it is more common to become invested in the emotional stakes within the fictional frame itself. A common type of viewing pleasure is so-called shipping, a term derived from “relationshipping” fandom that emerged around viewers rooting for (or against) a romance between Mulder and Scully on The X-Files. In an ongoing series, viewers make intense investments in the romantic entanglements of characters, advocating for particular relationships in forums with other fans, often via “shipping names” combining two characters, such as “Sculder,” as discussed for Lost in chapter 8. Viewers care about characters beyond romance, often rooting for particular figures to succeed or fail in business, crime, or other professional endeavors, as well as experiencing key developments in their various relationships with family and friends. Viewers’ investment in characters bleeds outside the storyworld as well into the realm of storytelling mechanics; fans might hope that minor characters get more screen time or that major ones get less, as well as imagining potential spin-offs or crossovers between series. These facets of serial engagement all suggest the centrality of the nonreciprocal relationship between viewers and television characters.
Often such connections between viewers and characters are termed “identification,” but I agree with Murray Smith that this term is inadequate to convey the complexity of the viewing process — viewers do not literally think of characters as standing in for them within the storyworld or imagine themselves as being characters, as implied by “identification.” Instead, Smith proposes that engaging characters involves the three practices of recognition (as discussed earlier), alignment, and allegiance (discussed shortly).12 Smith’s notion of alignment helps explain the connections viewers feel with characters, both within the storyworld and parasocially outside it, as a series manages what we know about and experience with characters. Alignment consists of two key elements: attachment, in which we follow the experiences of particular characters, and access to subjective interior states of emotions, thought processes, and morality. In a long-form serial, attachment is a crucial variable, as our relative connection to individuals can shift from episode to episode, and nearly all serials have a pattern of multiple attachments to an ensemble of characters — the most exclusive attachment on fictional television might be the highly episodic Dragnet, in which Joe Friday’s narration mimics the form of the police report, restricting every scene to his presence and personal experience.13 Individual episodes might similarly restrict attachment to a single character, as with the Veronica Mars pilot discussed in chapter 2, but such patterns expand over the course of a series for both practical production reasons (as it is too inefficient to require an actor to be present for every scene) and to encourage connections with a wider range of characters. A series typically creates a broad ensemble with wide-ranging attachments across scenes and episodes; these attachments often work to foster the sense that the serial is aligned more broadly with its setting and scenario than with individual characters. On The Wire, a scene might attach to any one of dozens of characters whom the narrative differentiates and recognizes — and the series’s opening credit sequences and season-ending montages attach to nondifferentiated people who serve in familiar roles, such as cop, dealer, and dockworker, without elevating them to recognizable characters. This vast breadth of attachment locates Baltimore itself as an immersive place functioning as the core aligned character, with its various inhabitants providing access to the city’s interior subjectivity, as discussed more in chapter 6.
Attachment is particularly important for serials, as spending time with characters encourages parasocial connections — the more time we spend with particular characters, the more we extend that time through hypothetical and paratextual engagement outside the moments of watching. Attachment strategies can become a crucial site of intrinsic norms that help define the storytelling parameters of a series. Lost offers a key example, with most episodes centered on a single character, including that character’s flashbacks (in the first three seasons), flash-forwards (season 4), time-travel experiences (season 5), or flash-sideways (season 6); fans typically label these episodes as “centric” to a character, as in a “Kate-centric episode.” Lost episodes do usually feature scenes in which the centric character does not appear, but these usually take place in the on-island narrative “present” (a tricky term for the temporally convoluted series). The effect of such centric episodes is to deepen viewers’ knowledge of particular characters, providing access to their backstories (or futures) and thus providing viewers with a broader range of knowledge than any individual character possesses, delivered through piecemeal episodic accumulation. Some episodes violate these centric norms by attaching to multiple characters — sometimes dually focused on the couple Sun and Jin, in a group flashback, as with the season 1 finale “Exodus,” or by dispensing with the flashback structure altogether, as with “The Other 48 Days,” which offers a linear account of the on-island events for the tail-section survivors. Lost’s complex but patterned use of attachment helps deepen our experiences with a range of characters, as well as offering engaging variations on serial storytelling.
Smith suggests that alignment consists of both spending time with attached characters and accessing those characters’ interior subjective state, but film and television rarely employ the literary conventions of hearing characters’ interior voices or describing characters’ emotional state or thoughts. Instead, moving-image media convey subjective interior states through the accumulation of exterior markers of what we see and hear about characters: appearance, actions, dialogue, and other sorts of evidence explicitly presented within the narrative discourse. Viewers necessarily infer and construct interior states of characters, filling in internal thoughts through a process of reconstruction and hypothesizing. Thus in a scene on The Wire, Cedric Daniels glaring at Jimmy McNulty (a frequent action) is an exterior marker, but we infer that it is a judgmental and infuriated glare, suggesting that Daniels might be thinking, “I cannot believe what he just did.” There are no adverbs in television’s visual storytelling, so the program cannot simply state that Daniels is glaring judgmentally, but it must cue viewers to infer his interior state through exterior markers, ranging from the subtleties of Lance Reddick’s facial expression and posture that convey tense, suppressed rage to the dramatic context of whatever disrespectful thing McNulty just did to motivate Daniels’s glare, to our own memories of previous instances when Daniels showed that same expression toward McNulty and other characters. In the moment, we infer Daniels’s interior state as a hypothesis, which is typically confirmed by subsequent exterior markers, such as Daniels tensely barking, “McNulty, my office!” other characters’ awkward reactions to witnessing such anger, or McNulty’s typical defensive reaction: “What the fuck did I do?” We might imagine another scenario in which Daniels breaks the tension of his glare with a playful, sarcastic insult, which would convey a different interior state of bemusement or camaraderie toward McNulty, but within the context of Daniels’s larger characterization, such exterior actions and interior states would be wholly out of character (whereas they would be in keeping with other characters, such as Bunk or Kima). Such interplay between explicit exterior markers, inferred interior states, and serialized contexts is part of the cognitive viewing process that I discuss more in chapter 5.
Some programs do allow for greater access to subjectivity, such as the voice-over and fantasy sequences on Scrubs, in which we are privy to J.D.’s thoughts, attitudes, and imagination. Although this might seem like full access to J.D.’s interior state, even those manifested moments of interiority contain gaps for us to flesh out through the same processes we follow in less subjective narrative techniques. For instance, in the first-season episode “My Bad,” J.D.’s voice-over interrupts a conversation he is having with Dr. Cox with, “I’ll always remember that moment as the first ‘thank you’ I got from Dr. Cox.” Dr. Cox follows with a sarcastic line, “Well, geez, Agnes, does the field hockey team know that you’re missing?” to which J.D.’s voice-over responds, “It felt good.” Viewers have to parse out the degree to which J.D.’s desperate need for affirmation ignores Cox’s sarcasm, how much Cox truly is appreciative but cannot express it openly, and how much J.D. himself might be sarcastically mocking Cox. Just because we are inside J.D.’s head with a great degree of subjective access, the process of narrative comprehension always posits hypotheses about what a character is thinking and feeling, even when the storytelling seems to portray a character’s interiority.
Fleshing out a character’s interiority is a core appeal of most fiction, a process that Blakey Vermeule argues is crucial to understanding how and why we engage with fictional characters.14 She suggests that fiction invites us to access characters’ interior states through a process of mind reading, in which we probe the thoughts and emotions of others — while we never can fully know the interiority of another person, whether fictional or real, narratives offer a laboratory for using social cues to explore others’ minds with more access than in reality. Mind reading is especially compelling around a character’s attitudes toward other people, and thus an ongoing serial portraying a community of characters interacting and reacting to one another becomes a particularly fertile ground to explore interiority. Over the course of a serial, the characters whom we are aligned with, connected to, and invested in are typically those we spend the most time with and who provide the most interesting interior states, balancing scrutable access with complex dimensionality to engage us as active mind readers, a process I discuss more later regarding Walter White in Breaking Bad. As discussed throughout the book, one of the pleasures of watching complex television is engaging with a sense of ludic play and puzzle-solving analysis, and attempting to read the minds of nuanced, multifaceted characters is fertile ground for such playful viewing practices. Through a long-term investment in a series, viewers accrue knowledge and experiences about characters that allow us to posit our own version of their interiority, especially within the gaps between episodes, when we are left to think about what we have seen and consider our own relationship to characters. Our alignment with characters certainly changes throughout the course of a series — but do the characters themselves change?
