Is TV moving away from antiheroes? Game of Thrones producer speaks

An antihero is a central character in a story who lacks traditional heroic characteristics, and Game of Thrones is full of them. Jaime Lannister, Arya Stark, the Hound, Theon Greyjoy…maybe even Cersei if you squint a little; all of them are major players in our favorite drama, and all of them have done some very questionable things.

On television, these sorts of characters were forerun by a great many other antiheroes, from Tony Soprano to Walter White to Don Draper and beyond. In some ways, the story of peak TV in the 2000s is the story of the rise of the antihero. But with the political climate in the United States and beyond more fraught by the day, is their reign coming to an end?

That was a question before Game of Thrones executive producer and former HBO president Carolyn Strauss at a PaleyLive panel discussion about CNN’s series The 2000s: A Look Back at the Dawn of TV’s New Golden Age. “There’s a totally different consciousness in the mind of viewers and the mind of the people who are buying the shows,” she said.

Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, who was also on the panel, put it more baldly. “We need a laugh,” he said, openly wondering whether “it’s time for heroes again”…with a few caveats.

I don’t know that we can ever go back to the characters that are all good or all bad, but maybe around the corner are more characters who are flawed, who work very hard to do the right thing and who want to be good, even when they’re not.

Strauss, for her part, doesn’t sound like she — or HBO — completely agrees. “The truth is none of us are all good or all bad,” she said. “We move from dark to light…I think all of us at HBO are attracted to the grey areas.”

Tyrion Lannister, doing things unbecoming of a hero.

In some ways, Game of Thrones bridges the gap between purely heroic characters and antiheroes. In the early seasons, traditionally heroic leads like Ned and Robb Stark were punished for their idealism while murkier characters like Tyrion Lannister persisted. But now, Jon Snow, who follows in the footsteps of his ~~father~~ uncle and ~~half-brother~~ cousin, looks like he’s going to make it to the finish. Will goodness triumph in the end?

Then again, we still have a season to go, and even if Jon Snow is getting by with his moral rectitude at the moment, the show has hardly abandoned “grey” characters. The show even depicted Daenerys Targaryen, who is pretty heroic as far as Game of Thrones characters go, as something of an antagonist during last season’s Loot Train Attack. I don’t think we can determine how Game of Thrones feels about antiheroes until we see the final episodes.

Don’t mind me, just looking on curiously as my enemy is eaten alive by dogs.

Strauss also talked about Thrones more generally, remembering the early days of the show:

I will say that I think I got incredibly lucky in being able to work David (Benioff) and Dan (Weiss) and that was one of those things where it was like, ‘These guys have never done something like this before’, but they really adapted to it…I had a lot of people at HBO that I loved working with, then being at Thrones is a great, great team…It’s a great group to work with.

There’s a school of thought that holds that people who don’t have much experience with something are actually the best ones to do it, since they don’t know what the rules are and therefore aren’t afraid to break them. I wouldn’t apply that philosophy to, say, heart surgery, but it might help when managing a TV show.

Also a huge help: HBO itself, which gave Game of Thrones the resources it needed:

I think that we were really, really lucky in that HBO was willing to jump off a cliff with it. And ultimately I think it will be–it already is–a profitable show for them. But we didn’t want to do anything halfway. We wanted to do it better than we’d done it before. The thing about Game of Thrones that’s amazing is you have this entire crew who has that same ambition. Everybody wants to do their job better than they’d done it previously, so it’s very aspirational in that way, and we had the support from the network to back it up.

“I think it will be — it already is — a profitable show for them.” Is that corporate speak for “Game of Thrones has made it possible for HBO executive to swim in pools filled with gold doubloons”?

Next: Scenes from the Game of Thrones series wrap party

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h/t Esquire,