In the 16 years since Tony Soprano burst onto the scene, anti-heroes have been a mainstay of prestige cable drama. HBO led the charge, capitalizing on the success of The Sopranos by following it up with The Wire, Big Love, and Six Feet Under, giving us worlds populated by a Dickensian cast of criminals in Baltimore, Mormon polygamists, and morally complex undertakers. Other networks followed suit: AMC established itself as an original content provider with Mad Men and its crooked ad man Don Draper, as well as everyone’s favorite meth peddler, Breaking Bad’s Walter White. These characters and the shows that housed them drew devoted audiences, near-deafening buzz, and serious accolades, trouncing network dramas at nearly every Emmy and Golden Globes ceremony since 1999. Prestige drama thrived — and, in many cases, still thrives — on presenting audiences with extreme protagonists and demanding its audience to have empathy for them.

It can be easy to forget, given how much attention has been paid to these bad boys, that HBO debuted Sex and the City a year before Tony Soprano became a household name. Carrie Bradshaw and her tribe clawed their way into our pop culture consciousness, and viewers — primarily women and gay men — aligned themselves with the character they felt most represented their truest selves. “I’m a Carrie!” we would declare (t-shirts saying as much can still be purchased today), or “I’m a Carrie with a little bit of Miranda,” or, “I’m a Charlotte, but I really want to be a Samantha.” These women operated not in underground meth labs or back-room mob meetings, but rather in the familiar, or at least more accessible, world of New York City: dance clubs and wine bars and art galleries.

Sex and the City, still to this day one of HBO’s flagship comedies, arguably paved the way for the network’s current crop of half-hour comedies, most notably its recent Sunday night line-up of Girls, Togetherness, and Looking. What do these four shows have in common, besides the network they call home? All have a serious protagonist problem. Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Hannah (Lena Dunham), Brett (Mark Duplass), and Patrick (Jonathan Groff) are cut from the same cloth: whiny, white, middle class, self-involved, and deeply unhappy.

Rather than mob kingpins or diabolical ad executives, these characters are more grounded in a reality shared by many of those with an HBO subscription: they’re just average, everyday people living in large urban areas on the coasts. While a majority of viewers have most likely not slung crystal meth and evaded their DEA agent brother-in-law, most have probably been romantically unfulfilled. While many people have most likely not whacked someone, they’ve certainly gone to brunch with their friends. Perhaps because of this, the impulse to relate to these characters is stronger.

Of the three shows still on the air, Girls navigates the murky waters of relatability and likability most deftly, mainly because it seems like the show doesn’t want you to like Hannah. The writers seem to know that Hannah is a nightmare: bumbling around New York, unable to reconcile her deep insecurity with her enormous ego, constantly getting in her own way. Initially presumed to be an avatar for Lena Dunham, many viewers expected Hannah’s arc to follow her creator’s. But as Dunham became more and more successful, Hannah continued getting knocked down at every turn.

Whereas Dunham got a seven-figure advance on her book deal, Hannah was offered an e-book contract, which was ripped away after the death of her editor. Whereas Dunham found romantic success with musician Jack Antonoff, Hannah alienated and drove Adam away. Part of the pleasure of watching Girls is the sense that the show is in on the joke that is Hannah. They know that all of her shortcomings and failures are a direct result of her questionable choices and unabashed self-centeredness. She is her own worst enemy. One gets the impression that every critique leveled against Hannah — that she is petulant, self-obsessed, self-defeating — has been considered and capitalized on by the show’s writers. They don’t want you to like Hannah. They want you to revel in her misery.

Conversely, Looking feels like a love letter to Patrick, its central character. Patrick could be Hannah’s brother; he shares nearly all of her despicable character traits: her self-centeredness, her obliviousness, her extreme lack of perspective (all characteristics also shared by Carrie Bradshaw). But Looking wants its audience to root for Patrick. They want his extreme naïveté to read as endearing, his obscene lack of self-awareness to come across as lovable. Patrick, who has a well-paying job in video game design, who leads a comfortable existence that allows him to be able to afford his humongous apartment even after his roommate moves out, whose parents are still together and accepting of the fact that he is gay, bemoaned his terrible childhood in a recent episode. When Doris — played perfectly by Lauren Weedman, and one of the few characters on the show who is not afraid to call Patrick on his bullshit — counters with the story of her actually terrible childhood, Patrick manages to admit, grudgingly, that maybe she had it a little bit worse.

