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TV
TV gives a villain what film cannot: time. Their trajectories analysed season by season, from Walter White to Tony Soprano.
40 articles
LabelingWho is the villain of Stranger Things? Vecna, and the people who nameA monster kills from another dimension, and Hawkins looks for a culprit who fits what it already feared. The show has two kinds of villain.Read →Rational choiceWho is the villain of Breaking Bad? The one who ran the numbersTuco, Gus, Jack and Todd fall one after another. The only one present in every season is the teacher who calculated $737,000 and didn't stop.Read →Patriarchy and crimeIs Soldier Boy Homelander’s dad? Yes. He called him a disappointmentVought made Homelander from Soldier Boy’s sperm. He never raised him, yet passed on what his own father left him: a yardstick for men.Read →DefianceLuke Castellan and the absent gods: the defiance of an abandoned sonHermes loves his son, but he sends another boy to save him. Defiance theory explains what a young man does with an authority that only shows up to make demands.Read →ContainmentQuirrell: the villain who carried another on the back of his headA timid teacher goes looking for a Dark wizard so he can be someone, and comes back with him under his turban. HBO’s series can show the man underneath.Read →Moral cost-benefitMargo Banks: the Hunting Wives queen who killed for her reputationHer secret would have ruined her socially. Killing to keep it made her a murderer. Margo Banks and the day gossip weighed more than a life.Read →Evolutionary criminologySauron in “The Rings of Power”: the manipulator who comes bearing giftsBefore the Eye there was a fair face and a gift. Annatar did not storm Eregion: he helped it. Why the most effective evil shows up as a benefactor.Read →PsychopathyJurek Walter: the killer prison can’t stopOne sentence whispered on the way out of a trial is enough to take a detective’s family from him for years. Why Jurek Walter’s psychopathy gets through walls.Read →Coerción DiferencialMargaret White: when faith turns into abuseMargaret White punishes not out of anger but by a rule she thinks is divine. Flanagan’s Carrie brings back horror’s most feared mother and an abuse that prays.Read →Cultural criminologyThe Monster effect: what Netflix does to a real caseEvery season of Monster selects, compresses and assigns a motive without asking the families. What if the same show helped reopen the Menendez case?Read →Cultural criminologyWhat a villain really teaches, and the three myths it leaves behindWalter White teaches neutralization better than any definition. The same fiction leaves behind three false beliefs that are very hard to shake.Read →Critical criminologyWho is the villain of The Simpsons? Not Sideshow BobThe villain is Burns, and has been since the first episode. The odd thing is that nobody in Springfield stops him, and not for lack of institutions.Read →Feminist criminologyLizzie Borden and the chivalry hypothesis: the 1893 verdictTwelve men acquitted Lizzie Borden in 1893, and no one else was ever convicted of the Fall River killings. What weighed on that verdict besides the evidence?Read →Economic model of crimeBobby Glass: the boss who runs his empire from prisonBobby Glass is serving time and still approves, vetoes and calculates from inside. Prison did not interrupt his business; it moved its head office.Read →Institutional anomieBoy Kavalier, the trillionaire boy racing to weaponize the xenomorphHe pours children's minds into synthetic bodies and only wants to be first to market. In his world, coming second is the only sin.Read →Institutional anomieJudi Stonehearst, the friendly assistant experimenting on outcastsFrom inside an institution meant to care for outcasts, someone is experimenting on them. How does care become the perfect cover for predation?Read →Criminal personalityIsaac Night, the genius who turns outcasts into raw materialBehind the program that harvests outcasts' powers there was no monster, but a brilliant, embittered mind. How does someone who believes he is superior think?Read →General strainCarrie White and strain theory: when the victim explodesCarrie White doesn't become a monster on prom night. She has spent years piling up humiliations at school and at home, with no way out.Read →PsychopathyThe villain's charisma: why we want them to winThe hero has the law and the moral high ground, yet when the villain steps into frame something in us leans his way. Which levers does that charm pull?Read →Right realismReacher and the vigilante: why vigilante justice fascinates usAn ex-military cop steps off a