Is the Antihero Dead?

I love an antihero. Show me the story of a down-on-his-luck boxer who’s gotta make a choice, and I’m in every time. 

In my worldview, everyone’s flirted with the possibility of hustling dope to pay rent. Maybe you haven’t, but trust me, I have multiple times. And yet, the classic “good guy cop takes down bad guy” story? Bo-ring. I don’t believe the job is that black and white. Whatever side of the gun you’re on, you’ve had to make some moral choices, and sometimes they’re honest and sometimes, they’re not. That’s life personified.

TV used to agree. The prestige era of television was built on bad men doing bad things, and we couldn’t get enough of them. Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper, Stringer Bell, Frank Castle, Rust Cohle, Jax Teller. These were the guys audiences lived and died for. The formula was simple: a deeply flawed, often violent man who still had something redeemable about him, even if it was just that he was fun to watch.

But in 2025, that era might be over.

The Antihero’s Last Stand?

We still get shows that play in the morally gray, but it feels like we’re in the twilight of the antihero era. Tokyo Vice and True Detective: Night Country still trade in the classic “cop who bends the rules” trope, but they feel like holdovers from an earlier time. Fargo keeps going, but its latest season moved away from the formula of bad guys getting what’s coming and leaned into people just trying to survive. Even Succession, our most recent cultural juggernaut, wasn’t about a single antihero dominating the world, but about a collection of pathetic, broken people failing upwards until they ate each other alive.

And then there’s The Last of Us, probably the biggest HBO hit since Game of Thrones. If that show had come out in 2010, its central figure, Joel, would have been framed as an undeniable badass, an antihero in the vein of Walter White. But in 2023, the show instead interrogated his choices. He wasn’t cool. He wasn’t a hero. By the end of Season 1, he felt less like an icon of toughness and more like a tragic warning.

So what happened? Why does it feel like we’re moving on from the antihero?

We’ve Seen It Before – Too Many Times

For 25 years, we’ve followed flawed geniuses committing crimes, making bad choices, and barely escaping consequences. And, frankly, we might be a little tired of it. TV is a cycle. The cowboy hero reigned for decades, then faded. The cop procedural had its run, and now even Law & Order is on life support. (Dun Dun.) Antiheroes dominated TV from 1999 to about 2020, longer than most trends last. At some point, every trope hits diminishing returns. According to a 2023 report by Parrot Analytics, the demand for antihero-led dramas has dropped by 22 percent since 2019, while shows focusing on ensemble casts and morally complex but relatable protagonists (e.g., The Bear, The White Lotus) have seen a 35 percent increase in viewership. 

It’s not just that we’ve seen these stories before. It’s that they’re predictable now. The thing that made Walter White exciting in Breaking Bad was that it felt fresh. But how many more variations of “flawed dude does crime” can audiences handle? We’ve had Sons of Anarchy, Banshee, Ray Donovan, Animal Kingdom, Bloodline, House of Cards, Narcos. Even Yellowstone is basically a cowboy Sopranos. We know the beats. We know how it ends.

We’re Too Exhausted to Root for Assholes

It’s not just about overexposure. The world has changed. In 2024, we’re living through billionaire corruption, authoritarian politics, and rampant disinformation. Our real-life antiheroes are just regular bad guys, and it’s harder to romanticize them.

There was a time when we could laugh at House of Cards’ Frank Underwood and Succession’s Logan Roy. But in an era where actual billionaires are trying to control the world, does it really feel fun anymore? When Elon Musk is actively ruining Twitter, do we really need a fictional corrupt businessman to entertain us? I mean, it makes sense when you think about it: We live in a world of the corrupt at every turn, so why fictionalize the shared trauma?

The antihero fantasy used to be aspirational. If you played your cards right, you could be the one holding the strings. Now, it just feels exhausting to think about being the puppet master. The antihero was the perfect character for the 2000s and 2010s, when people still held on to the idea that the system could be gamed. Now, people are just trying to survive it. Even pop culture is trying to be more hopeful. There are plenty of house-flip shows still and Sabrina Carpenter is topping the charts. Maybe nihilism is dead? (Take that, Nietzsche.) 

We’re More Interested in Victims Than Villains

Something else has shifted. Instead of glamorizing power, modern TV is exploring how it warps people. Beef, The Bear, The White Lotus. These aren’t antihero stories. They’re about people who are messed up, not powerful.

Even the biggest “antihero” show of the last few years, Barry, wasn’t about a cool, morally gray badass. It was about a deeply broken man who could never escape his own bad choices. Same with Kendall Roy. Same with Ritchie in The Bear. Maybe that’s what it is: Reckoning Television. A 2022 study by Nielsen found that 68 percent of viewers prefer TV characters who are “flawed but trying to do better” over traditional antiheroes who are “powerful but morally corrupt.”

Compare that to the 2000s, when TV worshiped men who broke the rules to get ahead. The message of Breaking Bad was “Walter White became the danger.” The message of The Bear? Ritchie learns how to set a table and realizes he wasted his whole life being an asshole. That’s a big shift. 

Where Does the Antihero Go From Here?

The old version of the antihero—the unstoppable, swaggering, alpha male genius—is mostly gone. But that doesn’t mean the morally gray protagonist is dead. It’s just evolving.

A few shows still keep the formula alive. HBO’s The Penguin looks like a classic “crime boss as protagonist” story. Reacher, Jack Ryan, and Yellowstone all give a certain segment of the audience the lone-wolf tough guy they crave. But these feel like exceptions, not the mainstream. (For the record, I think Sofia Falcone is one of the best characters in forever.)

Now, our most interesting characters aren’t untouchable badasses. They’re deeply flawed people trying to do better, or realizing too late that they never will. Carmy in The Bear. Kendall in Succession. Joel in The Last of Us. These aren’t antiheroes in the Tony Soprano mold. They’re tragedies in a slow-motion car crash.

So is the antihero dead? Not quite. But he’s no longer TV’s king. The era of the smug, all-powerful bad guy getting away with it all might be behind us. Maybe it’s just a working-class guy who’s really tired. Seems relatable.