Difficult characters

[tightropegirl]

(Spoilers for The Privilege of the Sword, Season Two Battlestar Galactica, "House vs. God," "Finding Judas")

Difficult characters, in the sense I mean, are those who don't easily sit within audience expectation. There's always a "but" that goes along with them. Hannibal Lecter, for instance, is a brilliant and civilized man but he's a serial

Comments

[lone_hobbit]

(First off: may I say that I am new to the show and have great admiration for you and your fantabulous episodes

[kristine_smith]

Thanks for this essay.

Don't some of the smaller cable channels/networks allow the writer to take more chances like the ones you described?

[tightropegirl]

They do. They rather like to, in fact; taking risks is part of their "brand." There's a reference to Showtime's Dexter further down in the Comments here; a protagonist dealing with the fact that he's a natural serial killer. (And may I say, he's an extremely likeable fellow.)

[badgermirlacca]

Sometimes, though, even "extremely likeable" isn't enough (or maybe I'm just one of those people who isn't being addressed). I started Darkly Dreaming Dexter, the original novel on which the series was based, and couldn't get past the first chapter. Serial murder just can't be turned into "likeable" for me.

It's a flaw, I know.

[postcardsfrom]

You're not easily manipulated.

[magnet5]

I don't think the problem with selling this kind of ambiguity is just with the audience. I've see TV shows and read books where the writer presented what was supposed to be a roguishly charming bad boy (the kind who's obviously All Wrong for the heroine but she can't resist anyway) and he came off like a complete dickhead I couldn't believe for a minute would attract her. I imagine with bigger flaws, the risk of that is bigger.

On the other hand, the 80s indie comic book Southern Knights had two assassins as supporting characters and the audience loved them (charming, handsome, witty and while they might be killers they'd never cheat on their wives). The author decided, as you mention at the start of the post, that it was because all their crimes were offstage, so he had them carry out a hit in a backup story, joking as they kill a perfectly innocent person (and quite obviously not caring why someone wanted her dead). Readers still loved them.

[drhoz]

ditto Sinister Dexter in 2000AD - Finnegan Sinister & Ramone Winabago Algonquin Dexter are a pair of wise-cracking assassins too - all on screen - and went on to become one of the most popular titles in the comic for the last 10 years

[alecaustin]

My instinct on why you can get away with this sort of thing is because the "assassin" characters - despite doing unpleasant or evil things on screen - have cleverness, charisma, and being bad-asses going for them, while the innocent victim has... pretty much nothing. There are lots of ways of signalling a character's irrelevance on a TV show, and being introduced right before you get killed is a pretty good one.

If you change things up by having the victim be a character with equal or greater emotional investment from the audience behind them (I'm thinking along the lines of Angelus killing Jenny Calendar from Buffy here, though that's still a problematic case - Buffy sending Angel to hell is probably a better example), the death is likely to have more of an emotional impact and thus impact the audience's perception of the character. How it impacts the audience's opinion will depend on how the act and its aftermath are framed, of course.

[adeline]

I loved that two traits we don't normally find in the same character were there in him; it gave him a reality I miss on television.

I think that about sums it up. The reason I like difficult characters such as you describe is that they are the ones who come off as the most human to me. There's gratification in watching them act out decisions based on more than a boring because it's the right thing ("right" by what standards, I always wonder) and, what's of greater interest to me, struggling with those answers that have a pinch or a pound of gray in them. I love nothing more on TV than having my morals challenged by characters I can relate with - and that just never happens with caricature knights in shining armor or scumbag villains.

[mecurtin]

I don't know if TV can take more chances or be more difficult unless commercials do.

That is, IMVeryHumbleComparedToYouO part of the drive toward simplicity and likability for American TV is that the shows need to match the ads. The ads come first, they are in the driver's seat -- the shows are just (well, mostly just) ways to deliver eyeballs to the ads.

If the material of the show is too painful, too serious, too difficult, then the ads are jarring rather than persuasive. I think that's one reason ads get suspended during crisis coverage -- because the contrast between the show's tone and the ads becomes actively repellant.

If TV shows start making considerable proportions of their income by DVD sales & other ad-free distribution, then maybe that would free them up to have difficult characters. As long as the ads both presuppose and require a passive, simplistic audience, the shows can't afford to be too engaging and complex.

Contrary to popular wisdom, I believe television is a far more active medium than books; at least, most