Alyssa wonders if the passing of James Gandolfini marks the end of the Anti-Hero Age of television:
The anti-hero genre Gandolfini made popular has soldiered on in the years since Tony Soprano flipped to “Don’t Stop Believing” on the jukebox and Gandolfini went on to play generals, CIA directors, and kind-hearted monsters, leaving space for the legend of The Wire‘s Omar Little, the pathos of Mad Men‘s Don draper, and the rise of Breaking Bad‘s Walter White. But as Gandolfini is laid to rest, anti-hero television is showing some decided strain. If the purpose of The Sopranos was to ask how far we could sympathize with a man like Tony Soprano who was a criminal and the head of a family, a serial cheater who also loved his children, and a man whose closest friendships could end in blood and be bound up by murder, maybe in the intervening years, we’ve found our answers, and it’s time to move on to other questions.
In a later post, Alyssa ventures as to why few female anti-heroes exist:
There really isn’t an equivalent framework available for women, who get penalized rather than rewarded for displaying masculine traits like aggression, physical force, ambition, or selfishness. Efforts to create female anti-heroes with masculine qualities like Damages’ Patty Hewes (Glenn Close) have failed because those characters are initially seen as evil rather than admirable. And trying to make anti-heroism work in a distinctly feminine way, by giving heroines characteristics like weakness, indecisiveness, or self-absorption, as has been the case with Girls, doesn’t quite land either. Shows with difficult female heroines have to travel in a different direction than shows about difficult men do, dismantling distaste for their female characters and building sympathy for them, rather than moving toward a moral revelation about how we’ve fooled ourselves by worshiping that man.
The Dish 