On Unlikeable Characters

Lovely members,

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas, and welcome to Issue #1 of my weekly newsletter. Enjoy!

On Unlikeable Characters

A common note we screenwriters contend with is that our characters aren’t likeable enough. It drives us crazy. One might think that the previous thirty years of hits constructed, entirely by design, around patently unlikable characters — The Sopranos, Mad Men, It’s Always Sunny, Breaking Bad, and, of course, most recently Succession — that our readers could give us a break. After all, the “heroes” of these shows can be selfish, avaricious, misogynistic, grasping, and yet they are series that have found success clearly because not despite these characters.

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And yet, even in the privacy of our own studies, we find it difficult to dismiss this note out of hand. We know, instinctively somehow, that our audiences need to be drawn to our characters, that they need to enjoy spending time with them, that they need — to adapt Raymond Chandler’s opinion about James Bond — to want to be them, or want to fuck them. Despite ourselves, we know that audiences, on some level, do need to like them.

Like all notes, the danger with this one is not so much in the note itself and more in the way we, as writers, react to it. The natural temptation is to make our characters nicer. Of course, our audiences will like this character if only they could be just a bit nicer! Or, to put it a different way, we are tempted to round off their edges, make them more ethical, more moral, to make them do the things that we’d like them to do and be the kind of person ideally they should be.

The reason that this is dangerous is that the fundamental thing that drives our stories is change. And if our characters are likeable, lovable, ethically right from the off, then their capacity for change is restricted. The whole point of drama is that, over the course of the story, it forces characters to do the right thing — or at least a right-er thing. If they are intrinsically likeable already, then where is the incentive to do better? What’s the point of the story? 

Perhaps, we may just need to change our view of what it means to be likeable.

Let’s take Succession’s Roman Roy (spoilers ahead): who is an excellent example of a deeply unlikeable character that we nevertheless like — if not love. Roman is greedy. He has a sulking child’s entitlement and privilege. He is (as his siblings take great delight in reminding him) sexually screwed up to the point of dysfunction. He’s also funny, which is helpful — though I’m not sure entirely why, as an audience, we care so much for him.

I think the thing that makes him loveable is that, despite all the things that Roman does: the bad behaviour, the treachery, (at one point he convinces his father to give the keys to the White House to a proto-fascist), there is something else at his core. 

At the end of the most recent series, we suddenly see everything Roman has done, all his snark and harm, for what they are — a shield, a protective shell. And, when his dissembling and camouflage erodes, what is left is a pretty direct and brazen appeal. He wants his father to love him. In the final scene where it is clear that Logan Roy is going to leave his children high and dry, Roman suddenly seems like a very scared child. 

And, of course, someone who is in love and will never be loved in return, is likeable to us, because they are us. It is not because that behaviour is good or right or even attractive, but because we recognise in this core behaviour something of ourselves. Roman is likeable because he is like us.

And this is despite he is a rich kid who will never have to work a day in his life, who thinks nothing of driving around on speed boats and who is sad because his is thinks he is losing his grip on a multi-billion pound empire. Despite the different social backgrounds and approaches to life that Succession’s characters show compared to most of its audience, it is because at their centre they provide a screen on which we can project ourselves.

I’m Christmassing with a family that does present-giving late…

… which has come as something of a shock to me, being raised in a family that aggressively — almost pathologically — unwraps as soon as they’re conscious on Christmas day. It wasn’t out of the ordinary in our house for Dad to rise at four or five in the morning and start stomping up and down the stairs in an attempt to make enough noise to wake us. My in-laws (who are staying with us for the holidays for the first time) are very different, exhibiting as they do a calmer, one might even say, more puritanical streak. 

The schedule for the day was: up at the ungodly hour of eight-thirty. Eat breakfast, go to church (for the holy; heathens such as me stay behind to tend Christmas dinner). Then, only once the turkey was firmly stowed in the oven and prayers winged their way skywards, were the presents politely passed around. I found it strangely exhilarating, the delayed gratification, the virtue of it all. It’s like I’ve been through rehab, gone cold turkey (no pun intended), and come out somehow purified.

There’s a writer I worked with earlier in the year who I haven’t heard from in a while…

… I’d sent a couple of e-mails that had gone unanswered and, to be honest, I was beginning to spiral. Had I done or said something wrong, was I a bad person to work with, had I been too standoffish or too stifling? I followed up with a Christmas note more in hope than expectation.

She replied quickly and in her note, she apologies for her silence but, she explained, her father had passed away in September and it was as much as she could do to keep her head above water. said — she was surprised about how much energy grieving takes. It’s a lesson, that too often we – I say we, usually when I mean I) assume that my sway over the world is too great and that — alternatively — that people simply disappear and stop living their lives when they are out of your sight. Her phrasing has stayed with me over a Christmas period that has been hard for so many: grieving takes so much energy.

I’m watching… A VERY BRITISH SCANDAL on BBC 1

Written by Sarah Phelps and starring magnetic performances by Claire Foy and Paul Bettany as the unhappily married Duke and Duchess of Argyll, it was a perfectly constructed gift for post-Christmas. The meat of the true story (the scandalous publication of the Duchess in felatio delicto) is skillfully and rightfully left as an afterthought, while the story focuses on a couple in spiralling free-fall. The writing felt effortless but was bone-lean with an incredible efficiency. Not a word or look was wasted.

I’m reading… REAL LIFE by Brandon Taylor

Which is a beautifully written and moving portrayal of someone in the midst of depression. Following the story of Wallace, a gay, Black PhD student in biodiversity in an anonymous midwestern US university, it tells of his struggle within a predominantly closed, white world over the course of a few days as he spirals following the death of his father. Perhaps if I found the narrative drive of the book a little disappointing, it was only because its portrayal is too well-crafted, /too/ realistic. Like those suffering from depression, you wanted to grab the story by the shoulders, tell it to get itself together, stop circling the same trauma over and over again. Like the experience of depression, too, it doesn’t offer any easy resolution or offer easy answers.

Hope you all have a fantastic New Year’s and stay safe.

James.