Viewers of serial television engage with an ongoing, dynamic system, not a fixed text like most films. We identify characters not just within a fixed ensemble but also from episode to episode, across gaps of various lengths in both screen time and story time. One commonplace strategy to maintain such recognition is dialogue explicitly mentioning characters’ names, relationships, and identity to help orient the audience — most series offer such identifying information about characters far more than we typically do in real life, and programs that eschew such dialogue cues, such as The Wire, are often viewed as confusing and disorienting, requiring guides, as discussed in chapter 8. But at a more abstract level, how do we recognize a character who has changed from the first season to the last? Is he or she the same fictional person, or has he or she changed at a more intrinsic level?
While it may seem that a pleasure of serial narratives is watching characters grow and develop over time, most television characters are more stable and consistent rather than changeable entities. This is not to suggest that characters do not experience major life events, traumas, and conflicts that have an impact on who they are — surely most serial characters experience an unrealistic number of such occurrences in the high-drama realm of fiction. And as discussed in chapter 1, a core facet of seriality is that narrative events accumulate in characters’ memories and experiences. But even in the face of such life-changing events, television characters are mostly stable figures, accumulating narrative experiences more than changing from them, as Roberta Pearson argues:
Over the course of a long-running series, the routine augmenting of traits and biographies for novelty purposes can lead to highly elaborated characters. But a highly elaborated character is not the same as a well-developed character. . . . For literary and dramatic critics, development has often meant that the protagonist grows, achieves a higher degree of self-awareness and makes life-transforming decisions. But the repetitive nature of the television series dictates a relative state of stability for its characters, whose failure to perform key narrative functions and to interact with other characters in pre-established fashion could seriously undermine a series’ premise. . . . In television, it’s more accurate to talk about character accumulation and depth than it is to talk about character development. The long-running American television drama can create highly elaborated characters of greater accumulation and depth than any contemporary medium.15
I agree with Pearson’s account of most serial characters, for whom elaboration substitutes for change, but there are certainly exceptions, in which character development and transformation do occur.16 How might we define stability and change within these terms, especially given that so many narrative events and shifts in relationships occur over the course of a serialized program?
To grapple with character changes, we need to consider Smith’s third factor of character engagement: allegiance, the moral evaluation of aligned characters such that we find ourselves sympathetic to their beliefs and ethics and thus emotionally invested in their stories. Since interiority is a restricted area of access, we must infer characters’ morality and beliefs on the basis of exterior markers, including their appearance, behaviors, and interactions as well as how other characters act toward and talk about them. When Pearson connects character development with a “higher degree of self-awareness” and “life-transforming decisions,” she is referring to changes within interior beliefs and moral values (which prompt shifting actions) that Smith frames as promoting allegiance. Most of such changes in a serial are either temporary, attributed to an external factor that dissipates over the course of an episode or short arc, or only midlevel shifts in behaviors and attitudes, rather than high-level transformations of core morality and ethics that would prompt a change in our allegiances. So when examining stability and change, we need to look for indications of shifting allegiances, as motivated by transformations within both exterior actions and interior thoughts and feelings. But because we can only access interiority through exterior markers, shifts in character allegiance must be manifested externally.
There are many ways to assess changed interiority on the basis of exterior markers — a character’s new appearance might indicate a revised attitude or belief system, as a different haircut or wardrobe might signify a transformation. Dialogue can certainly signal change, either from characters themselves (“I’ve changed!”) or what other people say about them (“She’s changed”). Of course, dialogue, costuming, and appearance all might be indications solely of superficial changes or characters’ attempts to change that viewers assume are ultimately futile. Complex multifaceted characters must have their interior states confirmed by a number of different exterior markers, and typically overt actions speak louder than dialogue to indicate a character’s true subjective state. For instance, at the end of Homeland ’s first season, CIA agent Carrie Mathison undergoes a mental breakdown that we have anticipated, given that we learn of her bipolar mental illness in the pilot and see her medication run out midway through the season. In the midst of her breakdown, she asserts that she is fine, but Claire Danes’s manic performance trumps those claims, as we are aligned with her colleague Saul in trying to discern how much she has lost touch with reality. He ultimately finds his answer, and we find ours alongside him, when he discovers a huge wall collage of color-coded papers that she has assembled in a fit of mania — more than any other marker, this artifact of her actions both conveys her unhinged state and reinforces our allegiance with her, since her madness enables her to discover a pattern pointing to the truth about a terrorist conspiracy. Thus while we want to gauge a character’s interiority, we judge characters mostly by what they do, cued by how other characters regard, interact with, and talk about them; through these actions and reactions, we locate our own allegiances within a set of characters. Our sustained allegiance through her breakdown marks Carrie’s shift as a midlevel behavior change, rather than a high-level moral shift — Carrie is still motivated by noble ethics and consistent beliefs, even if her actions and attitudes differ radically from where she started the season, and we believe the shift to be temporary, anticipating her renewed stability following psychiatric treatment.
Not all character changes are manifested in actions, as one significant way characters might change is through a shifted perspective on themselves and their situation that does not translate into different actions. Carmela Soprano is a good example of a character who makes many attempts to change outwardly, by forging new relationships, seeking a career, changing her appearance or material world, or even leaving her husband, but none of these changes seem to make much of an impact on her core character, as she always reverts back to the narrative status quo. Yet Carmela does seem to have learned something about herself and changed her own internal attitudes over the course of The Sopranos, gaining some peace and acceptance about the core hypocrisy of her lifestyle and Tony’s profession in the wake of numerous traumas, accepting her guilt in living off the spoils of his violence. We gauge this shift less from differing actions than through subtle shifts in Edie Falco’s performance — the way she looks at people and things, how her emotional reactions to Tony’s actions mellow — and contrasts to other characters’ lack of growth and maturation. We also fill in the gaps in these silent moments of Carmela looking or reacting by filling in her interior state by referencing our own serial memories of the character, constructing an internal monologue that draws connections across the life span that we have shared with her, a process discussed more later.
Characters rarely shift significantly, but our understanding of them often does, a change of a somewhat different narrative order that we might call character elaboration, referring to Pearson’s distinction between elaborated and developed characters. This model of change exploits the serial form to gradually reveal aspects of a character over time so that these facets of the character feel new to the audience, even if they are consistent and unchanging character attributes. Lost’s flashback structure harnesses the power of character elaboration, as each episode reveals elements of characters’ backstory that cast their on-island actions in new light.17 While most series are less predicated on such structures, many use intermittent flashbacks or moments of recounting to fill in crucial backstory contexts to elaborate a character, a strategy seen in programs ranging from Mad Men to How I Met Your Mother, Terriers to Orange Is the New Black. Since we measure character change in large part on the basis of our own allegiances toward characters, elaborating more about a character’s backstory can make a static figure seem more dynamic, so that our own shifting knowledge and attitudes create the illusion of character change, much like the sun appearing to orbit our seemingly fixed position on Earth.
This perspectival illusion of change is not unique to viewers, but it is even more commonly seen within the relationships between characters themselves, as the most fluid dynamic of television characters is the way they interact with one another, via romances, friendships, alliances, conflicts, and betrayals. As discussed in chapter 7, Robert Allen argues that daytime soap operas focus on the ripple effects of events within the web of character relationships, observing how intracharacter reactions and attitudes shift and resonate within the diegetic community and thus color viewers’ own perspectives on characters.18 For prime time serials with far fewer hours of story material, such character webs are usually more compact and less elaborated, but they still form a key point of engagement for viewers, helping to create the perception that characters are fluid and dynamic through the shifts in how other characters relate to them. For instance, Lost’s Ben Linus is a highly complex and engaging character, but he changes little throughout the series — he is driven by a stable set of motivations for personal survival, paternal protection, and quest for validation, accompanied with a moral flexibility and lack of loyalty to anyone but his daughter. He may not change much, but our attitudes toward him do, as he becomes much more elaborated through revelations about his backstory through flashbacks, as well as the shifting ways that other characters regard and act toward him, moving from fear and hostility to pity and contempt. On most series, we watch fairly stable characters interacting to form dynamic relationships, with such interactions providing the surrogate dramatic hook for change and development that might be lacking within the interior stability of characters themselves.
