- Better Than Human

I have always thought of myself as unwaveringly good. I tell the truth. I recycle. I once drove miles out of my way to return a lost puppy. When I play Fallout 3, I roam the Wasteland for hours to find water for that thirsty beggar. I always try to do the right thing—even when the context is hypothetical, without consequence, or in a postapocalyptic barrens populated by irradiated zombies.

So why do I find myself rooting for the bad guy?

When Walter White strangles an adversary with a bike lock, I muse, "Well, the poor man's just doing what he must." I empathize with The Walking Dead's Rick Grimes, even as he leaves a mountain of bodies in his wake, living and undead. I find Sterling Archer's man-sluttery adorable rather than off-putting; the fact that my own character on the animated FX series is often caught in the blowback more adorable still. At the end of Homeland's first season (I'm going to spoil it, and I don't care—that's how naughty I've become), I was shocked to find myself rooting, just a tiny bit, for Nick Brody's explosive vest to go off.

Look away. I'm hideous.

Before you smooth your petticoats in self-satisfaction, you're no better than me. No one wants a perfect hero anymore. We want self-destructive behavior, unabashed greed, emotionless sex. Our moral compass has been staked through the heart—and we are the murderers.

We should be happy here at the future's edge, but our tools of convenience may also be our destruction. We're awakened by sleep apps, ride upcycled bikes to green jobs, watch kitten videos over compostable bowls of organic kale salad. Life's edges have been rounded away, granting a tinny satisfaction that quickly fades, leaving an appetite for something base. Menacing. Wrong. So we sate it with Grimes' rampages and Omar Little's retributions, by savaging San Andreas without a tear for the innocents. We delight in the triumph of evil over good—in our entertainment, anyway. If our lives have become sanitized and controlled, at least we can watch other people cook meth and get laid.

But it's been getting tougher to confine my sinner's delight to the abstract. Recently, bank robbery suspects raced through LA, flinging money out of their car to attract a mob that would stymie pursuing cops—and as I watched a guy get hit in the face with a brick of bills, the only thing I could think was "Go. In the name of all things holy, drive like the wind." I may not be the one doing the dirt, but I'll be damned if I'll look away. —Aisha Tyler

The mid-season premiere of Archer airs tonight on FX at 10 pm EST.