These days, we as an audience are appearing less and less interested in characters that play by the rules and follow a moral compass. Back in the television days of yore, we weren’t allowed to have dramatic leads that didn’t follow the letter of the law and show us that doing what was right should be done the right way. Perry Mason, Jim Rockford, Thomas Magnum, Joe Friday, MacGyver, and Ben Matlock are just a few of the classic icons that we as an audience came to love growing up (whether in release or in reruns). Nowadays, though, the landscape is… a little different.
Currently, the shows that seem to draw renewals from networks and scores of viewers are the procedurals and whatnot. We have our CSIs and our Law and Orders and they still keep churning out millions of viewers and millions of dollars. Those kind of concepts always will. But take a look at the other protagonists who are fighting for truth, justice, and Nielsen ratings.
Dr. Greg House, MD: He lies, he cheats, he pops pills and he risks lives all in the pursuit of being right. But not being right in the moral and virtuous sense. House just lives to be correct and manipulate people as if they were dancing to his tune. They’ve made many attempts over the seasons to humanize the character and dull his edge, but at the end of the day House will always be House. Hugh Laurie’s charming misanthrope will insult the strong and antagonize the weak, just to prove that everybody lies. Even when you’ve just recovered from nearly dying of a crazy combination of once in a lifetime symptoms, House doesn’t shake your hand or tell you he’s glad you’re okay. He mocks you and tells you to not be stupid again. He’ll go over the spouse’s head, lie to the administration, and kidnap a patient.
Dexter Morgan: A serial killer who’s on our side. Not sure if that’s as comforting as it’s supposed to sound, but it seems to work. The show is starting its fourth season of Dexter killing killers and then ritualistically carving up the bodies all the while providing his extremely creepy narration thanks to Michael C. Hall’s eerie intonation. Dexter spends his time faking a personality he can use to get by his job as a forensic police scientist and a husband, but as he himself will tell you, it’s all just hiding his “dark passenger” who is constantly itching to get out and kill. The only thing keeping Dexter on our side is his code of protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty set forth by his adopted father, a cop who saw Dexter’s impulses from an early age. Even when Dexter thinks he’s found an ally in his cause in the form of another dark killer, he always realizes that without this code, anyone would succumb to the dark passanger. Frankly, in terms of role models, I guess you can’t do much better than a sociopath who hunts the guilty.
Patrick Jane: The Mentalist is a procedural that seems like it’s going to be pretty run of the mill. A team of federal agents who work for the fictional California Bureau of Investigation solving high profile murders and kidnappings all over the great state of, well, California are aided by a former television psychic. The psychic, Patrick Jane, was using techniques of the mentalist trade to dupe audiences and convince them he could speak with the dead and read their minds. When a serial killer known as Red John showed up, Jane tried to curry ratings by “aiding” the investigations. Red John killed his family out of sport. Jane and the members of CBI take on the usual “case-of-the-week” and usually catch the bad guy, but the methods that Jane employs almost always break the rules of institution. Like House, he’ll do whatever is necessary to solve a case and he isn’t doing it for justice since like Dexter, Jane is also a borderline sociopath thanks to the death of his family. If the case happens to have anything to do with Red John? Then you’d better get out of his way. Instead of playing him in a dark brooding fashion, Simon Baker makes Jane charming, smirking rogue. An interesting choice that pulls off the sociopath angle very well.
Detective Vic Mackey: ”Mackey is Al Capone with a badge.” With these words, you get everything you need to know about the character that Michael Chiklis played for seven seasons on The Shield, a gritty cop show that was loosely based on the actions of the infamous LAPD Rampart squad. Mackey is an intense individual with a corrupted system of justice and morality that has him doing whatever it takes to enact justice while defending the interests of his family and partners. This includes stealing from street gangs, providing protection for mobsters, and even killing fellow cops who have turned informant. Mackey is a monster in the eyes of some, but the point to keep in mind is that he’ll also do whatever it takes to take down the worst of the worst in Los Angeles’ Farmington District. He may not seem like he has any scruples, but there are moments where Chiklis shows that the character has a code of honor and will break whatever laws stand in the way of him taking down those responsible for violating that code.
Jack Bauer: There are those that argue that Kiefer Sutherland’s protagonist from the hit action series, 24, is a shill for the Republican administration’s theories of “international relations” in terms of terrorists. For a majority of the seasons, this is hard to ignore what with any character who was an Arab incidentally turning out to be a villain and Bauer torturing everyone (including his own brother) in the pursuit of trying to stop a terrorist threat. Season 7 was, in my opinion, a great return to form for Bauer as he was forced to face the consequences of his actions and attempt to defend the nation against threats without resorting to old methods and old paranoia. While Bauer kills, detonates, interrogates and, yes, tortures his way through seven seasons of action, his results can’t be denied as he will sacrifice his own life and safety if it means innocents go free and bad guys get the shaft.
There aren’t “good guys” anymore fighting the forces of evil out there. They’re all anti-heroes, these days. Somewhere along the line the only way to make a character interesting was to inject a little bit of evil in them. You can’t argue the results haven’t been entertaining seeing as how these five characters have topped the charts in critics and viewers lists for years. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen.
