Anti-Heroes are a staple of Shane Black movies -- and I’m here for it.
I know, I know, kids these days are now familiar with how exhausting it is "rooting for the anti-hero" thanks to Ms. Taylor Swift. But in the 90s this was all the rage. Movies like Blade, Fight Club, Pulp Fiction, are all ripe with Antihero love, and you can draw a straight line from Shane Black's Lethal Weapon to all of these movies. We love the bad guy who does the good thing in his own way, or who makes an even worse person pay for their crimes.
But what even is an anti- hero?
An anti-hero is a bit of a wayward hero. They are someone who doesn't play by the rules, who does things that perhaps are against the law, or perhaps even hurt others to get what they want. But here is a great ven diagram here where not all protagonists are heroes or anti-heroes, not all anti-heroes are villains. But usually -- we have come to accept that the protagonist is good or at least trying to be good and the villains are bad. But the best movies/TV shows are the ones that make you question the grey in various genres.
Now we always had those characters, right? People love to quote Archie Bunker or Al Bundy, but those characters tend to not change too much. They are understood to be rough around the edges but their stories are there to tell you that these people are really just misunderstood. A bit of gaslighting… but also, it works.
In the 90s big TV heyday, however, we were being asked on a regular basis, to feel genuinely sorry for them. We got shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad, and, I will even argue till I'm blue in the face that Sex And The City -- is also led by a villain. But these characters all have one thing in common -- even if they have questionable tendencies -- they are still heroes. They are still on a quest to change and to do something good, if albeit, through questionable means. Maybe you didn't like McNulty or Omar in The Wire, but you understood why they were doing what they were doing, and found yourself rooting for them both constantly, despite them being on opposite sides of the law. Unlike Archie and Al -- they weren’t always doing the right thing, they did very bad things, but we understood it and often got behind it. Dexter is a great example of this too right - He’s a murderer, but ultimately doing something good, he’s getting rid of the worst guy.
However, an anti-hero protagonist can create interesting problems in a TV show. A TV show is different from a movie in that you have to show change gradually, over time, and in the end whatever happens to our protagonist ultimately tells us about the theme. It's a version of "See, this is what happens when you do x". And ultimately it leads to a choice being made by the audience -- is your hero a good guy with questionable tactics? Or are they a bad guy? And how you end the show will ultimately really, really matter. Dexter, McNulty, Nancy Botwin, Omar -- all meet their end in a way that allows the show to give you the moral of the story. In its own way, it's still a hero's journey, but like most American story telling paradigms, it makes sure that our protagonist gets a ‘just’ reward.
In the early era of the Anti-hero TV heyday -- you were still supposed to root for them. Even though Walter White was a terrible person, the show gave you the distinct knowing -- that he was the person going through a metamorphosis. But this left the writers with an interesting dilemma. What are you trying to say about this show? Do you want us to know that in the end, they changed?
David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, has talked about this in the aftermath of the backlash he got for the Sopranos finale. In the finale (spoiler alert) we don't actually see Tony's ultimate demise. His comments on it, and I'm paraphrasing, are that we had been with Tony through all of the terrible things he did, we had been his accomplice in a way, and now, to see him go out, we would risk making him a hero... which was NOT the aim of the Sopranos. Breaking Bad tries to pivot and essentially give Walter White a bit of redemption in the end. And in the case of Sex And The City -- I mean, do I need to explain? Carrie cheats on Aiden (TWICE) and then gets into an abusive relationship which Mr. Big rescues her from. While it was INCREDIBLY entertaining -- what was she trying to say? But I digress...
There is a lot to consider when writing one of these anti-heroes/villains. Are you ultimately -- condoning what the hero did? Are you giving them a just ending? Are you just trying to tell us a story about someone's terrible choices, but clearly tell us they got their comeuppance? And really the reason I get asked a lot during the process of pitching TV shows is, "Why are you telling us this story at this point in time?" Basically, how is this villain's story relevant? And most importantly -- are you suggesting that understanding why someone does something is reason enough to excuse their behavior? Depending on how it ends, and how you show them getting away with it or not, It gets real tricky...
This is why I found HBO Max's show, The Penguin, a near-perfect, incredibly well-done show. It is NOT an anti-hero show -- it is a villain-protagonist/origin story show and it provides a masterclass in how to construct a villain-led show. It tows a similar line to The Apprentice -- which does a good job of explaining a narcissist, without excusing them.
But The Penguin had a much harder task. It had to humanize not just The Penguin (Colin Farrell) , our anti-hero and protagonist, but also, to humanize and explain our "Villain" and in this case really, his villain -- the antagonist Sophia Falcone (Cristina Miliotti)'s Hangman. And this is no easy task. Both characters had been through it. They both have very real reasons for you to feel sorry for them. Both characters give you very real reasons to root for them. Both characters give you very real reasons to be horrified by their actions while fully understanding their motivations. They are perfectly matched and both evil, but complicated people who don’t consider themselves the villain in their own story. And we see that… regularly.
The show also does an incredibly interesting relationship dynamic in that this isn't like Harley Quinn where she's out fighting Joker, so one Villain is fighting worse Villains. That is not this show. It's one Villain versus another Villain, but each of them have very real motives and drives. The entire experience of watching the show, the way you feel about Oswald Cox, is the SAME experience that characters in the show have as they interact with the Penguin. We go on a rollercoaster of emotions as we feel for him, get him, appreciate him, hate him, fear him, want him to win, want him to die, and everything in between. And that -- is a life. It's a complicated world of contradictions and that is what this show is. If you want to write a show with a Villain protagonist, you should watch this show as a how-to -- twice.
However, one thing that the show does not do, is redeem them. And that is quite possibly the most difficult needle to thread in all of this. To not redeem them, still, give them each a pseudo-happy ending -- if anything at least a hopeful ending -- for each of them. This is an EXTRAORDINARY feat in writing. It shows you how TERRIBLE both of these characters are, particularly as it relates to their family, but you also know what their liabilities are. You see moments of their humanity seeping in, and you see them FIGHTING their most impulsive and darkest urges, until the situation breaks them and they allow their darkest impulses to win. We also see how far our protagonist is willing to go to protect his worldview. It makes you both feel sorry for him and at the same time, fear him. Same with the antagonist. They are so evenly matched! The tension is exceptional. But despite the brutality of their final chess moves, you can't help but understand what they are doing. I found myself condemning the last couple of moves, while simultaneously understanding them. But the show does one thing that I think no other show in recent memory, except probably Fallout does...it makes sure to remind you that our protagonist is in fact, evil, without sacrificing the story or emotional arc. It goes an extra step to remind you that even if our protagonist has "won" for now, you cannot confuse that with triumph. It does not let you forget that they are... evil. And that is something that makes the show twenty layers deeper and all the more interesting.
It would be tempting for this show to lean on a simple origin story narrative, but it also creates full and complete character arcs, ones that seem to mirror each other. For the protagonist, he ultimately comes to a conclusion about family that serves his purposes, one that confirms his worldview that family is a liability. His antagonist comes to the opposite conclusion -- one that ends with an opening for family as a potential asset. They are both still evil, still villains, still complicated people that earn their title as Villain/protagonist and villain/antagonist in one deviously delicious combo.
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