a note from the author:
There’s a reason House of Cards was so successful. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Gordon Ramsay cooking shows. These people are, by any 2020 societal standard, realistic or not, absolutely and chaotically bad people. We love to hate them. When I ask others why that is - why it’s easy to grow attached to characters who are bad, antagonistic, evil, or whatever you’d like to call them - the answer I most often receive is that “they are more interesting.”
My follow up question is “why?” Is it as simple as the question of and fascination with their psychological motives? Is it because we poor folk stuck in modern society live vicariously through those that get to live life outside the norm of what’s acceptable? Are we jealous? Is it because we actually relate to those desires? Then there’s the question: does doing bad things make you a bad person? Or, is brushing someone off as a bad person a tangible explanation for the doing of bad things? What does “bad” really mean? Selfish? Rude? Hurtful? Unintelligible? Psychotic?
I don’t actually ask people all these questions because I don’t think there are definitive answers. Or at least people won’t give them to me. But I want to ask. I want to know. And there is no better way of accessing the depth of human consciousness than through a sitcom.