bus, smells injustice and fixes it with his fists. Millions of viewers love him precisely because he carries no badge.Read →Differential associationAdolescence: how the manosphere radicalizes a 13-year-old boyJamie Miller is thirteen and accused of killing a classmate. The series does not ask who did it, but who taught him to look at her like that.Read →Anomie / StrainSquid Game: the debt that turns ordinary people lethalHundreds of debtors agree to children’s games where losing means dying. What has to break in a society for ordinary people to walk through that door?Read →Differential opportunityThe Penguin: why Oz Cobb could only climb the ladder of crimeOz Cobb wanted the same things as any Gotham executive. The difference is that only one door ever opened for him, and it led to the underworld.Read →Critical criminologyHomelander and impunity: when the most powerful commits the crimeHomelander kills in broad daylight and Vought sells it as heroism. Who decides what counts as a crime when the culprit is the most powerful?Read →Feminist criminologyKilgrave: “she wanted to”, or coercive control as a superpowerKilgrave gives an order, it is obeyed without recourse, and then he says the victim wanted to. His power makes literal a cage the justice system rarely sees.Read →Moral disengagementFred Waterford designed Gilead and still believed he was a good manHe doesn't shout or hold a gun: he writes the laws. And the architect of Gilead still sees himself as a decent family man.Read →Routine activitiesJoe Goldberg Psychology: Why We Root for a Stalker (You)Joe Goldberg stalks, lies and kills, and somehow we still want him to get away with it. The trick isn't Joe himself: it's letting you hear his voice.Read →Situational crime preventionMoney Heist: Why You Want the Robbery to SucceedBy the second episode you are no longer hoping the police win. The Professor planned that wish as carefully as the heist itself.Read →Social controlDexter: Can a Serial Killer Be the Good Guy? The Code ExplainedHe brings donuts to the office and, a few times a month, kills a man wrapped in plastic. Why do we keep rooting for Dexter not to get caught?Read →Trastorno antisocialTony Soprano kills without blinking and passes out over a few ducksHe strangles an informant in the middle of a college tour with his daughter and falls apart when a family of ducks leaves his pool. The Sopranos put him on a couch.Read →PsychopathyWhy We Love Villains: The Psychology of Why the Bad Guy WinsYou root for the monster, and you know you shouldn't. Why does the villain pull us in harder than the hero who is supposed to save the day?Read →Inteligencia y crimenProfessor Moriarty: the criminal genius, Sherlock’s nemesisThey call him the Napoleon of crime, and we never see him commit a crime. The real relationship between intelligence and crime is far less novelistic.Read →PsychopathyVillanelle: the psychopath who kills for pleasureShe wears haute couture, smiles like a child and drives in a knife without a tremor. Diagnosis rarely sees her coming, because she is a woman.Read →Rational choiceFrom teacher to Heisenberg: five theories for the fall of Walter WhiteThousands of teachers fall ill every year and don’t build a drug empire. Why did Walter White, and at which step did he stop doing it for his family?Read →Marginalidad avanzadaIn The Wire the villain isn’t Avon Barksdale: it’s BaltimoreYou can lock up Avon, kill Stringer and crown Marlo, and the corner will be the same at dawn. In Baltimore the villain isn’t a man.Read →PsychopathyPsychopath vs sociopath: the real differenceHannibal Lecter asks Clarice about her perfume and within minutes he is the one interrogating. We use psychopath and sociopath as synonyms, and they are not.Read →Delinquent subculturePeaky Blinders: the war trauma that built a criminal empireTommy Shelby came back from France unable to sleep, and in Small Heath he found only bricked-up ladders. Crime was the one nobody had sealed off.Read →Moral developmentGame of Thrones: five villains, five ways to make a monsterA boy king who tortures for fun and a liberator who burns a surrendered city to ash. Game of Thrones doesn’t have one villain: it has five paths into the abyss.Read →PsychopathyThe 7 most manipulative villains, and why we always fall for themWe all think we’d see the lie coming, and season after season we take the liar’s side and applaud the one who betrays.Read →Life course8 TV series that are really a master’s degree in the criminal mindA mob boss on the couch, a teacher who cooks meth, a killer with a code. Eight series that, beneath the thriller, teach a class without warning you.Read →