Lately, I seem to be spending time in the company of a bunch of people who are unlikable, irredeemable or just plain annoying.
And I do so by choice.
These people are fictional, and they populate some of the “critically acclaimed” shows I’ve watched on TV and streaming services.
Certainly, every TV series I’ve watched for multiple seasons, going back to those I enjoyed in the 1960s, has had at least one character who’s annoying. Think “Leave it To Beaver’s” Eddie Haskell, and his ilk.
After all, even sitcoms need a bit of conflict to be interesting.
But what I’m talking about here are shows on which I simply can’t stand a majority of the characters. And yet, I keep watching. Many of us keep watching.
Take the show “Succession,” which aired its season three finale last month on HBO.
The show concerns a Rupert Murdoch-like media mogul named Logan Roy (played to the hilt by Brian Cox) and his four obnoxious, entitled children — plus one obsequious son-in-law and a clueless cousin — who are jockeying to take over for the patriarch.
From left, Meredith Hagner, John Reynolds and John Early star in “Search Party” on HBO Max.
The show, which just won three Golden Globes including best TV drama, somehow manages to be tremendously entertaining, despite the fact that I have absolutely no one to root for in the entire main cast of characters. I cannot relate on any level to these entitled one-percenters, the younger generation of which is hell-bent on destroying their siblings and their father via incompetent corporate warfare. Their money and power riles them up instead of letting them enjoy a life of astonishing comfort.
And yet, I’ve anxiously awaited every new weekly installment of the show throughout three seasons.
I had the same experience 10 years ago when I committed to following the HBO show “Girls.” In this popular series about young women finding themselves and negotiating relationships in Brooklyn, I found the main characters — along with the men they were involved with — to be whiny, selfish-centered and obnoxious.
And yet, not subscribing to HBO at the time, I went to extraordinary lengths to watch every episode of the series — binge-watching seasons during my cable company’s free weekends or while house-sitting for friends. All this, while I was setting the remote down on the couch after many episodes, saying aloud to myself, “Why am I WATCHING these people?”
From left, Mario Cantone, Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon and Sarah Jessica Parker reprise their “Sex and the City” roles for the HBO Max series, “And Just Like That…”
It was somewhat the same with the original “Sex and the City” series. While I got wrapped up in the human comedy of the lives of Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha, I could also see that they were a quartet of often-self-centered pills who sometimes treated the men and other people in their lives badly.
At least in the flawed, but still entertaining, “And Just Like That…” reboot of the series, now streaming on HBO Max, the women have gained some maturity that leads them to be a little bit more introspective in their 50s than they were in their 30s.
On AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” teacher Walter White started out as a regular Joe till expensive cancer treatment led him to cook meth for money. The drug cartel characters into whose orbit Walter spun which reinventing himself as kingpin Heisenberg — Giancarlo Esposito’s brilliant criminal Gus Fring being just one example — were terrifying in their brutality. I lost sleep after many an episode. But I still wouldn’t miss one.
The show I’m knee deep in these days is “Search Party,” an HBO Max show that begins as both a missing-person mystery and as a satire of millennials with stereotypical characteristics, born of entitlement. The young-adult characters have become unlikable and frustrating at points, but engender just enough sparks of empathy to make the viewer not feel embarrassed for following their saga. Further, the plot twists the show takes are so borderline-wacky and unpredictable — murders, cover-ups, a court trial, kidnapping, the secret to enlightenment in the hands of a billionaire businessman — that I’ve decided to strap in for the rest of the wild ride as I watch the ending series’ final few episodes.
What is it that compels viewers to watch a show on which most or all the characters are obnoxious or hateful?
There are a few possible explanations, I suppose.
Interesting or annoying? From left, Alia Shawkat plays Dory Sief and John Early portrays Elliott Goss in the HBO Max series “Search Party.”
Maybe sometimes we’re just attracted to the dark side, and need to get it out of our system. Sometimes we just need a journey to the opposite side of our sphere of experience. The ancient Greek playwrights knew it was a healthy community-builder for an audience to experience and then purge negative emotions in a collective catharsis as the result of storytelling.
In her 2018 Elle magazine essay “I Hate Everyone on ‘Succession’ and I Can’t Stop Watching,” EJ Dickson notes the “rise of the critically acclaimed prestige-TV antihero,” and suggests ”Succession” gets us to empathize with the siblings as they indulge in the trappings of wealth to try to heal the wounds of their “deeply drab and miserable lives.” They’re just like the rest of us, only unhappier, despite their money.
It can’t be something as simple as Schadenfreude that keeps me coming back for more, can it?
Perhaps we extend sympathy to characters like the Roy siblings because we see how they’ve been damaged by how horribly they’ve been treated by their parents.
In 2019, the Hollywood Reporter interviewed sociologists about “Succession’s” popularity, and one suggested viewers like the show because it gives them a sense of moral superiority to people rich enough to buy and sell them. Another theorizes our attachment to such shows comes simply from an appreciation of the written characters as witty and three-dimensional.
Maybe it’s simply that great writing and stellar acting can compensate for having no character to admire or root for. Performances by “Succession” actors Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook and Kieran Culkin and Matthew Macfayden are certainly a thing to behold.
Maybe the appeal comes because when reprehensible characters get their comeuppance on a show, it feels like all is right with the universe. Maybe it’s that when heinous characters come to a crisis and realize they’ve been behaving badly, it seems more profound than when a decent character makes one mistake and has to apologize.
When Walter White admits to his wife late in the “Breaking Bad” series that he was cooking and selling meth not only to raise money for his medical treatment but because he liked the power it gave him, it was an especially emotional moment in the series.
Maybe it’s a form of addiction: Once you’ve invested time and emotional energy in a story, no matter how angry you get at yourself for being interested in the tales of horrible people, you simply can’t stop watching until you know how it all ends.
Perhaps the Devil made me do it.
Or, maybe I just need to turn off the TV for a while, and go outside for a walk.
