Lengthy Interactions with Hideous Men: Walter White and the Serial Poetics of Television Anti-Heroes

Abstract

In his collection of short stories Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace creates a resonant implication between the two adjectives in his title-if we're going to spend time in the company of hideous men, it best be brief. 1 Most fictional television abides by this implication , where distasteful and unpleasant characters are treated briefly, whether as unsympathetic figures on an anthology programme like The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959-1964) or single-episode villains emerging in the course of a procedural's police investigation or medical case. But as I argue elsewhere, serial television is distinguished by the long time-frames it creates, and thus any interaction with hideous men found in an ongoing series' regular cast will last quite awhile. 2 One common trait shared by many contemporary serialised primetime programmes is the prominence of unsympathetic, morally questionable or villain-ous men at their narrative centre, a trend typically identified by the character type of the anti-hero. The rise of serial television's anti-heroes raises a key question: why would we want to subject ourselves to lengthy interactions with such hideous men? 3 Before diving into that question, we should first contextualise the very prominence of anti-heroes on American television. For most of television history, fictional series needed to be anchored by characters who were relatable, likable and otherwise the type of people you would invite into your home each week, with villains and outcasts clearly marked as non-sympathetic figures. It wasn't until original series began to thrive on cable channels like HBO and FX, specifically with the surprise breakthrough hits The Sopranos (HBO, 1999-2007) and The Shield (FX, 2002-2008) respectively, that the industry realised that smaller 74 R. Pearson et al. (eds.), Storytelling in the Media Convergence Age