We're Rooting for the Wrong People — and We Absolutely Know It

Let's be honest for a second. You watched Succession and somewhere around season two, you started rooting for Logan Roy. Not because he was right. Not because he was good. But because he was compelling in a way that the so-called decent characters just weren't. You watched The White Lotus and found yourself weirdly fascinated by the rich guests trashing their hotel rooms and each other. You binged Squid Game and felt a complicated rush when the most ruthless players outmaneuvered everyone else.

This isn't a coincidence. This isn't a glitch in your moral compass. This is the defining entertainment pattern of our cultural moment — and it's worth actually unpacking why we're all so addicted to characters we should, by every reasonable standard, despise.

The Death of the Clean Hero

For decades, mainstream storytelling handed us a pretty simple contract: root for the good guy, boo the bad guy, feel satisfied when justice wins. Think early network TV, the classic action hero, the romantic lead who never really did anything wrong. The formula worked because it was comfortable. It asked nothing of us.

Then something cracked. The Sopranos happened. Breaking Bad happened. And audiences didn't just tolerate morally compromised protagonists — they loved them. The cultural appetite for complexity didn't fade after those shows ended. It grew, mutated, and eventually became the dominant mode of prestige storytelling.

Now in 2024, the clean hero feels almost naive. Almost boring. We've been so thoroughly trained on moral ambiguity that a genuinely virtuous main character reads as underdeveloped. Which should probably alarm us more than it does.

What Squid Game Actually Did to Us

When Squid Game dropped, the discourse immediately focused on its class critique — the desperate, debt-ridden contestants forced into deadly competition by obscenely wealthy spectators. That reading is valid. But here's what got talked about less: a huge portion of the audience was fascinated by the wealthy game-runners. The VIPs in their masks. The Front Man in his cool suit making cold decisions. The sheer audacity of people who had so much they needed to invent suffering as entertainment.

We were horrified, sure. But we were also riveted in a way that went beyond simple disgust. The show made their world look almost seductive — sleek, powerful, operating by its own internal logic. Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk built that tension deliberately, but audiences leaned into it harder than maybe even he expected.

That tension — horror plus fascination — is the exact cocktail that keeps us coming back.

The White Lotus Effect

Mike White's The White Lotus has become the clearest cultural case study in this phenomenon. The entire premise is watching wealthy, mostly awful people be wealthy and awful at a luxury resort while the staff suffers around them. There is no redemption arc built into the structure. These people are not going to learn their lesson in any meaningful way.

And yet. Viewers obsess over Tanya McQuoid. They write dissertations about Daphne Sullivan's particular brand of weaponized obliviousness. They make TikToks analyzing every look, every line, every petty cruelty.

Part of what White Lotus does so brilliantly is refuse to let its rich characters be cartoonishly evil. They're recognizable. Their insecurities are human. Their rationalizations are ones we've heard — or maybe even used ourselves. That's the uncomfortable hook. We see fragments of real behavior in these fictional monsters, and it makes us weirdly protective of them even as we're watching them do terrible things.

Ambition Got Complicated

There's a generational piece to this that doesn't get discussed enough. Millennials and Gen Z came of age watching the American dream quietly collapse around them. The idea that hard work plus decency equals success got exposed as, at best, an oversimplification and at worst, an outright lie. The people who actually won — in Silicon Valley, in finance, in politics — were frequently not the most ethical. They were often the most ruthless.

So when we watch Logan Roy consolidate power by destroying everyone who trusts him, or watch a Succession-style corporate monster outmaneuver genuinely good-intentioned people, there's a complicated emotional response happening. It's not admiration exactly. It's something closer to grim recognition. Oh, so that's how it actually works.

Villain-coded characters in prestige TV have become a way to process the gap between how we were told the world operates and how it actually does. They're not escapism in the traditional sense — they're a kind of dark realism.

The Sympathy Machine

Good writers know exactly what they're doing when they make you care about someone awful. They give you the backstory. They show you the wound. They let you watch a character be genuinely funny or charismatic for twenty minutes before revealing the body count.

This is craft. But it's also a manipulation we're increasingly aware of and increasingly fine with. We know we're being worked when we feel bad for a character who just did something indefensible. We know it and we lean in anyway, because the emotional experience of that contradiction is genuinely interesting.

What that says about us culturally is that we've become sophisticated consumers of moral complexity — or, less charitably, that we've become comfortable rationalizing our way into empathy for people who don't deserve it. Depending on the day, both readings feel true.

So What Are We Actually Watching For?

Here's the question worth sitting with: when we stan the villain, what are we actually getting out of it?

Some of it is pure entertainment — chaos is fun, unpredictability is engaging, and morally unconstrained characters can do things that heroes can't, which makes for better plot. But some of it is something murkier. A safe space to explore impulses we'd never act on. A way to process anger at systems and structures by watching someone — even a fictional monster — refuse to play by the rules. A permission slip to find power attractive even when we know it's corrupting.

The shows that are defining this era of television understand something essential: we don't want to be lectured. We don't want the narrative to punish the bad guy in a way that feels tidy and unearned. We want to sit in the discomfort of caring about someone we shouldn't, and we want the show to trust us to handle that.

Most of the time, we can. And the times we can't? Well, that's probably worth paying attention to too.

Because at some point, the line between understanding a villain and quietly rooting for one gets thinner than we'd like to admit. And the fact that we keep crossing it — gleefully, voluntarily, with a full watch-party spread on the coffee table — says something real about where we are right now as a culture.

We're not rooting for the wrong people by accident. We're doing it on purpose. The only question left is what we're going to do with that.