Although wholesale shifts in allegiance are rare, there are instances when we do see characters change; to describe such examples, we might use a number of terms interchangeably, such as “development,” “growth,” and “transformation,” but more specific vocabulary can help distinguish between different types of character arcs. One common model of change is character growth, evoking the process of maturation in which a character becomes more realized and fleshed out over time. Not surprisingly, such arcs are most common with young characters; their physical and emotional maturation fulfills a coming-of-age narrative. This framework succeeds particularly well because viewers know from the start that young characters are not fully formed, and we expect the ongoing story to portray them transitioning out of youthful tumult into more stable adulthood. Thus many complex programs center on young characters, including Buffy, Veronica Mars, Gilmore Girls, and Friday Night Lights; highlight them within an ensemble, as on Six Feet Under, Game of Thrones, and Arrested Development; or feature young secondary characters that serve as a focal point for how they grow in relation to the more static adult world, such as on The Sopranos and Mad Men. Even when a character is not young, an arc can mimic a growth narrative by presenting a major transition that resembles the traumatic development of adolescence, such as Bubbles overcoming drug addition on The Wire, the eponymous protagonist of Chuck adjusting to a world of espionage, or various figures on Heroes adapting to their new superpowers. In almost all of these series, the characters who follow such growth arcs are contrasted with stable adults whose personalities and actions are much more static, highlighting how character change is far from universal.
Another frequent character arc might be considered character education, in which a mature adult learns a key life lesson over the course of a series and ends up a changed person. This type of education is commonly seen in the smaller scale of an individual episode, as many sitcoms and dramas portray characters learning something about themselves and promising to change; however, those lessons rarely stick, as the episodic nature of conventional prime time storytelling demands a return to a narrative status quo each week. Lost’s Jack Shephard offers an example of a long-arc character education, spending most of the series struggling with his role as a reluctant leader, his need to fix situations, and his inability to see beyond his own rationality. The series portrays his gradual acceptance of irrational phenomena and coming to terms with his lack of control, an arc that enables him to ultimately fulfill his destiny to save the island and his friends. Similarly, The Wire’s Carver starts the series as a mediocre cop who betrays his boss and takes dangerous risks without thinking, but we see him learn from his mistakes and follow the mentorship of Daniels and Colvin to become “good po-lice.” Typically such educational arcs are contrasted with other characters who do not learn those lessons, either because they lack the ability to change (as with Carver’s partner, Herc) or because they already knew them (as with Jack’s frequent adversary John Locke), highlighting thematic lessons as well as aligning viewers with the figures that are most able to adapt and adjust. Neither Jack nor Carver undergoes major moral shifts, as both start as basically good if flawed people who must learn how to move beyond their limits, and thus our allegiance does not waver significantly throughout the series. This type of character education is fairly common in long-form serials, as characters learn to accept their life’s situations, come to terms with their pasts, or develop skills and abilities that change how their behavior — but in all of these instances, such an arc leaves the character’s core morality and our allegiances unchanged.
A more abrupt form of change might be called character overhaul, in which someone undergoes a dramatic sudden shift, often tied to a supernatural or fantastic situation that creates body switches or clones, but we retain our serial memories of earlier events and relationships. Such character overhauls can be seen on a range of programs, including Locke on Lost, Francie on Alias, both Starbuck and Sharon on Battlestar Galactica, and Olivia on Fringe. Buffy and Angel employ such character overhauls quite frequently, often just for a single episode in which a character is possessed by a demon, switches bodies with someone else, confronts a doppelganger from another dimension, has his or her memory erased, is turned into a puppet, or is otherwise temporarily recharacterized.19 Some of these shifts are more long term, tying into larger arcs that make overhauls part of the character’s core identity. Angel is a key example here, as he is a reformed vampire with a soul, but occasionally on both Buffy and Angel, he becomes Angelus, a soulless killing machine. However, for both viewers and other characters, the memories of Angel’s soul persist, and we imbue Angelus’s actions with a level of moral complexity and sympathy that the demonic vampire himself lacks. A more lasting transformation occurs in Angel’s fifth season, as Fred is permanently transformed into Illyria, an ancient demon who is bewildered by the modern world; we experience this transformed character through the sympathetic perspective of her boyfriend, Wesley, who tries to sustain Fred’s memory by helping Illyria learn from humanity. Along with Wesley, we feel the loss of Fred and see Illyria inflected by our shared serial memories that she herself does not understand. Such fantasy conceits allow extreme examples of character transformation that contrast most normal characters’ stability, whether it is a temporary overhaul that quickly returns to normal or a longer-term shift that highlights what was lost through the disappearance of the character’s original stability.
Overhauls offer opportunities to play with recognition, teasing viewers and other characters about which version of a character is present. Such mistaken identities are often integrated into key plot threads, so that a character’s recharacterized version deceives other characters within the story, as in Fringe’s so-called Fauxlivia version of Olivia, who manipulates her colleagues across dimensions. In such plotlines, viewers typically know about the deception, creating suspenseful anticipation of when the truth will come out, as well as layers of dramatic irony in which we know the true meanings of dialogue. More rare are instances of overhauls in which the audience is unaware of the switch, only to learn of it at a later point in the series to create a moment of dramatic surprise — Lost featured a significant instance of this, as the 2007-era on-island scenes with John Locke featured in six episodes in the fifth season turned out to be a doppelganger manifestation of the unnamed Man in Black in Locke’s form, a transformation only revealed in the season finale. This twist forced viewers to retroactively reinterpret the season’s events (and inspired many to rewatch within this new context), positing new interior states to explain the same external markers performed by the newly identified character, known by fans as “Flocke” (fake Locke) or “UnLocke.” Playful names such as Fauxlivia and Flocke speak to fans’ need to identify and recognize characters within viewer discourses, orienting themselves within complex layers of characterization and multiple identities, as discussed in chapter 8, as well as indicating the ludic fun that many fans have in playing such games of comprehension.
This need to recognize an overhauled character is a heightened instance of what viewers of all cumulative narratives must constantly do: locate a character in their experiential arc. Most programs simplify this process by mirroring the chronology of characters and viewers, so at any given time, a dedicated sequential viewer will be drawing on the same set of shared memories and experiences as the characters themselves. Programs with convoluted chronologies complicate this process, as we must locate characters within the serial time frame and calibrate our knowledge and memories of their experiences, a process that is mirrored within the series of Doctor Who itself. As discussed in chapter 8, the romantic arc between the dual time travelers River Song and the Doctor features a tremendously twisty narrative chronology, with the characters carrying their own orienting journals to sync up their experiences whenever they meet. The two characters take time to recognize each other and to figure out who they are at this time, as defined by their shared or divergent experiences — and River Song herself expresses the melancholic anticipation that the Doctor will eventually not recognize her at all given their opposing temporal vectors (a moment that viewers had previously witnessed), as well as insisting on “no spoilers” for events in each character’s future. Of course, many television viewers are time travelers themselves within serial storyworlds, consuming episodes out of order or rewatching selected episodes, requiring viewers to similarly sync up their memories or consult paratexts to orient themselves as to which version of a character is appearing on screen.
My final category of character change is what we might traditionally think about under such an umbrella: a character transformation of an adult, complete with a gradual shift of morality, attitudes, and sense of self that manifests itself in altered actions and long-term repercussions. Pearson suggests that traditional norms of character change feature such “life-transforming decisions,” a model that seems suited to the more stand-alone narrative forms of film and literature than to the ongoing serial model of television, but a few rare examples of television’s character transformations do seem to fit this category. One of serial television’s most effective character transformations is Wesley Wyndam-Pryce from Buffy and Angel, who was introduced in the former’s third season as a comedically pompous, cowardly, and bumbling Watcher ineffectually trying to supervise Buffy. The following year, Wesley moved to spin-off Angel and began to transform into a more competent and assured “demon hunter” through his experiences and meaningful relationships with coworkers and friends, eventually rising to a leadership role within the team. Yet when he betrays his friends in a well-intentioned attempt to spare Angel additional torment, he is outcast from the group and becomes involved in a dark and manipulative sexual relationship with the antagonistic lawyer Lilah. Wesley eventually returns to Angel’s side but is clearly a changed man, with a darker and more cynical edge; he confronts romantic situations and personal sacrifice quite differently in the program’s final season through his relationship with Fred and the trauma of Illyria’s emergence. Although he encounters numerous supernatural phenomena in his journey, his transformation is not a paranormal overhaul but a gradual human shift — at any point in his multiseason journey, Wesley feels like a robust and fully realized character, and it is only through a broader view that we can see his arc as a rare example of serialized character transformation.
By concluding this roundup of different models of character change with transformation, I do not mean to suggest that television’s dominant approach to characterization is flawed by overemphasizing stability or less organic models of change except for a few notable exceptions. The desire for stable characters with consistent traits and personalities is a major draw for serial storytelling, as we want to feel connected to such characters through parasocial relationships and might be quite disappointed if they changed in ways that violate their initial connections and appeals — certainly a common complaint among television fans is when a character’s actions seem unmotivated and inconsistent, a critique that speaks to the need for character stability. Viewers invest themselves in the shifting web of relationships between fairly stable characters; focusing on character change does not belittle that dominant mode of television storytelling in either episodic or serial forms. However, character transformation remains an exceptional feature for most television, and looking closely at how a series can accomplish such dramatic changes highlights one of the more innovative possibilities of complex television. No series embraces character transformation more fully than Breaking Bad, so to explore its remarkable approach to television characterization, we need to examine an important dramatic staple of many complex series: the antihero.
