On True Detective Season 1

DVD Cover for True Detective Season 1 (Wikipedia)

We don't want to watch stories about good guys anymore. That's what it seems like, if we look at the popular, critically acclaimed TV dramas of the moment. It's been happening for a while now, a corrosion of the line between good and evil on our screens. Superman's boring -- you can't write him interesting, you have to write around him -- but even Wolverine's standard fare now. We've gone beyond flawed protagonists, beyond every-man anti-heroes, and our pop culture seems to want to keep pushing further and further afield.  Now?  We're at Suicide Squad and Deadpool -- people that should be locked up, pychopaths, the criminally insane.  And that say nothing good about us, right?  Or that's how I think that slippery slope's supposed to go; someone else wrote something trying to plot a moral trajectory of our superhero films, so go look for that if you want.

But outside of the overloaded slate of superhero films – or, actually, as a cause of it -- movie studios are scared as hell, cluelessly groping around for what can even constitute a safe tentpole blockbuster anymore, and ending up with weird reboots and Apatow-y envelope-pushing comedies and lots of spies having to go off the grid. Television, meanwhile, – well, mainly HBO, and FX, and AMC -- seem suddenly enraptured with getting prestige, brooding, masculine, "adult" dramas greenlit at the moment.

HBO's True Detective is a good example of this.  The second season was apparently bad, and I'm not going to watch it, but the first season was highly acclaimed.  And it's so not-at-all interested in pushing a good guy on the viewer, but it even goes beyond that. Writer/creator Nic Pizzolatto is aggressively uninterested in making Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson's characters relateable, or, really, any of the people on the show. There are moments interspersed to soften the blows, but not many, and they don't balance out with how the show makes sure to remind you how terrible human nature is. You might compare them to Walt from Breaking Bad if we're talking about unlikeable protagonists, but Breaking Bad was different: it wanted to make you root for him in the beginning, and it grounded his actions with a base of logic and conviction before slowly stripping away the rationalizations. True Detective doesn't reveal such an obvious throughline or arching purpose in its protagonists.

#TeamWalt, Fictional Heroes and Villains, and Interpreting Morality in Breaking Bad

I am not on #TeamWalt. Walter White should go to jail, for all the morally reprehensibly things he has done for morally dubious reasons. Many people, though, proudly label themselves members of Team Walt, and actively cheer for the Breaking Bad protagonist, and they'll even have justifications for all of Walt's actions; they say Walt's always been doing everything for his family, to provide for them, to keep them safe, and that includes his surrogate son, Jesse. Others don't deny that Walt's done bad things, but they say it's fun to cheer for Walt, to see him succeed, and he is the protagonist, after all. This is his story, and those viewers want him to keep going, keep outsmarting people, keep doing terrible things in order to survive, because that's what keeps the show moving forward. There are people that are fervent in their defence of Walt's actions, and I want to take a closer look at that viewpoint here.