Loving the Monster: How Television Engineered Our Devotion to Characters Who Deserve None

There is a particular discomfort that settles in during the final stretch of Breaking Bad—not the discomfort of watching Walter White destroy everything he once claimed to love, but the quieter, more unsettling recognition that some part of you wanted him to win anyway. That sensation, that guilty pull toward a man who poisoned a child and watched a young woman drown without lifting a finger, is not an accident. It is the intended result of one of the most deliberate narrative engineering projects in the history of American television.

The sympathetic monster is no longer a novelty. It is a genre unto itself.

The Architecture of Complicity

The mechanics by which prestige television converts audiences into unwilling accomplices are, upon examination, remarkably consistent. The first move is almost always temporal: we meet the character before the worst of them exists. Walter White is a humiliated chemistry teacher coughing in a doctor's office. Tony Soprano is a man who cries over ducks. Stringer Bell is someone who attends economics classes between acts of violence. We are given the origin before the crime, the wound before the weapon.

This sequencing matters enormously. Psychologists refer to the anchoring effect—the cognitive tendency to rely disproportionately on the first piece of information encountered when making subsequent judgments. Television writers have long understood this principle intuitively, even if they would not name it as such. By the time Walter White is ordering executions, the audience has already filed him under us rather than them. Reversing that categorization requires a conscious act of will that most viewers, absorbed in narrative momentum, simply do not perform.

The second mechanism is the strategic deployment of a worse villain. Gus Fring looms. The Cousins arrive. The show generates a figure more immediately threatening than the protagonist, and in doing so, temporarily transforms a drug manufacturer into something that functions emotionally as a hero. We want Walter to survive—not because he is good, but because the alternative presented in the moment is worse. This moral sleight of hand repeats across the genre with remarkable reliability.

Villanelle and the Aesthetics of Harm

If Breaking Bad seduced through sympathy, Killing Eve seduced through style. Villanelle, the assassin at the center of that series, commits acts of extraordinary cruelty with a wardrobe that functions almost as editorial commentary. She is funny. She is vain. She throws tantrums in boutiques and murders people with hairpins, and the camera regards both activities with approximately equal visual affection.

What Killing Eve understood—and what its cultural reception confirmed—is that aestheticization operates as a form of moral anesthesia. When violence is rendered beautiful, when the perpetrator is charismatic and the cinematography flattering, the audience's evaluative faculties are partially suspended. We are watching a performance, and performance invites admiration before it invites judgment.

This is not a new observation about art. What is relatively new is the sustained, serialized application of it across ten, twelve, sixteen episodes of television—enough time to build genuine emotional attachment to a character before the full weight of their actions is presented for reckoning.

The Post-9/11 Moral Landscape

It is worth asking why this particular form of storytelling gained such dominance in the early 2000s and has only intensified since. The timing is not coincidental. The years following September 11, 2001 produced a cultural atmosphere in which moral certainty was simultaneously demanded and deeply suspect—in which the rhetoric of absolute good and evil was deployed by political institutions with consequences that many Americans came to regard as catastrophic.

The antihero boom arrived in that context. Tony Soprano had premiered in 1999, but the genre that coalesced around him gained its full cultural weight in a decade when audiences had particular reasons to distrust simple moral narratives. A character who was visibly, complicatedly compromised offered something that felt more honest than the clean heroism of an earlier era's storytelling. Moral ambiguity became, paradoxically, a form of integrity.

What has changed in the years since is that the ambiguity has deepened into something closer to nihilism. The characters audiences are now invited to love are not merely flawed—they are, in many cases, functionally evil by any coherent ethical standard. The genre has migrated from complicated to irredeemable, and audiences have followed willingly.

What Our Appetite Reveals

The more uncomfortable question is what this sustained appetite for morally bankrupt protagonists says about the culture consuming them. One reading is essentially optimistic: that audiences are engaging in a form of safe moral exploration, using fiction to examine the logic of transgression without endorsing it. The monster on screen externalizes impulses—toward power, toward freedom from social constraint, toward the satisfaction of pure will—that exist in attenuated form in most people, and fiction provides a container for that examination.

A less comfortable reading suggests that the repeated experience of rooting for Walter White, of grieving for characters whose grief we have been carefully guided toward, has a cumulative effect on moral imagination. If every compelling character is compromised, if darkness is consistently coded as depth and virtue as naivety, the genre may be training audiences to regard ethical seriousness as a form of unsophistication.

The truth, in all likelihood, contains elements of both. Television does not simply reflect cultural values—it participates in shaping them, and the relationship between what we watch and what we come to believe is real, if difficult to trace with precision.

The Tragedy in the Design

What is perhaps most striking about the sympathetic monster as a narrative form is how rarely it ends in genuine tragedy—in the classical sense of a fall that illuminates something true about the human condition. Walter White's ending gestures toward accountability, but the show had already spent five seasons ensuring that his perspective dominated. Tony Soprano's cut to black refuses the catharsis that tragedy traditionally offers.

The genre borrows the emotional weight of tragedy without always delivering its moral function. We feel the loss, we feel the waste, but we are not necessarily left with clarity about what was lost or why it mattered. The darkness accumulates without quite resolving into meaning.

That may, in the end, be the most accurate thing these stories tell us—not about their characters, but about the audience watching them. We have grown comfortable in the dark. We have learned to love what we cannot excuse. And we keep returning, season after season, to see what new monster television will ask us to mourn next.