JuicyTalk
One of the best tricks a TV series can pull off is making you empathize with terrible people. There are plenty of shows about good people who are easy to root for, like Ted Lasso and Bob’s Burgers, and plenty of shows about terrible people you’re not supposed to root for, like Seinfeld and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
But some shows have managed to do both, and make you root for people you’d normally hate in real life. From the obscenely rich Roy family in Succession to the washed-up sitcom actor in BoJack Horseman, these shows made us fall in love with terrible people.
The Shield
Shawn Ryan revolutionized the police procedural with The Shield. In a post-Rampart scandal world, Ryan realized that old-school cop shows like Dragnet and Columbo were no longer relevant, and set out to create a more morally gray cop show. The Shield was the first police procedural to make its protagonists a bunch of corrupt cops.
Vic Mackey is a murderer and a con artist, but he’s also a caring family man. He’s not on the right side of the law, but we can at least understand why he is the way he is (and it helps that Michael Chiklis is so compelling).
BoJack Horseman
Netflix’s first foray into adult animation yielded a masterpiece. BoJack Horseman started off as a wacky, lighthearted satire of the Hollywood entertainment industry, set in a colorful world full of talking animals. But creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg just used that premise as a way in to explore mental health and substance abuse.
The title character in BoJack Horseman is mean, self-centered, and responsible for a couple of deaths of people close to him. But he’s always trying to be a better person, Will Arnett is a treasure, and BoJack is a talking horse, so you still love him in spite of all that.
Barry
When Bill Hader’s show about a hitman who wants to become an actor first premiered, it seemed like a gimmicky premise that couldn’t possibly sustain a full series. But the naysayers were quickly silenced by one of the greatest TV shows of the 21st century.
Barry is a haunting character study of a sociopathic killer who wants to have a normal life, but can’t seem to put his life of violence behind him. All the characters around Barry have their own flaws (not quite as glaring), but they all have redeeming qualities, too.
Breaking Bad
Vince Gilligan famously set out to turn Mr. Chips into Scarface with his groundbreaking crime saga Breaking Bad. Walter White isn’t a terrible person when the series begins — he’s just frustrated by his mundane, underachieving life — but by the end of it, he’s a murderous monster.
Thanks to Gilligan and his team’s captivating storytelling, and Bryan Cranston’s incredible performance, we stick with Walt through thick and thin. It’s easy to see why he starts off on the path to “break bad,” and everything that follows is just a very unfortunate consequence.
Veep
Since Veep revolves around the power players of Washington, it would be impossible for the characters not to be terrible people. But Armando Iannucci is one of the greatest satirists of our time, so he managed to make those terrible people wildly entertaining.
The satire of Veep also does a great job of showing how hard it is to be a good politician. Voters can never agree on a single topic, so you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, and the system isn’t set up to allow good people to deliver on their campaign promises.
Mad Men
Just about everyone who works at Sterling Cooper is an awful human being. It’s the norm for all the men to cheat on their wives, it’s the norm for all the fathers to neglect their children, and it’s the norm for the bosses to harass their secretaries and exploit their underlings.
Don Draper is the worst of all — his whole life is a lie — and yet, he’s also Mad Men’s most compelling character. Mad Men is a testament to the notion that characters don’t have to be likable for audiences to invest in them; they just have to be interesting.
Succession
Succession is the poster child for this kind of show. The Roys are absurdly rich, but they’re not happy. Everyone in Succession is a broken person underneath their wealthy facade. The scars on Logan’s back indicate a horrific childhood; Roman has a mental block around intimacy; Kendall is an addict.
The Roy kids are all just desperate for their dad’s approval, and no one in the show has a healthy relationship with another human being; all the relationships are either transactional or downright toxic. No amount of money can buy these people happiness.
Better Call Saul
After making audiences empathize with a drug-dealing husband and father in Breaking Bad, Gilligan and co. got them to empathize with a law-breaking lawyer in the spinoff, Better Call Saul. There are a couple of genuinely good people in Better Call Saul — namely Kim Wexler — but the ensemble is mostly morally gray.
Throughout the series, we see that Jimmy McGill wasn’t always like this. He started out as a good, honest lawyer who wanted to make a difference. But he was underestimated and held back by his own brother, so he had to go his own way.
The Wire
David Simon’s crime drama The Wire just might be the greatest TV series ever made. It examines the broken institutions of the American city with an almost documentary-like sense of realism, and that includes a harsh look at the good, the bad, and the ugly of humanity.
All the characters do bad things, but the show makes us understand why. McNulty sleeps around, but he’s a sex addict. Stringer is a ruthless drug lord, but it’s the only outlet for his legitimate business acumen. Bubbles steals from his sister and inadvertently gets his young ward killed, but it can all be blamed on the disease of addiction.
The Sopranos
David Chase revolutionized television when he created The Sopranos. Every show on this list is following in the footsteps of The Sopranos. Chase is the visionary who introduced the antihero to television. Networks previously thought that if a character wasn’t likable, then the audience wouldn’t come back to see them again next week.
But Tony Soprano proved that wrong. In just the fifth episode of The Sopranos, we saw Tony murder a man in cold blood. And because he was such a fascinating character, played brilliantly by James Gandolfini, viewers came back for the next episode (and the next five seasons).
