heroes, anti-heroes, and ensemble casts

[cellio]

Generally when I'm reading/watching fiction that revolves around a main character, I want that character to be a hero -- someone I'm sympathetic to and whose actions, in context, I can more or less agree with. I said "more or less" -- nothing's perfect, after all, and following only characters like me would be boring. On the flip side, I can sometimes get into the right "anti-hero" as a character study if presented well.

This doesn't come up in all fiction, of course. A TV show with an ensemble cast, by definition, doesn't call out one character as "the main guy", and I find I both tolerate and relish many shades of gray there. B5's Londo is a fascinating character to me, for instance. I actually prefer ensemble shows, by the way, because they seem to allow for richer characters.

Jack Bauer on 24 tries to be a hero, but as this season goes on I'm becoming convinced that he is pretty much completely amoral, and there's nothing heroic about that. The character and the show do not fit any of the molds I've described as liking -- he's not a hero I identify with, he's not a fascinating character study, and 24 certainly is not an ensemble show. And yet I find myself watching it every week, and wanting to watch it on the broadcast night. I don't know why.

This ramble was inspired in particular by the last five minutes of this week's episode. There darn well better be consequences.

Edit: A cleaner way of saying this might be: if there is a main character then I want to either like or be fascinated by him; this is not true of Jack Bauer; yet I still watch.

Comments

[jducoeur]

I haven't seen any of this season yet, just the previous ones; adjust accordingly. That said:

On the other hand, based upon screen time, he's not the star, he's part of an ensemble.

No, I agree with cellio -- while he may not have all the screen time, and he's *far* from the most sympathetic character, Bauer is unquestionably the center of the story. Each season has emphasized this eventually: everything ties back to his own past successes and failings eventually, and his personal traumas tend to magnify in the situation.

he's a supremely capable and amoral hatchet man.

The one thing I find fascinating is that he didn't start quite that way. At the start of the series, he still thought of himself as basically the good guy -- sometimes doing the nasty work that others wouldn't, but he clearly thought of himself as the hero. As the seasons have progressed, that's subtly broken down, and I'm still not sure if it's intentional. At the end of season 3, we had a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown, apparently starting to internalize that maybe he wasn't the good guy after all, and maybe starting to question whether it was all worth it.

If they would pay that off -- if they'd let Jack's arc *go* somewhere and come out the other side -- I think the entire series would be worthwhile. I'm just not sure they have any intention of ever doing so, though. *That* is the soap-operatic aspect, which is starting to annoy me. Jack is the central character, and if he stagnates, the overall story really doesn't go anywhere.

(I've begun to realize that I now demand arc in my TV. If the story isn't going somewhere, it's not worth my time...)

[cellio]

(I've begun to realize that I now demand arc in my TV. If the story isn't going somewhere, it's not worth my time...)

I've been noticing that tendency too. I'll still accept episodic TV, but I at least want there to be a larger framework supporting it, with cross-episode continuity and stuff like that. For example, most Trek doesn't have an arc, but there is character growth and change and sometimes a mini-arc. It's when each episode ends with a reset button that I lose interest.

(Well, except that I do have a soft spot for some old classics that pre-date this kind of TV storytelling, like M*A*S*H.)