There are 12 in all, including The Hero, The Lover, The Wholesome. If Daenerys Targaryen can draw in more than 10 million viewers, can a brand equivalent pull people into the cereal aisle?Ī first step would be to re-examine a framework that has held brands in this typecasting for decades: archetypes. The thinking behind this orthodoxy is similar to that of television, where marketers and agencies have long held that in order for an audience to want to support a brand and purchase its products, that brand must be “good.” Since the dawn of modern advertising, brands of all shapes and sizes have attempted to play the role of the traditional hero. What seemed inconceivable to the industry at the end of the last century has become inescapable.Īnother industry has long followed a similar code, locked in the belief that its participants must be quantifiably “good.” Most of today’s popular programming is built around antiheroes: Succession, Yellowjackets, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The White Lotus. So, a steady stream of shows emerged with new, more twisted versions of the antiheroes we craved. An FBI agent could use any method imaginable on 24. Even a humble advertising executive could be presented as a philandering, identity-stealing drunk.Īnd we, the audience, couldn’t get enough of them. A police detective could now have highly questionable morals on The Shield. With that one brutal act, the era of the TV antihero began. Why would audiences invest their time in characters who lacked those virtues? It was inconceivable to network execs, and so show after show featured leads who fit the bill.Īnd then, on that fateful night in early 1999, in the fifth episode of the first season of The Sopranos, Tony Soprano-a mob boss and a family man-violently and mercilessly garroted a “rat” before returning to a college campus to pick up his daughter. They were allowed to make mistakes, but they had to be good people, well-intentioned and likeable. Lucy Ricardo, from I Love Lucy Frank Columbo, from Columbo or Will Smith, from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. 7, 1999, there was an unbreakable, unshakeable, unmistakable rule in television: networks believed that the protagonists of their shows needed to be undeniably “good.” Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.Until Feb. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior.
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