A former colleague reached out the other night. He’d just started the first season of Slow Horses, the Apple TV espionage series based on Mick Herron’s excellent novels.
“Are these right wingers the real bad guys? Cause if they are, I’m not going to keep watching.”
His problem being the “stereotypical” depiction of racist, anti-immigrant Brits who’d kidnapped a “Paki” (the characters’ words, not mine), and threatened to behead him. The political right is Hollywood’s default villain, he complained. And that’s not fair. I sensed that he was quite worked up, and might’ve been stomping a foot while holding his breath. I don’t know. But that’s how I envisioned him.
“Keep watching,” I said.
Over eight books, Herron serves up every possible flavor of bad guy. Give it time, and he’ll hit your preferred target. My friend, you’ll be relieved to learn, finished the season and declared the show “pretty good”. Which, for him, is a five-star rave. But his complaint about acceptable villains lingered. And he wasn’t alone.
A few days before that, a writer buddy shit on Task’s finale, an episode of television I thought was novelistic and lyrical and thematically rich and absolutely loved. His beef revolved mainly around how writer/creator Brad Ingelsby’ chose the “easy” ending for every character. I disagreed, but wanted details. Which my friend provided.
He made good points, I have to admit. Among his gripes was the sympathetic backstory and redemption arc given to Fabien Frankel’s corrupt DelCo detective, Anthony Grasso. Which tracked. You see, my friend’s a lawyer and former criminal defense counsel. I’ve picked up enough clues to wager with confidence that he doesn’t think much of cops—myself excluded, presumably (hopefully?). He wanted Grasso to fit his preferred image of law enforcement—corrupt, evil buffoons—the same way my old cop buddy hated seeing right wingers portrayed as racist, evil buffoons. Buffoonery being the common thread, I noticed.
I’ve been thinking for a while how the culture wars have destroyed our ability to accept challenges in our art—specifically in our villains. Even legendary TV critic Alan Sepinwall (unknowingly) got into my mental mix, commenting on his Slow Horses recap that the current season’s baddies have morphed from the book’s North Koreans to Syrians for TV. Sepinwall took issue with western culture’s reliance on the Middle Eastern terrorist trope. I saw this same alarm raised in negative reviews of TJ Newman’s debut novel, Falling, which sees Kurds hijack a commercial airliner. A similar sentiment is echoed in one-star rips of Jack Carr’s The Terminal List, in which nefarious Democrats conspire to undermine America (I think; I haven’t read Carr). More examples come from reviews of Joe R. Lansdale’s 2023 novel, The Donut Legion. Some readers knocked off points because characters shit on Trump or vaccine-deniers. Others had problems with the sheriff character not being a racist, evil buffoon (these offenses should cancel each other out; Lansdale slams everyone!).
And it’s not like I’m immune to this phenomenon. I’ve bumped against countless uncomfortable characterizations of racist, stupid, evil, misogynistic, racist, sexist, corrupt, racist police officers over the years. But there are compelling ways to show this. Think Don Winslow’s The Force, in which every shield pockets cash-stuffed envelopes while planting drugs and guns at crime scenes. Or any of James Ellroy’s Bad Men With Guns. The cops Winslow and Ellroy write embody the worst in my former profession, but I devour their work just the same. Maybe it comes down to style. When the depictions range into didactic, obvious takedowns that are clearly reflective of the author’s views, I stop reading. It’s a failure of execution, I tell myself. But there’s another possibility: am I quitting because the truth has cut too close?
Good question, that.
Whatever we like to think of the values we align ourselves with, there’s going to be hypocrisy. And when that hypocrisy is held up to our faces, we flinch. Modern tech enables us to punch out entirely, and instantly find something that won’t challenge how we see ourselves. Maybe our culture’s siloed nature demands creators signal their intentions. A nod and wink that says to the consumer, “You and me know something about this world.” So, we settle in and the views we brought to the movie or book or show are affirmed and we walk away feeling awfully good about ourselves. And that right there’s the problem. Art—even Low Art like movies and TV—should provoke and question.
Who should qualify as acceptable villains? Allow my friend to answer for me:
Hm. I thought that’d be larger on desktop. Anyway.
Yes, Gary, everyone should be a potential villain. In crime novels this makes obvious sense from a pure story perspective. If a writer introduces a character who is antithetical to their worldview or broadly stereotyped as evil, I’m pretty sure that’s going to be the killer (Rian Johnson’s Knives Out movies are two-for-two in this regard). Thing is, for readers and viewers, true revelatory joy comes from the subversion of established tropes. This is why Game of Thrones blew us all away; Goerge R.R. Martin shat all over our expectations (still waiting on Winds of Winter, George. Just sayin’).
I want art to challenge me. Show me a compelling counter to my beliefs. Make me question myself. My past. My former career. My upbringing. My religion. My politics. Your politics. The years of anecdotal observations that have metastasized into engrained worldviews. Shake me. Slap me. Shiv me in the gut with a toothbrush you’ve shaved to a spearpoint. Tell me a nuanced story filled with believable humans, and I’ll follow you anywhere.
If writers do that, maybe—just maybe—us viewers will accept that Mick Herron’s onto something depicting kidnap-happy, Britain First hooligans or that Brad Ingelsby believes even dirty, murderous cops have sick mothers requiring full-time care.
Or maybe we should all just get the fuck over ourselves.
Libyan, not Syrians, though both would have worked for how the plot was changed for TV: developing countries with dictatorship where the West encouraged rebellion then walked or away (worse in Libya: overthrew the government, then left). But if your friend watched the end, he might have heard the OB character admit the real villains sometimes were Western intelligence agencies that got too caught up in the Cold War to think about long-term consequences or blow-back. As you say, Herron gives everybody a turn as the bad guy. Far & away my favorite spy thriller since Le Carré, the books & the show. The changes in the latter have all been defensible IMHO, even casting a jacked Roddy Ho! 😄