10 TV Shows With No Redeemable Characters
No heroes, no good guys, no problem?
On a long running television programme, it stands to reason that you’d take the time to craft characters who the audience can latch onto. There are many ways to do this, of course, but one of the simplest techniques would be to create protagonists who are likeable, who you can root for, who you could imagine going for a pint or a weekend away with.
Sometimes, though, TV shows go in the opposite direction. Not satisfied with generating a few antagonists to be bested by the gallant heroes, these programmes are replete with characters who are not just flawed but relentlessly bad. They don’t want to change; indeed, they seem incapable of doing so.
This isn’t necessarily a misstep or a bad thing. There’s nothing more boring than a flawless character, and as long as your creation has the necessary depth and internal logic, an inherent wickedness can be intriguing. The opposite can be true, of course. When writers believe their characters are fascinatingly deep, but in fact they’re just scuzzy, that’s a problem.
Through design or just the proclivities of the writers, these shows built empires around a complete lack of heroes or even humanity. The results varied, but these characters could never change.
10. Peep Show
Everyone is either a Mark or a Jeremy to some degree. It’s not something we’d like to admit, but the two fragile, selfish husks at the centre of this seminal flatshare comedy represent modern society at large, warts and all.
Over nine seasons of Peep Show, we witnessed Mark and Jeremy subject one another to every atrocity imaginable while still sharing the same square footage of a London high rise. The genius of Peep Show is in slowly illustrating that these two men, on the surface so different, are actually crippled by the exact same flaws - non-existent self esteem, overthinking, stubbornness, an eroding sense of morality.
The supporting characters are no better, either, from the criminality of Super Hans to the indecent proposing of Johnson, Sophie’s inept stabs at motherhood and Big Suze’s complete disregard for anyone on a lower social strata than her.
The (slightly lame) finale of Peep Show illustrated its ultimate thesis perfectly. Mark and Jeremy can by this point barely stand the sight of one another, but they’re doomed to spend the rest of eternity sniping away from the (dis)comfort of their couch. There’s no changing them.