Peer into the perfect storm of modern TV’s Dramedy genre and all the raunchy, vulnerable protagonists it provides.
By Natalie Lileks
Bill Hader as the troubled, Barry, in season three of Barry / photo: HBO
A hitman sits next to his acting instructor, trying to harvest his evils for emotion to use in class. He’s just told him a harrowing story from his time as a combat soldier the military, recalling when he’d brutally murdered civilians and watched a fellow soldier bleed out in his arms. Sorrow and guilt surrounds him like a fog.
With a desperate, craven need for comfort, Barry asks: “Do you think I’m a bad person, Mr. Cousineau?”
Mr Cousineau pauses. Takes a breath. “I think you are…” He considers everything Barry’s done. “…deeply human.”
A beat. Barry’s contending with what that means. It’s heavy. It’s one of the most gutting moments in the series.
Then, Mr Cousineau — Henry Winkler, with his Henry Winkler cadence — breaks the silence, quickly switching tracks: “But I don’t think you should tell this story in front of the class,” he says hastily, “Also, they will shit themselves. I mean, they’re children!”
The greatest triumph of fiction is never more dazzling than when it presents a protagonist whose story you’d follow until the sun swallows the Earth, but simultaneously, someone that, if faced in reality, you’d love nothing more than to beat over the head with a crowbar.
Rolling Stone recently declared The Sopranos, as number one on their “100 Best Television Shows Of All Time”, and both Barry and Succession have won a cornucopia of prestige awards. The newest Golden Age of Television is characterized by its host of morally ambiguous anti-heroes, questionable behavior, and overall grim content. Why? Because selfish, self-serving characters are modern television’s grease oil, assuring that conflict shoots forward with unnerving ease and constantly polishes the audience’s dark mirror. In the last twenty years or so, viewers have developed a taste for entertainment stewed in moral ambiguity — or even depravity — because we’ve learned to love the rough, gamey chew of deplorable main characters. Dramas do it especially well.
But just as important is another common thread between these shows — the effective use of comedy. Spliced together, the “dramedy” successfully delivers to us some of the most delicious, terrible people on TV today. Audiences have always loved to watch detestable characters, but this alchemical formula of humor and turmoil produces some of the best.
To visit one half: Currently, the longest running live action comedy series to date is It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The show banks on the hilarity of its awful, barely-human characters falling into ludicrous and often violent hijinks (sneaking into morgues for human meat, getting a priest hooked on meth). In its early days, production was low-budget and haphazard, but the show struck lightning. American audiences were hooked on these layabout narcissists, torturing each other with abject cruelty, doomed to each other and themselves in true No Exit fashion. Comedy thrives on humiliation, and the show provides a non-stop circus of exactly that — the characters have a stunning lack of self-awareness and are pathetically, collectively delusional to a caricature point. And despite what we may tell ourselves, there’s nothing humans love more than to watch fictional losers get what they deserve. However, while the show is a comedy to its core, rare moments of vulnerability do shine through — the most significant being a character’s emotional coming-out dance performance in the Season 13 finale. Because, at some point, the show must eventually acknowledge its characters as human. Tender moments are sprinkled throughout with the comfort that it’ll be back to normal next episode.
This admission of humanity, despite everything, is where the genius of the comedy-drama shines. In the case of shows like Atlanta or Fleabag (both named within the top ten of the Rolling Stone list), both protagonists toe the dramedy line, but they linger in the middle-ground, their actions potentially excusable and far more relatable. They are versions of real people you know, their relatability more clear-cut, yet still ultimately dealing with mortal-grade problems. They still navigate this genre intersection with constant swings between gut-punch to belly-laugh, but these shows exist on a lower caliber of bastard-ism than Succession or It’s Always Sunny.
Kendall, Shiv, and Roman Roy share a raw moment in the Season three finale of Succession / photo: HBO
There is a richer, bloodier flavor of television anti-hero when their vessels become mob bosses, hitmen, or the lording one percent. With a firm bedrock of drama, the humor of these shows swaddles its anti-heroes in perfect absurdity, to be digested by the audience like absinthe — first a soursweet taste on the tongue, its lingering effects nearly hallucinogenic. Kendall Roy commits manslaughter then dances merrily to Whitney Houstin’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody. Barry’s on a hotel balcony, talking on the phone with an actor friend about the Meryl Streep-lead movie Doubt, while his partner-in-crime is inside, being visibly beaten by Chechens. Tony Soprano’s ranting to his therapist about mob murders with carefully coded language. In these shows, comedy is omnipresent and consistent. It bobs up like a buoy in a dark sea, and the audience grapples to hang on. Barry and the Sopranos do this instantly with their premises (mafia man goes to therapy, contract killer becomes an actor), the layouts of which produce a large majority of its humor, while Succession does it on a smaller scale of dialogue and dark irony.
Succession is also unique in that like It’s Always Sunny, the outward-facing facades of its main players barely attempt likability. They exist on a gilded plane and achieve a near uncanny valley simulation of how real people talk and act. But the characters endear themselves to us because, above anything, there is a satisfaction in watching them cannibalize themselves. We watch them swirl the drain for seasons at a time because they do it so entertainingly. Over the course of years on our screens, they step outside of any anti-hero archetype — the characters barely even graze the “hero” label, even though they grasp at it desperately. Throughout the course of Succession we watch its characters grapple for power and validation, tugging at their version of Excalibur lodged in stone, but all of them ultimately walk away unsuccessful. Because something far more cruel rules this universe: the true antagonist, their father Logan Roy, who’s the only one who has the power to pull it free. Shiv's hand is slapped away from the hilt across a low-lit dinner table, Kendall simply doesn’t have the strength, Roman barely even bothers. But we get a sick chuckle watching the siblings try, because sometimes, they say funny things.
There’s the sweet, sterile satisfaction of watching a hero slay the dragon. Fiction is prescriptive, and stories about prevailing good fill a certain niche. It comes naturally to root for the good guy, to watch things end right and fair, but beyond existential angst or dark mirrors, there’s a more humanistic appeal for the opposite. Well-written stories about terrible people give us, as viewers, the heady and addictive privilege of both power and entertainment. There’s the voyeuristic thrill of seeing someone say or do horrific things, time and time again, knowing you’ll enjoy watching them reap what they’ve sowed; there’s nothing more compelling than seeing evil put in a glass box and watching it dance.
The Roman elites watching gladiators fight in the colosseum, viewers watching Kendall Roy flail his vote of no confidence — It’s all the power and entertainment of a doomed narrative. But it’s the comedy of these shows, threaded equally throughout light moments and dark depths, that hit us where we live. Because it’s a raw, honest coping mechanism that audiences can both relate to and laugh at. There’s chaos in violence as much as there’s chaos in humor; tragedy and comedy are famously two sides of the same coin. You can forever jab at your viewers with shocking plot points, deplorable dialogue, or jarring visuals — but comedy is, on the stage/screen/page, a grounding admission of humanity. It’s exactly why it finds such a perfect mate in drama. The power of fiction is not that it makes you detest these characters, it’s that it puts you behind their eyes and forces you, kicking and screaming, to care.
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