Ten years ago, Don Draper was living his best life. Freshly divorced, he had been freed from the encumbrance of parental responsibility and was able to drink, smoke and sleep around to his heart’s content. He had a new flat, several new suits and a new company with his name on the door. And the guy still wasn’t happy!
It turns out that being raised in a house of ill-repute and watching your father get kicked to death by a mule can damage a person for many years. An entire cultural revolution had to take place before the protagonist of Mad Men began to heal. He did so eventually, however, and came up with a soft drink jingle while holding the Siddhasana pose.
Don went on a journey and, over the past 10 years, TV drama has too. At the turn of the decade, Mad Men was entering its fourth season (with some of the above antics taking place in the opening episode). Meanwhile, in Albuquerque, Breaking Bad was into its third series, with Walter White determined not to let the small matter of complicity in a young woman’s death interfere with his conscience. In May 2010, brooding British cop Luther marched to a murder scene in a coat even heavier than his attitude. Looming over these dramas, and sundry other shows from Justified to the Walking Dead, was the hulking shadow of Tony Soprano, off the air for just two years at that point. It was the age of the male antihero, the ‘difficult men’ of television. By the end of the decade, however, that era had come to an end.
Caveat: there are still difficult men on television. These include Saul Goodman (the snaky lawyer spun off from Breaking Bad into a different but no less morally ambivalent series, Better Call Saul), Elliot Alderson of Mr Robot (hacker activist by day, ruthless terrorist by night) and Westworld’s Man in Black (who can only find pleasure in immolating androids). Drama series are still being built around charismatic men with a nasty streak, but these days they certainly don’t set the weather.
While audiences are increasingly siloed into genres and ‘watercooler’ TV is less and less common, the flip side to an explosion of content is a greater diversity in the type of stories told. By 2019, the best antiheroes on television were women. Of Fleabag, what more is there to say? Daenerys Targaryen’s descent into vindictive mega-violence was about the only interesting thing in the final series of Game of Thrones. At least when ITV’s Marcella commits vindictive acts she has the decency to black out beforehand. Russian Doll’s Nadia was clever, compassionate, rude and self-regarding. And, perhaps in a direct nod to the male dramas of 2010, HBO’s Big Little Lies was full of female characters it was impossible to like.
The difficult women of 2019 are no less unpleasant than the men who preceded them, but their stories are different and almost certainly new to the viewer. As much as the Soprano lifestyle became problematic and difficult to represent on screen uncritically, it had also become boring. No one needs to see another middle-aged bloke invent a brutal use for a nail gun; it has – with all due respect – been done. Villanelle from Killing Eve over-tightening a testicle clamp with tragic consequences? That’s more like it.
Another 2010s trend that neutered the anti-hero, whether male or female, was the return of the actual good guy. Dramas continued to be about secrets and lies and sex and murder, but it wasn’t obligatory for the protagonist to be up to their neck in it. Happy Valley, one of the standout serials of the decade, starred a cop who may have been married to her work, but didn’t throw the rulebook out the window and tried at all points to retain compassion for her fellow human beings, even the worst of them. The moral probity of the internal investigations unit of AC-12 was integral not only to the tone of Line of Duty, but its process (doing things by the book was how the story got told). In HBO’s True Detective, there were damaged men aplenty but they all aspired to decency. Working out your issues is different to indulging them.
There will likely be something cyclical about this change; the antihero story got told too much so another replaced it. But it is tempting to think a switch in the stories told on TV also reflected differences in the world outside, particularly in the west. But in those places the past 10 years have been a period of greater uncertainty than the 10 which preceded it.
The financial crash occurred in 2008, the world of The Wire was one of poverty and neglect and the war on terror claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, but – for the cosseted western middle class – the noughties were a prosperous and peaceful decade. They lived it up like never before, the floor beneath their feet apparently sturdy. It’s much easier to indulge in fantasies of kicking against the powers-that-be when there’s nothing significant at stake. In this past decade however, all of a sudden those norms that felt constraining have been revealed as vital to the functioning of a healthy democracy. We had difficult men running our countries – we didn’t need them on our screens, too.