In the collection of short stories Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace creates a resonance between the two adjectives in his title — if we are going to spend time in the company of hideous men, it best be brief. Most television abides by this link; distasteful and unpleasant characters are treated briefly, whether as unsympathetic protagonists on an anthology program such as The Twilight Zone or as single-episode villains featured in a procedural’s police investigation or medical case. But as I argue throughout this book, serial television is distinguished by the long time frames it creates, and thus any interaction with hideous men found in a series’s regular cast will last quite a while. One common trait shared by many complex television series is the narrative prominence of unsympathetic, morally questionable, or villainous figures, nearly always male (as discussed more shortly), a trend typically identified as the character type of the antihero — a term that may not be applicable per traditional literary definitions but has become the common cultural moniker for this style of characterization. The rise of television’s antiheroes raises a key question: why would we want to subject ourselves to lengthy interactions with such hideous men?
Using Murray Smith’s vocabulary, an antihero is a character who is our primary point of ongoing narrative alignment but whose behavior and beliefs provoke ambiguous, conflicted, or negative moral allegiance. Although often lumped into a singular character type, antiheroes can come in a wide range of variants, from misanthropic, selfish, but ultimately redeemable heroes, such as Mal on Firefly or Tommy on Rescue Me, to arrogantly superior, destructively flawed, but moral figures, such as Gregory House on House, M.D. and Jimmy McNulty on The Wire, to outright amoral villains as protagonists, such as Tony Soprano and Dexter Morgan. Some antiheroes stretch a rebellious member of a typically upright organization to its moral limits, as with The Shield ’s portrayal of rogue cops turned into corrupt murderers and thieves, while others focus on a community of villains within an unlikely locale, as with Oz’s prison or the Sons of Anarchy bike gang. Complex comedies have also embraced antiheroic protagonists, as with Larry David’s misanthropic self-portrait on Curb Your Enthusiasm or the ensemble of horrid losers populating It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Television features a longer history of comedies centered on unlikable protagonists, including Archie Bunker on All in the Family, Seinfeld ’s core ensemble, and the main characters on The Larry Sanders Show, with even more prominence on British comedies such as Fawlty Towers, Absolutely Fabulous, Blackadder, and The Office. In nearly all of these comedic instances, we are positioned as rooting against the unsympathetic heroes, watching them fail for our amusement as well as laughing at their boundary-pushing behavioral extremes. But how do we account for the pleasures of watching a highly unpleasant protagonist at the center of a dramatic narrative that asks us to truly care about his actions and potentially encourages our allegiance?
Antihero narratives regularly invoke relative morality, in which an ethically questionable character is juxtaposed with more explicitly villainous and unsympathetic characters to highlight the antihero’s more redeeming qualities.20 On Mad Men, Don Draper’s misbehavior is often seen as more redeemable and motivated than that of less sympathetic characters Pete and Roger; on Dexter, the title character’s murderous ways are always contrasted with another murderer who lacks a code and targets innocents. Although The Wire is not directly focused on antiheroes, criminal characters such as Stringer Bell, Omar Little, and Bodie Broadus are framed as more multifaceted and morally complex than unredeemed villainous figures such as Marlo Stanfield, The Greek, and Maury Levy. Within The Sopranos, it would be hard to say that Tony’s actions are truly more ethical than those of his mafia associates, but through his therapy sessions and familial interactions, we come to know his personal history that shaped his amorality, his moral quandaries, and the anxiety attacks that derive from his internal conflicts. We may not be certain that Tony is a morally superior person than more villainous associates Richie Aprile and Ralphie Cifaretto are, but due to our alignment with Tony, we perceive him as relatively more worthy of our allegiance than these more distanced and opaque characters. Even more central characters Paulie and Christopher are viewed as less noble than Tony, lacking leadership abilities, parental grounding, and an ability to overcome their respective flaws of superstitious paranoia and drug addiction.21 With Tony Soprano and other leading antiheroes, we feel more connected to characters with relative morality within that program’s ethical universe, even if all of the characters would be reprehensible in real life — in effect, these main characters are validated for being less hideous than the alternatives presented in the series.22
As suggested by The Sopranos, alignment and elaboration are key components of our allegiance to an antihero — the more we know about a character through revelations of backstory, relationships, and interior thoughts, the more likely that we will come to regard them as an ally in our journey through the storyworld. This might be partly akin to a fictionalized Stockholm Syndrome, in which time spent with hideous characters engenders our sympathy as we start to see things from their perspective. However, we are not being held captive by serial television, so a series must justify why it deserves our attention week after week; and compelling characters are an essential element of any program’s appeal. Charisma helps us overlook the hideousness of many antiheroes, creating a sense of charm and verve that makes the time spent with them enjoyable, despite their moral shortcomings and unpleasant behaviors. Charisma largely stems from an actor’s performance and physicality but is also cued by how other characters treat the antiheroes, so that on-screen relationships guide viewers how to feel toward a character. Thus on The Sopranos, nearly every character respects, loves, desires, or follows Tony — and those who do not rarely survive for long — despite the fact that he consistently treats people quite poorly, whether they be family members, colleagues, or friends. Likewise, everyone tells Don Draper how good he is at his job, with most of Mad Men’s male characters aspiring to be him and many of the women desiring to be with him. Both James Gandolfini and Jon Hamm are magnetic actors, with the former using his physical bulk to create a sense of menacing but approachable power, while Hamm is commonly regarded as one of the most handsome actors in Hollywood, a physicality that certainly feeds into Draper’s desirability. Additionally, both Tony and Don are positioned as accomplished leaders in their respective careers, generating material wealth and power that signals desirability and success within much of American culture. Both characters exude charisma that inspires viewers to want to spend time with them, despite their moral hideousness.
The draw of antiheroes does not simply override such hideousness but partly stems from the fascination that it prompts — the immoral actions of these characters create viewer intrigue, or what Smith calls “the innate fascination of imagining experiences that we lack the opportunity or courage to experience in reality.”23 The fictional bubble allows us to witness actions and traumas that we are hopefully safe from in real life, and through aligned antiheroes, we are able to read their immoral minds. Vermeule connects such fascination to a cognitive concept called “Machiavellian intelligence,” in which success in a socially complex environment depends on the ability to understand and manipulate other people, a trait that is well served by interpersonal mind reading. For Vermeule, much of our engagement with fiction stems from our interest in reading the minds of Machiavellian characters who display social intelligence, cunning, and a keen ability to manipulate others — we learn from their adventures, helping to develop our own social intelligence through the tales of fascinating characters. She posits the core Machiavellian character as a “mastermind” who manipulates others (for good or ill), excels at social problem solving, and is often found in narratives with “high narrative reflexivity” and allusions to games and puzzles, all traits common to complex television.24 Although most of Vermeule’s literary examples are not antiheroes, we can see such traits within many complex television series focusing on amoral figures, suggesting that Machiavellian fascination is a key component driving the antiheroic boom.
The lead character on Showtime’s Dexter offers an interesting example whose hideousness as a serial killer may be unmatched in terms of reprehensible actions among television antiheroes; he is responsible for murdering more than 130 people over eight seasons. However, Dexter Morgan is clearly framed as a protagonist deserving sympathy and allegiance via a number of characterization strategies. Actor Michael C. Hall brings an intertextual shine to his portrayal, as he was well-known as the sympathetic, soft-spoken, and occasionally victimized David Fisher on HBO’s Six Feet Under for the five years immediately before Dexter’s 2006 debut; given the two shows’ shared style as a dark premium-cable drama with comedic undertones, Hall’s previous role helped make Dexter feel more familiar, charismatic, and accessible to viewers of both series. Viewers are highly aligned with Dexter, spending most of the narrative attached to him and being granted exclusive access to his interiority via voice-over narration, flashbacks, and subjective visuals. Such alignment facilitates mind reading as well as granting access to Dexter’s dryly ironic sense of humor, highlighting our shared connection to the character. This attachment allows us to witness actions that no other characters know about, providing shared secrets and knowledge of Dexter’s personal ethical code to promote allegiance and even positioning viewers as passive witness to, and accomplices in, his vigilantism. The series clearly embraces relative morality, as his victims are almost always more monstrous than is Dexter himself, and we repeatedly hear his thoughts about his adoptive father’s code of ethics and his need to target those who deserve to be brought to justice to protect innocents. We admire his Machiavellian prowess; his cunning and dedication to rational analysis allow him to evade capture and discovery for many years. Thus even though we see Dexter doing unspeakably hideous things, we are steeped in his perspective, his rationales, and his backstory enough to understand and even sympathize with his murderous and deceitful actions.
