Where Did Television's Real Villains Go? The Guardian Asks, and Points at Italy

The Guardian's television criticism has published an essay asking where television's genuinely wicked characters have gone. Its argument is that the industry's habit of supplying villains with sympathetic backstories — trauma, childhood, motive — has made them boring, and that the appetite for cruelty, torment and evil turns on screen has not gone away. The occasion the piece hangs on is a new Netflix adaptation of East of Eden, reviewed by the Guardian at the start of the month.

The essay is a piece of criticism rather than a news report, and it should be read as such. Its claim is cultural: that the moral legibility of the modern antagonist is a production convention, not an audience demand. The Guardian's own framing — 'cruel torment, depraved violence, evil turns' — is deliberately theatrical, and it is making a case about taste as much as about craft.

For readers in Italy, the argument has an unusually long pedigree. The country's literature and opera have never been short of figures who do harm without explanation, and the foreign press has often noted how readily Italian narrative traditions — from the nineteenth-century novel to the melodrama — treat evil as a condition rather than a wound to be explained.

The Guardian's complaint is not new, but it is sharply put. Villains, in the essay's account, have been recruited into the therapeutic register: every cruelty now arrives with a cause, and a cause is a kind of excuse. The result is antagonists who are legible, and legibility is the opposite of what a certain kind of story needs. The piece names its examples from the television canon and treats the trend as a settled fact of commissioning.

The Italian comparison is not one the Guardian makes; it is one the country's own critics have made for a century. Italian opera built its most durable characters out of exactly the material the essay wants back: Scarpia in Tosca, Iago in Verdi's Otello, the implacable forces of the melodrama tradition, figures whose evil is presented as a fact of the world rather than a symptom. Verdi in particular has been a recurring subject of foreign music criticism this season, with new recordings drawing attention to how unsentimental his villains remain.

That is the comparative point worth making from this desk. Where Anglo-American television has spent two decades explaining its antagonists, the Italian repertoire has kept a supply of characters who are never explained, and the foreign press keeps returning to them — at the opera houses, in new translations of the nineteenth-century novel, in festival retrospectives. The Guardian's essay is a request for something Italian culture has been exporting all along, largely without noticing that it was doing so.

Whether television takes the advice is another matter. The essay is an argument about appetite, and appetites in commissioning are set by data as much as by critics. But it is a useful marker of where the international conversation about screen storytelling currently sits — and of how often, when that conversation reaches for an alternative, it reaches for something Italian.