The moments of comedy in Looking come from easy double entendre and catty quips, rather than the absurdity of its central character. The show takes Patrick seriously. It wants Patrick to find happiness and assumes that its viewers will follow suit. In its overwhelmingly effective second season, the show successfully pulled off a major transformation for Agustín, Season One’s most off-putting character, and explored the co-dependent, unhealthy, but ultimately lovely relationship between Dom and Doris. But it still doesn’t seem to know what to do with Patrick.

The show also bears the burden of the fact that Patrick is one of the only gay protagonists on television. In attempting to avoid cliché representations of gayness — the quippy queen, the slutty party boy — the show has instead, presumably in an attempt to make him more complex and “real,” created a character with a severe lack of redeemable characteristics. If the show leaned into his unlikability (the way Girls does with Hannah’s), instead of exalting him as some sort of golden calf for us to worship, Looking might be a more interesting, engaging show. Instead, the writers assume that viewers feel as warmly as they do toward Patrick, without expending much effort to earn those feelings of warmth.

And then there’s Togetherness, the newest show in the Sunday night line-up, and its protagonist Brett. From the moment we meet Brett, his dissatisfaction radiates. He feels trapped in his marriage, unfulfilled in his work, and unsure how he came to be so unhappy. He spends the majority of the season avoiding sex with his wife, stewing at his cushy sound design job, and seeking solace in a hippie he meets in the woods (Mary Steenburgen’s Linda). While this character no doubt exists in real life, as television it makes for a frustrating, unsatisfying viewing experience.

Which is not to say that Togetherness itself is entirely unsatisfying. Melanie Lynskey turns in a deeply affecting performance as Michelle, Brett’s wife, who, for some reason, is desperately tying to hold on to him even as she finds herself lured away by a charismatic local politician. And Amanda Peet and Steve Zissis round out the cast, imbuing their characters, lost thirty-somethings that could easily be played as caricatures, with real warmth and heart. But Brett’s middle class, white male malaise looms large over the show.

No television show should be expected to be representative of an entire community – twenty-something girls in Brooklyn, gay guys in San Francisco, Gen-X married folks in L.A. – and none of these shows claims to be. And it can certainly be argued that happy, satisfied characters do not make for interesting television (though Netflix’s The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt serves as a compelling rebuttal to that argument). But in taking stock of HBO’s current offerings, it is difficult to ignore the fact that these characters are overwhelmingly homogenous: middle class, unhappy, and white.

The whiteness, at least, is something the network is aware of and attempting to address. Last month, they announced the HBOAccess Writing Fellowship, seeking diverse — in this case, “diverse” is defined as those who identify as: Asian Pacific, Sub-Continent Asian, African American, Hispanic, Native American, Middle Eastern, and/or women — writers to develop new material for the network. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, this initiative yields.

Perhaps it will yield new programming featuring more diverse, but still overwhelmingly unhappy, protagonists. Perhaps that is what the network wants. Perhaps that’s what audiences want. Perhaps misery does in fact love company, even on alleged “comedies.” Maybe the overwhelming success of the anti-hero in television drama has conditioned us to expect similar characters in our lighter fare.

But stepping back and taking a look at the wider television landscape provides us with a slightly more promising and certainly more diverse picture. ABC’s Black-ish, one of the few new network comedies to not only survive the fall but also find a wider audience, features a happy, successful African American family delving into issues surrounding race and family with incisive humor. CW’s Jane the Virgin, whose star Gina Rodriguez took home a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy, is pure, escapist fun. And Amazon’s Transparent, the show on this list mostly likely to feel at home somewhere like HBO, features Maura, a deeply happy trans woman finally, late in the game, accepting her true self. Her children are miserable, sure, but Moira’s joyful exploration of her new, more authentic self is the engine that drives this much-lauded show.

For a network at the forefront of ushering in the most recent Golden Age of Television, HBO seems awfully and myopically formulaic in its current half-hour programming, catering to the white, twenty-to-thirty-something, middle-to-upper-middle class audience that its shows portray. Perhaps in an era in which “anti-hero” as a character description is often confused with “complex,” at least as far as HBO is concerned, despicable is the new likable and repugnant is the new relatable.

Brett Barbour is a writer who lives in Brooklyn and is prone to binge-watching.

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