The Bad Guys

This may be a little off the topic, but it is certainly related...


I have noticed what seems to be a trend along those lines, where there is no actual "good guy", just bad guys with varying degrees of "badness".
Whether the underlying point is to 'show' everyone has some degree of 'evil' they had done... Well, I don't know.


More than a few TV movies and series seem to have that underlying theme.
The current series (but in its last season this year, 2016) THE GOOD WIFE pretty clearly illustrates the no-good-guys theme.

A failed two-season series, REVOLUTION, turned what originally appeared to be the original "good guys", one by one, into some pretty unsympathetic characters as the show went on. The Spielberg TV series (one season only) TERRA NOVA was cancelled before the 'sheriff' was changed, but the change had started when he smuggled his way to Terra Nova. That series had lots of comments about whether 'the rules' allowed killing the dinosaurs, (and they were killed, both in self-defense and merely because-someone-could, later in the first/only season), and it included having a father sing a 'spider song' to his young daughter and a public "summary execution". Even the protagonists in the series SUITS have more than a few skeletons in their closets; "Mike" acting as a lawyer w/o a law degree and passing the bar exam, plus possessing/selling serious amounts of drugs just before he got hired into the law firm by "Harvey". WHITE COLLAR had some back-stories and ongoing criminal plots their protagonists had going during the series, and the FBI guy and his wife were having their "good guy" values slowly eroded.
Do I even need to add FALLING SKIES? Apparently the ending season completely corrupted the one heroic "good guy" teacher who had been the moral compass through the first four seasons. And the reason for the first alien invasion and near extermination of the human race... *sigh* (were the writers totally ticked off that the show was cancelled, and "burned it to the ground" on the way out?)
Should I even mention the "reality shows" like SURVIVOR, BIG BROTHER, and the like, with their constant encouraging/rewarding lying, deceiving, betrayals, and intrigue to get to the finals?

As a contrast to SUITS, a TV show in the same time frame is ROYAL PAINS. Its protagonist is a doctor that got booted out of the hospital where he worked, by leaving one of the wealthy hospital donors in the care of the usual staff after an uneventful routine surgery, in order to treat and save the life of an "uninsured" patient. The wealthy donor took a sudden and severe turn for the worst during that time, and died. That doctor was possibly the most sympathetic protagonist in the current and relatively recent crop of TV shows. He had some "character flaws", instead of the current "skeletons in his closet", and became reclusive and withdrew from pretty much everything after his firing. He had realized he would do the same things again, if he was ever put into the same situation... (save a patient instead of 'babysitting' the wealthy donor). His brother convinced him to take a vacation to get him out of his withdrawal, and that was the way the series began...






Does anyone really wonder why the "Affluenza Teen" both happened in the first place, and then he got only ten years probation for his drunk driving crash that killed four people and injured nine others, when he was 16 (legal drinking age is 21 in the USA). And BTW, his "10 year probation" would actually have ended on the day he turned 19, if current events had not happened.
(Namely: His likely probation violation posted on social media at age 18, he and his mother fleeing the USA to Mexico, being caught, deported by Mexico - back to the USA, and his case transferred to adult court (yesterday, just prior to his 19th birthday) instead of remaining in the juvenile court system used for his original trial and sentencing).
And the so-called "Affluenza Defense"?
It was used to indicate that he had not been taught basic right, wrong, and responsibility by his wealthy parents, and so, was not responsible for his actions of drinking to far over the legal driving alcohol limit, then driving in that condition, and causing the deadly crash.

Incidentally, a teenage boy, one of the nine injured in the crash, has ended up in a wheelchair as a result of spine and brain injuries, completely unable to take care of himself and unable to speak, trapped in his own body, like the intended state of the beating victim in this movie...

It ain't real, until it is...