Dexter’s first season sets important groundwork for the character, establishing clear alignment and allegiance for viewers to build on for the rest of the series. The season gradually elaborates the character in tight alignment, as we discover alongside Dexter himself the gruesome childhood trauma that caused his mental illness: when three years old, he witnessed his mother’s murder via chainsaw and was locked in a room in a pool of her blood for two days. The harrowing flashbacks to this event, which stand out as the most gruesome and troubling images in a series full of them, provide a plausible explanation that such trauma might cause a mental break and turn a boy into a serial killer, creating sympathy for the character’s victimization in childhood that extends to his older murderous version as trained and guided by his adoptive father. As discussed more in chapter 5, this sympathy is contrasted to his previously unknown brother, whom Dexter discovers also experienced this matricidal trauma and became a serial killer but lacks Dexter’s moral code and familial grounding. The series accomplishes what would seem to be an impossible task — making a serial killer into a sympathetic hero whom we enjoy spending time with each week — but gets stuck in a narrative bind: because Dexter must continue to kill to fulfill the program’s concept but cannot deviate from his moral code to sustain viewers’ sympathy, the character has little room for conflict, change, and development. Nearly every season portrays Dexter fighting his instincts and working to eliminate his murderous urges, but he must always embrace who he is to exact justice, to save his family, or to preserve his own life, leading to character stagnation and repetition and stretching emotional credulity for a series that already lacks realism in much of its storytelling. Typically a program can use the fluid dynamics of relationships to offset static characters, but because Dexter’s concept is predicated on his character posing behind a stable facade to all of his long-term friends and family, they cannot have sincere relationships with him compared with what we know of him as aligned viewers; instead, Dexter’s family situation is the most fluid variable, as he marries, has a child, and then copes with being a single parent, but none of these shifts have much palpable impact on his core characterization. Without a sense that Dexter’s character changes over time, either internally through transformation or development or cued via the surrogate of externalized relationships, the program’s concept wears thin after numerous seasons, only rekindling interest in the seventh season when his sister, Deb, learns his secrets and thus transforms their relationship and challenges his worldview.25
Dexter’s serialized challenge highlights one of the key issues with antiheroes: what are our expectations for character change? Since antiheroes are predicated on a careful chemistry of alignment, relative morality, fascination, and charisma, character change can upset that balance, but overt stagnation becomes dull and troubling for the relationships portrayed on the series. Additionally, the narrative scenarios of most antihero dramas seem pointed toward an ultimate reckoning, when characters will have to pay the price for their crimes and immoral behaviors — but without clear character changes or development, coupled with the endless delay of television’s infinite model (which Dexter suffers from for much of its run), the final destination of an antihero can set up mixed expectations. In chapter 10, I discuss the conclusion of The Sopranos and the need for narrative closure and potential justice for Tony, but we can see similar challenges raised for the arcs of Don Draper and Dexter Morgan. Seinfeld ’s ending delivered a reckoning for the lead characters, imprisoned for their insensitivity, but most viewers felt like the punishment did not fit the crime, especially in the program’s comedic context. Probably the most celebrated final fate for an antihero is The Shield ’s, with Vic Mackey working the system to get immunity for his crimes, but he ends up condemned to a desk job that feels like prison given his action-oriented personality. Antihero conclusions are extraordinarily difficult, as they must provide a motivated end to a complex character arc, pay off serialized arcs that reward viewers’ dedication, and offer (or actively refuse) a moral position toward the characters’ behaviors. And for many ongoing serials, the anticipated ending looms over a series run, with viewers waiting to judge a character’s arc and morality in lieu of where the story takes him.
As I have argued throughout this book, complex television acknowledges its own role as fiction through reflexive storytelling strategies, even when programs are highly dedicated to realism, as with The Wire. This is an important element for antiheroes, as we must remember that their hideous acts are fictional to allow us to suspend moral judgments and rationalize their behaviors, which Margrethe Bruun Vaage argues is essential to enable allegiance with characters doing horrible actions.26 However, the serial model of television complicates the solid line between fiction and reality, as parasocial engagement with television characters allows serialized characters to persist beyond their time on the screen. If you immerse yourself within the fictional lives of Dexter Morgan or Tony Soprano, you are likely to think about their behaviors even while you are not watching television, perhaps positing how they would handle a situation in your own life or imagining what they might be doing in between episodes. While we do maintain a clear sense that these are fictional characters, parasocial engagement allows hideous characters to occupy our thoughts and attention outside the clear frame of televised entertainment, creating uncomfortable blurs in which we might find ourselves imagining the actions and thoughts of a psychopath within our daily lives. Although antiheroes do spark a different set of allegiances than typical serialized characters do — though I am loathe to acknowledge that there are certainly viewers who imagine Dexter as their “TV boyfriend” — there is no doubt that watching an ongoing serial tightly focused on an antihero does entail entering into a relationship with the character and allowing him into our daily routines and thoughts, for better or worse. While this does not mean that viewers cannot distinguish between fiction and reality, it does highlight how watching serial television blurs character boundaries and suggests that any notion of a clear fictional frame might be a bit more muddy than we might expect for other, more bounded media.
In my discussion of antiheroes, it should be clear that crafting characters who effectively balance alignment, allegiance, and stability is quite difficult to pull off successfully throughout a serial, which leads to a key question: why bother? Decades of dramatic television have avoided such antiheroes at their centers, settling for charismatic villains we love to hate to explore darker characters, such as Dallas’s J.R., Melrose Place’s Amanda, or numerous figures on every daytime soap opera. Certainly part of antiheroes’ appeal stems from the imitative logic of commercial television — when The Sopranos became a surprise hit, it invited the industry to ride on its success by mimicking its focus on a criminal protagonist, a trend that proved lucrative through commercial and critical successes such as The Shield and Dexter but also certainly yielded less successful imitators such as Kingpin and Brotherhood. This innovation also signaled to television creators new possibilities for darker heroes, storylines, and themes, capitalizing on the freer content standards available on cable to tell a broader range of stories than had been permissible in television’s classic network era. Not surprisingly, such dark stories tend to get more critical accolades and awards for their innovative approaches and subject matter, so there are incentives for creators to rise to the challenge of creating compelling antiheroes that encourage viewers to stick around for such lengthy interactions.
As mentioned earlier, all of these antiheroes are hideous men, with a distinct lack of female characters who invite us in to embrace their troubling morality. Female characters who approach antiheroic status tend to be either sympathetic but prickly, as with Veronica Mars, Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica, and Sarah on The Killing, or more comedic approaches to morally questionable women, as with Sex and the City, Weeds, Nurse Jackie, and Enlightened. The few examples of a full-blown female antihero I can name who might be dramatically equivalent to Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Dexter Morgan, or Vic Mackey fall short of those programs’ characterization. Patty Hewes on Damages seems similarly ruthless and unsympathetic, but her protagonist function is more doubtful, as she is contrasted with the more noble and sympathetic character of Ellen, making Patty more into a villain we love to hate, at least in early seasons before her backstory is more fully explored. Revenge teased with transforming its main protagonist from a vengeance-seeking hero into a morally questionable antihero, but the series maintains Emily Thorne’s moral superiority to her victims, backing away from murder and other explicitly immoral acts. The Americans focuses on a married couple of undercover Soviet spies, with Elizabeth presented as more capable of violence and betrayal than is her husband, Phillip, but the dual focus makes the antiheroic woman less central than on most male-centered series.
