The Protagonists You Love to Hate

Photo sourced from Maryland Gov pics and was taken by Jay Baker

The concept of characters audiences “love to hate” is especially prevalent in Reality TV (Kim Kardashian , any of the Real Housewives) as well a soap style drama’s a la Scandal. Generally, this designation is restricted to the antagonists like Papa Pope (Scandal), Kilgrave (Jessica Jones) etc… But can also be applied to a series or films main protagonists.

“The protagonist must be empathetic (whether or not he is sympathetic).”

(Mckee, 1997)¹

We discussed this briefly in the workshop this week while discussing why audience members must be able to empathise with the protagonist but not necessarily sympathise. One of the examples brought up was Dexter. Dexter is a serial killer and should be thought of as a bad guy and yet audience members (myself included) ended up rooting for him anyways. This had to do with how the writers were able to humanise him. They gave him rules; He would only kill other killers, They gave him a sad childhood, They gave him family and friends. Another example of a Protagonist like this is Selina Meyer from VEEP.

Selina Meyer is played by Julia-Louise Dreyfus (who also famously played another highly unlikable protagonist on Seinfeld). On VEEP Selina Meyer is the ignored Vice President of the United States. She is mean to her employees and coworkers, Selfish, a bad parent, and hates fat people. Despite all of this, the audience continues to watch her journey. The writers drop small doses of moments that show her humanity. For instance, The Veep offers to buy her employees boat – though later retracts this offer as she was “high as balls” when she made the offer. They also write in great moments of karma for her character such walking through a glass door.