Protagonist syndrome: what it means to you.

Hey, folks,

So we’re still working our way through Breaking Bad and also Life. (Scott has watched Breaking Bad before and liked it; I watched Life before and liked it. We often trade shows this way, and we don't watch too much television so it takes us a while to get through stuff.)

Anyway, watching both of these is making me think about how, in our culture, if a show features a straight white dude who is centered in the action, the audience response is so often to assume that he's The Hero. And of course, in a lot of this gritty, literary TV is about people who are not heroes, who are--perhaps--not even antiheroes.

(I'm not saying that Charlie Crews is exactly in the same category as Walter White, but I will get to that later.)