Part of why antiheroes seem limited by gender stems from the cultural norms of particular genres, with crime dramas that lend themselves to antiheroes tending toward masculine appeals, as discussed in chapter 7. More centrally, there are broader cultural norms at play; men are more likely to be respected and admired for ruthlessness, self-promotion, and the pursuit of success at any cost, while women are still constructed more as nurturing, selfless, and objects of action rather than empowered agents themselves — or when women do embrace powerful agency, they are often recast as the comedic “unruly woman.” This cultural stereotype can yield a backlash against an aggressive, morally questionable female character, who is often viewed as more of an unsympathetic “ball-busting bitch” than the charismatic rogue that typifies most male antiheroes. But clearly there is room within television’s narrative palette to expand the range of female antiheroes that might serve as the focus of serial narratives.27
Throughout this discussion of antiheroes and character change, I have avoided one example that might be the most salient and interesting from contemporary television: Breaking Bad ’s Walter White. Thus I conclude this chapter with a detailed look at Walt as a case study of television character analysis, with the clear caveat that it is an exceptional and atypical example. Creator Vince Gilligan conceived the series to be predicated on character change to a degree that he had rarely seen on television, with the title indicating this transformative arc — “breaking bad” is an American southern idiom for someone losing his or her moral compass. Gilligan regularly mentions that his goal was to take Walter White on a journey “from Mr. Chips to Scarface,” referring to cinematic character tropes of the model schoolteacher and gangster kingpin, respectively, a transformation he elaborates in more depth in comparison with The Sopranos:
Where you meet Tony Soprano, he was a guy born into a world of crime. . . . I like the idea of approaching a crime show from my point of view. . . . I’m just a big weeny; there’s no way that I’d break the law — not because I’m particularly moral but because I’d be scared of the consequences. And I like the idea of approaching a bad-guy character from a starting point of zero, from never having jaywalked or littered to doing some of the crazy shit Walter White does. . . . What would I do if I suddenly decided to become a criminal? How would I approach it? The process . . . was a big part of what appealed to me, delineating the process of transformation, of going from a normal schlub to a bad guy and ultimately to a kingpin.28
As Gilligan makes clear, the program starts with Walt as an everyman “schlub,” a high school chemistry teacher who is clearly aligned with the audience and encouraging our allegiance; by the final season, Walt is a monstrous villain, murdering rivals, poisoning an innocent child for a risky, selfish scheme, and deceitfully manipulating those whom he claims to love. How did this epic moral transformation work?
To understand Walter White, we must start at Breaking Bad ’s pilot — or even earlier, as Breaking Bad ’s debut in January 2008 was linked to three key intertexts. As the cable channel AMC’s second foray into original dramatic programming, Mad Men loomed large, having debuted six months before Breaking Bad and establishing AMC as a legitimate venue for ambitious, antiheroic serialized drama and thus encouraging viewers and critics to take the new series seriously. At the level of plot, Breaking Bad was initially framed as a male version of Weeds, with shared focus on a “respectable” middle-class parent entering into the illegal drug business in a moment of crisis; this comparison helped highlight Breaking Bad ’s dramatic darkness and heavy serialization in contrast to the more playful comic (and female-centered) tone of Weeds. The third and most important intertext in terms of characterization was Malcolm in the Middle, the landmark single-camera sitcom that pioneered many techniques of complex comedic television in the early 2000s, featuring Bryan Cranston as the befuddled man-child father Hal for seven seasons. Breaking Bad was initially known as “that show where Malcolm’s dad gets cancer and becomes a drug dealer,” an important framework for how Walter White was perceived: Cranston’s star persona as an affable comedic actor (on both Malcolm and a recurring role on Seinfeld) inflected his portrayal of Walt, whose character was vastly different from Hal but drew on Cranston’s reservoir of goodwill and likability. Thus Breaking Bad emerged into a context where viewers were poised to embrace Walt as a sympathetic lead character, fulfilling Gilligan’s conception of an everyday schlub.
Indeed the pilot’s opening moments evoke the Malcolm intertext, as we first see Walt recklessly driving an RV through the desert, wearing nothing but “tighty whitey” underpants and a gas mask. It is not hard to imagine Hal in such a manic situation, albeit without the dead body in the back of the van, as Cranston was hailed on Malcolm for his outlandish physicality and no-shame style of physical comedy — Malcolm’s writers used to play a game called “what won’t Bryan do?” as they created outlandish and humiliating stunts for which the actor always was game.29 The underwear is an unintended intertextual connection that Cranston initially resisted, pushing back against Gilligan’s scripted call for Walt to wear the same style of underwear as Hal. After further consideration, the actor embraced how the wardrobe choice says something different about each character: for Hal, it indicates his boyish immaturity, as “he always wore them and it never occurred to him to wear anything else,” while Walt wears them as a sign of “stunted growth” and a depressive lack of caring about himself.30 For viewers who knew Cranston from Malcolm, this opening moment taps into positive sentiments toward Hal and extends them to this still-unknown figure of Walter White. Beyond this shared taste in undergarments, the two characters are both motivated largely by fear, which Cranston suggests manifests itself differently: an outlandish cartoonish cowardice in Hal and a closed-down emotional and physical absence for Walt.31
We get our first indication that Walt is not Hal when we first see Cranston’s face upon removing the gas mask, as Walt has what the actor calls “an impotent mustache” that Hal never featured. Physical appearance is crucial to creating characters, and Cranston, as a producer as well as a star (as well as an occasional director starting in the second season), had an active hand in creating Walt’s look: “I told Vince, he should be overweight, he should wear glasses, he should have a mustache that makes people go, ‘Why bother?’ His hair should be undefined; he always needs a trim. He doesn’t care. His clothes should blend in with the wall, no color in his skin. As he changes, color palettes will change, his attitude, everything.”32 These exterior traits clearly reflect on Walt’s internal psyche, and Cranston has noted that physicality is crucial to his performance, both in how Walt feels and in how that interiority is conveyed to the audience. As the series progresses, Walt’s changes are externalized through his appearance, as the impotent mustache and undefined haircut shift to a shaved head with a goatee, a look that Cranston calls “badass, . . . the most intimidating look there can be,” both signaling his changing psychology and allowing Walt to help rationalize his behavior because he “doesn’t recognize the man in the mirror.”33 Similarly, Walt adopts a black porkpie hat to wear in his persona of “Heisenberg” within the drug business, an iconic marker that transforms both our perception of the character and his interior sense of self. By the second season, it is hard to imagine a viewer looking at Cranston and thinking about Malcolm’s Hal, but at the start of Walt’s journey, that association was crucial to forge allegiance and a positive emotional connection with the character.
Walter White does not start as a villainous antihero, as his initial characterization seems driven less by questionable morality than by a desperate situation — he makes a series of bad choices that lead to his eventual moral dissolution, but he starts by evoking pathetic pity rather than the charismatic confidence of most other antiheroes. As we learn about his cancer, his unfulfilling career, and his dire financial situation, we are fully attached to the character, sharing knowledge that he keeps secret from other characters, thus increasing our alignment. The first lines of dialogue we hear from Walt are his confessional thoughts, even though the series never uses voice-over narration, as he videotapes a message he presumes to be his dying words to his wife and son. In a now-conventional format discussed in the introduction and chapter 2 regarding Alias, Revenge, and Veronica Mars, this pilot opens with an in medias res scene that invites us to wonder how he came to this desperate moment — on Breaking Bad, this curiosity is cued by Walt telling the video camera as the surrogate for his son, “There are going to be some things that you’re going to learn about me in the coming days.” Importantly, the video message clearly establishes Walt’s character constellation, as he assures his family that all of his mysterious and seemingly suspicious actions were done for them. This opening scene, in which Walt is the only character present (aside from an unconscious Jesse), establishes that the series will be a highly aligned character study and that it will pivot on the enigma of how this man, so clearly uncomfortable holding a gun, ended up in such a dire situation — and, given the show’s serial nature, what complications will follow from these events.
As suggested earlier, the relative morality of characters is important in establishing allegiance, and even though Walt does not begin as an amoral antihero, he is still partially redeemed in comparison to others, especially his bombastic, blowhard brother-in-law, Hank (who is later revealed to be far more conflicted and less confident than he seems), his seemingly shallow and materialistic sister-in-law, Marie (who we will learn is both a kleptomaniac and stronger than she lets on), and the brash young drug dealer Jesse who introduces him to his life of crime (whose moral journey will be almost as complex as Walt’s). Compared to these strong personalities, Walt shrinks into the background and seems too inconsequential to be anything but morally sound. His wife, Skyler, and son, Walt Jr., are both more sympathetic, though neither character has the degree of depth and nuance that Walt does, at least for the initial two seasons. Walt garners our sympathies if not our admiration, as he is clearly pitiable in a hopeless situation that begs the question, “what would you do?” While his desperation-driven decision to cook crystal meth to secure a nest egg for his family is not posited as admirable, it is reasonable given the dire circumstances — in fact, “reasonability” is a crucial facet of Walt’s decision-making process, as Breaking Bad presents Walt as a master rationalizer for his increasingly hideous actions. Throughout the series, we watch Walt convince himself that various immoral decisions are the right thing to do, given a lack of alternatives, leading to a descent into monstrous behavior that is always presented as reasonable within Walt’s own self-justification and immediate context.
