And she’s also, paradoxically, less sympathetic. The joy of the character from the start was the childlike satisfaction she took in being a really good killer; the violence didn’t bother us because the joke worked. Now, when she does kill — out of anger and disappointment rather than a misplaced sense of duty — the bloodshed doesn’t have a comic charge, and it’s simply unsettling. (Mike Hale in the NYT reviewing the new Season of "Killing Eve")
The reviewer misses the happy-go-lucky psychopath, the more morally conflicted one is a bore. Or unsettling. Either way, what's the fun in that?
There are some "prestige television" shows I have watched as a kind of duty to keep up with the zeitgeist, so to say. But several I gave up on, in some cases because I felt as though an hour of exposure to their vulgarity required a shower afterward. Or in other cases because they have this banality-of evil vibe that is more numbing than interesting. The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Billions, and Succession. That's how I felt about Killing Eve. I didn't find much in it that made me. It was banality trying too hard to be clever. Or maybe that's just my lack of sophistication. In any event, I gave them all a chance, and stuck with some longer than others, but eventually found them unwatchable.
The writers and producers of these shows I find unwatchable seem to assume that the only interesting characters are deeply, irredeemably depraved. They start depraved and stay depraved. I'm sure they pat one another on the back with words like "We create real characters, not comic book stereotypes as in the Marvell universe." Well, ok, but that's a pretty low bar.
Breaking Bad would appear to have been in this same category, but it really wasn't because Cranston's Walter White character was Shakespearean in his tragic moral descent. Billy Bob Thornton's character in Goliath kept me involved because there was just something movingly heroic about his ability just to get out of bed every morning. I really liked Russian Doll. I like almost anything the Coen brothers do because there is a moral seriousness in their work that lies behind the apparent nihilism of many of their characters. Most recently, I watched the first and last episodes of Inventing Anna. That was enough for me. Empty, lost people are simply not very interesting, no matter to what extremes they go to make themselves appear more than they are.
No character is interesting if there isn't some form of moral ascent or descent, and that's what these unwatchable shows lack. Depraved characters who start and stay depraved are not really interesting because they are so predictable in their soullesssness. And because they're so predictable, and because audiences become increasingly numbed to their persistent depravity, and because the writers probably think ideas like moral ascent and descent as cliche, the writers must instead push for new ways to shock, new levels of depravity, new taboos to break, new ways to go where the watcher will say, "Wow. I didn't see that coming. Those writers are genius."
"Thank you, thank you," they respond. "Now where's my Emmy?"
And it's because TV critics like Hale accept these criteria about what makes a show entertaining, they can write bizarre sentences like "The joy of the character from the start was the childlike satisfaction she took in being a really good killer; the violence didn’t bother us because the joke worked."
"Joy"? Really? Is that the word you're looking for? Is your life so devoid of it that such a thing passes for it?