That characters don’t need to be likable is one of the lessons, tenets and some would say advances of 21st-century television. By many critical reckonings, the medium’s adulthood was signaled by the rise of the antihero — your Tony Soprano, your Don Draper, your Walter White — and the concomitant appearance of the anti-villain, the appealing bad guy: Boyd Crowder, say, or Al Swearengen. Such figures so dominated the premium TV landscape in the first decade of the 2000s as to become tiresome, a new cliche dressed as an innovation.
They were always men in the beginning, but more and more that role was taken on by women, in series like “Fleabag,” “Killing Eve,” “Ozark,” “Animal Kingdom,” “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” and all over “Game of Thrones.” “Succession” features a woman nicknamed for what was originally criminal slang for a knife. These shows, if not necessarily better than their phallocentric predecessors, were more interesting just by virtue of allowing women agency, complexity and the right to be morally unappealing — a toxic femininity not unrelated to the classic femme fatale, but more confounding, harder to assess and therefore to dismiss. This did feel like progress.
Still, such characters can also try one’s patience, making a series difficult to watch, no matter how good it is. Two new quasi-comedies — “Am I Being Unreasonable?,” which premieres Tuesday on Hulu, and “Beef,” already running on Netflix — that focus on difficult women (alongside some difficult men) fit that bill. I have nothing negative to say about either show on any creative or technical level; indeed, there’s much to praise. They’re well-written, well-directed and very well performed. If they were less convincing, they’d be easier to dismiss, if no easier to experience.