By the time Walter White becomes a full-fledged antihero, a hideous man whose actions bring suffering on his family and colleagues, whom he claims to be protecting, it is clear that he is of a different ilk than other television antiheroes. Unlike Tony Soprano or Vic Mackey, he is not a charismatic leader with loyal followers or devoted family members — for most of the series, the only characters who seem to like or respect him are family members who know nothing of his secret criminal life, and thus such feelings do not extend to viewers, who know the full depths of his moral decline. He lacks “friends” in any conventional sense, with his closest confidant being Jesse, who grows to regard him with contempt, working with him only when “Mr. White” (as Jesse calls him) manipulates him into an alliance or when Jesse’s own insecurities drive him to seek for the security of a father figure. Walt’s sometimes estranged wife, Skyler, only accepts him back into a tenuous reconciliation to maximize her own safety, but only before she knows of the extent of his crimes or when he bullies her into submission. And unlike nearly every other antihero, there are no romantic plotlines that frame Walt as an object of sexual desire — his sex life with Skyler perks up when he discovers his dark side in the first season, culminating in an aggressive nonconsensual encounter in their kitchen that Skyler must defensively cease once she gets over her shock at his behavior. But otherwise Walt is sexually neutered for most of the series and even attempts a ludicrously inappropriate advance toward his high school supervisor, Carmen, resulting in his being fired. He creates the artifice of a powerful and respected villain under the Heisenberg moniker emblematically tied to the black hat, with a feared street reputation, his demand that adversaries say his name, and even a narcocorrido ballad celebrating his mythic exploits, but long-term viewers recognize Heisenberg as a shallow put-on rather than an authentically awe-inspiring figure. While other antiheroes gain our allegiance through the attitudes of other characters, Walt might be the least respected or admired ongoing character on the series, despite our clear alignment toward him.
Instead of relationships cuing our allegiance to Walt or numerous flashbacks to his originating backstory, we instead have our own memories of who Walt used to be, as long-term viewers can recall him as being decent and ethical, if boring and depressed. Our serial memories help sustain lingering allegiance, despite his irredeemable acts along the way. Such memories help us understand the characters in micromoments as well, given that Breaking Bad features many scenes with minimal dialogue that invite us to think along with the characters. Through a long-term investment in a series, viewers accrue knowledge and experiences about characters that allows us to mind read our own version of their internal monologues. For instance, in the opening two-minute scene from the fourth-season episode “Open House,” nothing really happens: Walter White comes to work in the meth lab, drinks coffee, notices the newly installed surveillance camera, and gives it an obscene gesture, with the only dialogue a muttering “Son of a . . .” And yet for serial viewers sharing Walt’s memories from more than 30 previous episodes, we can read Cranston’s subtle cues and infer Walt’s raging interior drama that contradicts the lack of exterior action — we infer his contempt toward the workaday life he tried to escape via the drug game, evoking his feelings toward his old car-wash job from the pilot. His one moment of pleasure comes while drinking coffee made in an elaborate contraption, as he fondly remembers its quirky architect, former coworker Gale. This joy turns to grief as he thinks about Gale’s recent death, then to guilt when he remembers that he is directly responsible for ordering Gale’s murder. In typical Walt fashion, guilt turns to indignant anger, as he rationalizes his own acts and convinces himself that he is actually the victim — an anger confirmed and further stoked by discovering the camera. The scene concludes with Walt channeling his anger and sense of outraged victimization into an impotent attempt to fight back, represented by the obscene yet ineffectual gesture and reminiscent of many other times he has raged against people purporting to be his superiors. While different viewers might construct their own particular accounts of Walt’s interior emotional state, through the power of serial memory we can overcome television’s limited access to character interiority and provide a subjective account of tightly aligned characters.
As Walt shifts from his pitiable but sympathetic initial status through his moral journey, we are gradually confronted with increasingly escalating actions that challenge our character allegiance, a process that can be benchmarked by those who die or are injured at his hands. In the pilot, he concocts a gas explosion in the RV to escape a direct threat, killing Emilio and incapacitating Krazy-8, an action of unthinking self-defense that seems completely justified in the moment. Walt and Jesse take Krazy-8 hostage and rationalize that they must murder him to protect themselves from his vengeance or being caught, but Walt is unable to commit murder until Krazy-8 poses an immediate physical threat, again justifying the act as self-defense. Later in the first season, Walt shaves his head and adopts the pseudonym Heisenberg to take on a more intimidating facade of a drug criminal, confronting the kingpin Tuco and his henchman by triggering a seemingly nonfatal explosion in his office — this is Walt’s first act of planned violent aggression, but since it is aimed at characters who are clearly more dangerous and immoral than he is, we are still clearly allied with Walt. Indeed, the Heisenberg persona and visual style is clearly framed as an enjoyable “badass” facet of Walt’s character, inviting us to enjoy his violent acts against more hideous criminals in a fashion common to other morally ambiguous crime series such as The Shield and Justified. Although some of Walt’s actions are violent and his contributions to the drug epidemic are a negative social force, for the most part Breaking Bad ’s first two seasons situate us on Walt’s side against less moral characters.
The end of the second season takes a major step toward Walt’s broader moral dissolution. Walt is investing more of his emotions and energies into his secret drug career and personal relationship with his protégé Jesse than into his own family, including missing his daughter’s birth to make a drug delivery, but he reaches an impasse with Jesse, who has sunk deeper into his drug habit along with his girlfriend, Jane. When finding Jane choking on her own vomit in a heroin-induced stupor, Walt chooses to let her suffocate in order to reclaim Jesse and avoid Jane’s blackmail — we watch him wordlessly rationalize this passive act of murder. As discussed more in chapter 6, this moment plunges us into Walt’s interiority by triggering serialized memory: we reconstruct Walt’s interior thought processes via our shared experiences of his life that we have witnessed over the previous two seasons. We know his talent for rationalization and his need to prioritize his own well-being over that of others, as well as his paternal connection to Jesse, and thus can imagine his internal monologue as he stops himself from saving Jane’s life and watches her die to protect himself and his surrogate son. Although at this moment it is unlikely that most viewers feel that Jane deserves to die the same way that they may have felt toward Krazy-8, Walt’s rationalization makes sense as an act of passive cruelty toward a character we have less allegiance toward and as an attempt to rescue Jesse, whom we have become more allied with through the series. However, this moment indicates some vital character change, as the Walt whom we met in the pilot certainly would have saved Jane had he found himself in the same situation.
Walt and Jesse’s relationship is crucial to Breaking Bad ’s shift in character morality. Throughout the first season, Walt is clearly more admirable, driven to crime out of desperation and a sense of familial obligation and displaying an impressive mastery of chemistry that allows him to thrive in this new criminal world, while Jesse is an avid if not addicted drug user, bright but uneducated, and seemingly only motivated out of selfishness, greed, and hedonism. We are more aligned and allied with Walt, although learning more about Jesse’s family background and undernourished artistic talent makes him more sympathetic and understandable in his actions. Season 2’s “Peekaboo” is a key episode for increasing our connection to Jesse, as we follow him into a dangerous situation in which he both acts to save a young boy and refuses to murder the boy’s junky parents, revealing a moral center that grows stronger and more admirable as Walt’s dissolves. The end of season 2 troubles our allegiances, with Jesse being less aligned but more admirable despite his addiction, while Walt’s selfishness and deceit becomes less justifiable in contrast.
By season 3, the duo shifts roles in terms of allegiance: armed with the secret of Jane’s preventable death, most viewers root for Jesse’s eventual salvation and hope he can escape from Walt’s dark influence. Jesse comes away from Jane’s death blaming himself and, as he says in the episode “No Mas,” accepting who he is as “the bad guy,” an identity that viewers regard as undeserved and avoidable. Meanwhile, Walt runs from his own moral culpability, as he renounces his criminal career to salvage his crumbled marriage and restore his normal life. But Breaking Bad puts viewers in an uncomfortable situation — the moral version of Walter White is an unpleasant, boring, and pitiable character whom we feel little desire to spend time with over the course of a series, while the amoral, “bad” version is much more vibrant, Machiavellian, and engaging as an antihero. The series pushes Walt further and further across the moral line, making us root for him to do hideous things for our entertainment, while calling attention to his hideousness in a way that refuses to glorify violence or celebrate depravity. The series poses and reasserts the questions of how far is too far for this man and, given his actions, what price should be paid and how should we regard him. Thus we root for him to get back to cooking meth, even though we know there will be unforgivable consequences from that decision and must reconcile our own culpability in watching his moral decline. At the end of the third season, he is even deeper in the drug game, easily killing two henchmen who threaten Jesse and plotting to kill Gale to protect himself — his most brutal act is enlisting Jesse to shoot Gale, as discussed more in chapter 3, corrupting Jesse further by pushing him into being a murderer and thus generating more viewer antipathy for Walt through the moral rebalancing of the two characters. Walt’s turn toward the monstrous reaches far beyond the point of no return by the end of season 4, when he sends his innocent neighbor into his house to root out an ambush from murderous thugs and poisons a child to manipulate Jesse back to his side, not to mention directly causing the deaths of five drug criminals and setting off a bomb in a nursing home.
