Review: 2 new TV shows seem designed to test the viewer’s patience. And it pays off
That characters don’t need to be likable is one of the lessons, tenets and some would say advances of 21st-century television. By many critical reckonings, the medium’s adulthood was signaled by the rise of the antihero — your Tony Soprano, your Don Draper, your Walter White — and the concomitant appearance of the anti-villain, the appealing bad guy: Boyd Crowder, say, or Al Swearengen. Such figures so dominated the premium TV landscape in the first decade of the 2000s as to become tiresome, a new cliche dressed as an innovation.
They were always men in the beginning, but more and more that role was taken on by women, in series like “Fleabag,” “Killing Eve,” “Ozark,” “Animal Kingdom,” “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” and all over “Game of Thrones.” “Succession” features a woman nicknamed for what was originally criminal slang for a
