Yay! I thought I was seeing a return of the anti-hero but not entirely sure. Now I know I'm seeing what I thought I was seeing. And now that it's this obvious and so often repeated, when will we burn out and forget which show we're watching?

I do wonder how much longer this whole deeply flawed Protagonist / anti-hero phenomenon will continue. Of course, I was wondering how much longer the whole superhero thing could stick around 5 years ago... and that's still here.

Ha! They make their point clearly, don't they. OTOH, the formula doesn't account for The Good Wife... I find when it comes to trends, I don't do badly at spotting the patterns but I'm not very good at predicting the timing. The anti-hero trend and the superhero thing will both clearly obsolesce eventually--the question is when? I suspect it's both a question of what the audience wants and what producers see as possible (where the latter limits the options for the former). I wish I had the information and tools to look systematically at what kinds of films were successful 80 years ago in the Depression (on the basis that culture goes in 40 year cycles; we're in a 2x40 year remove, plus an economic depression) and see what that data predicts will be successful right now. Scott, you know your film history: if you're ever inspired, I'd love to know what parallels you see between film trends of the 30's and what's happening today. Back to the article: it seems to me that if so many shows are on the anti-hero bandwagon, there's room to break in with a completely different kind of protagonist and narrative, and serve an audience segment that's largely ignored. (But that's how I tend to respond to trends.)