For the first half of season 5, Walt tries to become a full-time Heisenberg supervillain in the “empire business,” alienating all of his family and Jesse in the process. He finally triumphs over all adversaries but finds the lack of recognition and hard work empty despite the nearly infinite monetary rewards; thus he retires from the meth business and attempts to rededicate himself to his family. Yet the monsters he has unleashed, from his alliance with the dual evils of a global corporation and a band of neo-Nazi enforcers, will not remain dormant, nor will his brother-in-law Hank, who discovers Walt’s secret life. The final string of episodes presents an elongated moral reckoning that stems from Walt’s hubris in thinking that he could transcend the drug game that provided his wealth, with a string of deaths, exiles, bankruptcies, and betrayals. Walt’s most brutal penance is in the series finale, as he finally admits — to Skyler, to us, and to himself — that his rationalizations were ultimately hollow: “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was alive.” He finally owns up to his own villainy and antiheroic status, but only as he stands as a dying shell of the kingpin he had become, knowing that his pride and selfishness has led him to his death and condemned his family to pay for his sins.
The complexity of Walter White’s characterization stems in large part from the disjunctions between how we see his actions and how he sees himself. The points where those two perspectives merge is in the episodes whose plots follow a pattern of “trap and escape” — Walt and Jesse find themselves in a seemingly inescapable situation, and we watch how they manage to work free in slow-burning detail.34 As Vermeule suggests, “Machiavellian narratives drop their characters into the middle of the march and watch them try to wriggle out.”35 From the beginning of the series, Walt’s genius is decidedly not in the realm of the social, as his scientific knowledge allows him to escape traps often set by his own inability to play the human side of the drug game, but his Machiavellian intelligence gradually grows as he becomes more immersed in criminality. Thus in season 2’s “Four Days Out,” Walt wriggles out of being trapped in the desert using his scientific expertise to create a battery, but by season 3’s “Sunset,” he uses his social intelligence to escape the RV by ruthlessly tricking Hank into believing that Marie has been in a car accident. In these moments when Walt asserts his abilities, we enjoy marveling at his antiheroic exploits, even when it means morally questionable behavior such as cruelly manipulating Hank, which also results in a devastating assault on Jesse in retribution.
More often, Breaking Bad presents a gap between how Walt sees himself and how we regard him and his actions, as the character is a master rationalizer of his own decisions, able to convince himself that his immoral choices are either for the greater good of his family or not decisions at all given the circumstances. Even though he frequently attempts to withdraw from the drug world, he is repeatedly pulled back in because of the thrill and ego boost that it provides — between his increased sex drive in the first season to moments when he confronts other drug manufacturers with competitive vigor, it is clear that Walt’s criminal acts have awakened a vibrancy within him that contrasts with our initial image of him with his impotent mustache, and this ego rush drives him more than his rationalized justifications do. Walt’s vigor and antiheroic sense of self is tied to his professional achievements, as his initial depression and passivity stems from his neutered career as a chemist despite his talents, while his renewed vigor stems from becoming known as the region’s preeminent meth manufacturer, a professional accomplishment that he painfully must keep hidden from his loved ones and former colleagues until the series ends.
However, Walt also sees himself as more of an aggressive leader than he really is, as typified by his conversation with Skyler in season 4’s “Cornered.” When Skyler expresses concern for his safety after hearing about Gale’s murder, saying, “You are not some hardened criminal, Walt. You are in over your head,” Walt responds with prideful indignation that shows her Heisenberg for the first time: “You clearly don’t know who you’re talking to, so let me clue you in. I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger! A guy opens his door and gets shot, and you think that of me? No. I am the one who knocks!” While there is little doubt that Walt wants to believe in his own power, his assertions are contradicted by our serial memories of Walt being previously thwarted in his repeated attempts to kill Gus and manipulate Mike and Jesse, while he felt the need to sow doubts in Hank’s mind to avoid Gale getting credit for Walt’s meth-making prowess. Additionally, he was not the “one who knocked” on Gale’s door, but rather he forced Jesse to do it on his behalf. Walt’s assertions of Machiavellian prowess are often hollow attempts to puff himself up rather than insights into his own antiheroic capabilities, but these contradictions create layers of interpretive engagement for viewers to exert our own social intelligence, rooting out dimensions of deception and self-revelation as we construct these complex characters through our narrative engagements.
After Walt’s defiant proclamation to Skyler, he walks away, with his lips moving as if he has more to say, but turns into the bathroom, a strikingly ambiguous moment. The richness of Cranston’s performance opens up a wide range of different thoughts that we imagine he might be suppressing: he might want to apologize to Skyler for berating her, or he yearns to boast more of the dangerous havoc he has caused but stops to protect her, or he might be trying to convince himself that he is indeed the one who knocks, not the target of his adversaries’ danger. All of these are potential outcomes of reading Walt’s mind, but the program never tells us precisely what he is thinking, allowing for ludic hypothesizing across serialized gaps in the narrative. Such interplay between tight alignment and limited interior access into a highly layered and self-deluded character is one of the key pleasures of Walt as a transforming antihero, with his fascinating psychology keeping us attuned and interested in him, even as he grows more hideous.
The power of Breaking Bad ’s antiheroic characterization is that it is predicated on charting changes, rather than inviting us to wonder what makes an already hideous man such as Tony Soprano tick. By the end of Breaking Bad ’s fourth season, we have witnessed the remarkable transition of Walt from everyman schlub to amoral criminal kingpin, a gradual enough shift that we have still maintained a degree of allegiance to him — in part because we have invested so much time in following his exploits, an instance of “sunken costs” of attention and engagement. The series was premised on Walt’s need to break the law to provide for his family, but as it progressed, his deeper goals have been revealed: to be seen, known, and appreciated for his talents and unwilling to accept outside help or to accept the monetary spoils of crime without the recognition of his chemical mastery. The character is liberated as he grows less fearful and timid, willing to stand up for himself in moments of danger and then creating moments of danger to assert his own power and importance. The series makes this transformation work through its gradual progression, as each step along the way feels organic and consistent to the character, to our accrued experiences with him, and to the interiority we infer about his character. As discussed more in chapter 7, Walter White’s characterization presents a critical vision of ineffectual masculinity striving to find redemption in a changing world yet choosing the path that leads to the dismantling of the very things he claims to be trying to protect: his family and sense of self.36 Breaking Bad is a highly moral tale, in which actions have consequences, and thus we expect it is unlikely that Walt emerges from this story as a victorious hero — even though he proclaims “I won” when he finally kills Gus, we recognize that the cost of that victory is another part of his dwindling morality.
Breaking Bad ’s character transformation invites a “what if?” experiment for viewers: would you start watching a new series focused on Walter White that begins with him at his antiheroic peak at the end of the fourth season? Personally, I doubt I would get invested in the story of a pathetic and uncharismatic man who poisons a child to manipulate other criminals without any other clear protagonists with whom to align myself. Yet having watched from the beginning, I find myself connected to Walt to the point of having used the iconic Heisenberg line drawing as my Twitter avatar, an emblem of self-identification as a fan of this transformed monster. The pleasures of Breaking Bad are in the character’s journey; we find ourselves uncomfortably in a situation that we would rather not be in, aligned to an immoral criminal whom we remember as having once been decent and sympathetic. And thus I find myself loving Walter White, not as a person (even though I do personify him and grant him a more robust interiority than nearly any other fictional character I can think of) but as a character — I am endlessly fascinated by his behavior, his arc, and his enactment by Cranston and the program’s production team. Just as complex television plots encourage the operational aesthetic in observing the storytelling machinery in action, Walt’s complex characterization invites me to examine what makes him tick, how he is put together, and where he might be going, while at the same time emotionally sweeping me up into his life and string of questionable decisions. We might think of this engagement as operational allegiance — as viewers, we are engaged with the character’s construction, attuned to how the performance is presented, fascinated by reading the mind of the inferred author, and rooting for Walt’s triumph in storytelling, if not his actual triumph within the story. Although his moral transformation is unique within serial television, understanding the unusual case of Walter White helps explain the contradictory appeal of serial antiheroes and our willingness to spend lengthy times with such hideous men.