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It’s not easy to be a professional hater. But with shows like Succession, The Other Two, and Barry, which boast an array of rich scumbags, vain aspirants, and total nitwits, doing my job—abhorring these people in recaps and other essays—has never been easier.
Until: Cut to 2024, when all of these creeps, assholes, and slime puppies were canceled. (No, not in the online sense. In the “their TV show ended” sense. But if this were real life, they’d probably be canceled in the online sense, too.) Now that these characters have been killed off or put to rest, who are we going to hate on TV?
With endearing shows more popular than ever, the answer might be no one. Perhaps our time with you-love-to-hate-’em baddies is coming to a close. Ted Lasso may be ending, but it left behind a legacy followed by the likes of Abbott Elementary, Jury Duty, and Shrinking. Maybe Nicecore is taking front and center stage after all.
But nice people have always had a place on TV—it’s the feeling of pure hatred that has been a newer, more exciting trend. We watched Succession to gawk at pure selfishness, to allow our mouths to gape at the vicious one percent backstab one another. Barry gave us the opportunity to smack our foreheads in light of everyone’s foolish killing problems, while still rooting for the killing. And The Other Two made us cringe at vain wannabes using any fame as leverage in their careers. We love to hate them because, in the end, they were fools—not just asshats—all along.
Then again, the not-so-perfect protagonist isn’t completely novel. We’ve witnessed a flurry of anti-heros—Tony Soprano of The Sopranos, Mad Men’s Don Draper, Veep’s Selina Meyer, and even The Office boss Michael Scott—in the past few decades. But Tony, Don, Selina, and Michael were surrounded by smarter, oftentimes more empathetic characters. Even they, themselves, tended to have at least one endearing quality. But in more recent shows, we’ve been bombarded with an array of complete and total dickheads with very, very minimal redeeming personality traits. (Pardon my French, but really, the word “jerk” only packs a minimal punch here.)
In watching a show like Succession, we didn’t want to hate our leading person, our Kendall (Jeremy Strong) or our Logan (Brian Cox)—we wanted to despise everyone, from blubbering Karl (David Rasche) to awkward Greg (Nicholas Braun). Barry had an array of irritating mobsters, perhaps a la The Sopranos, but with a higher fail rate and, frequently, way less motive.
There is, by the way, a show that’s currently airing that we haven’t touched on quite yet: The White Lotus. Nothing has inspired more fury in TV watching than the brutality of the wealthy travelers on Mike White’s destination anthology show. In fact, we may love the Succession meanies—I mean, “L to the OG” is an iconic song, and I don’t hate it in any way—far more than we love those pompous buffoons. But The White Lotus isn’t returning until 2025. Who will we hate in the meantime? Will we really have to abide by our petty New Years’ resolutions to spread more happiness? Are we all stuck plastering cheesy smiles on our faces instead of chic, semi-shocked, devious grins?
No, thank goodness! The Regime—which, like all our lost shows, will premiere on HBO—promises to turn Kate Winslet into an evil dictator of sorts. Well, maybe not a dictator. She’ll star as a chancellor of a fictional European country who has to make amends with America, led by U.S. Secretary of State Martha Plimpton. Plimpton and Winslet as arrogant world leaders? Count me in, especially when the show is produced by the same folks of Succession.
And there’s more: Palm Royale, which heads to Apple TV+ in the earlier months of 2024, follows a wannabe (Kristen Wiig) socialite as she climbs the rungs of high society in the 1960s. Perhaps a period spin on The Other Two? And although The Franchise doesn’t have a release date quite yet, it’s rumored to be coming out in late 2024 and is set to satirize Marvel productions. Seeing as Armando Iannuci, creator of Veep, is at the helm, I think we’re about to meet a whole bunch of new suckers in that series, too.
For now, though, it’s okay to wallow in the dread of missing the ones we hate most in this world. Usually, that mourning is reserved for those we love—it’s odd to yearn for folks we absolutely loathe. Somehow, recent TV shows have done the trick. They have shown us that we have so much room in our hearts to hate, and I pray that, in the future, we can all continue doing so. If all else fails, we can put on a happy face until The White Lotus sets sail next, next year.
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