I’m fascinated by a change that seems to have slowly, but irrevocably, overtaken American television. It’s hard to say exactly when, but it was certainly visible by the late 1990s, and obvious by 2005. It has to do with a new understanding of the idea of a “character.” Previous, at least back through Romanticism, a character had been understood as a collection of characteristics, personality characteristics, an individual history, a predilection for certain things and not other—in short, a consistent set of personality markers and behaviors. Hence, the following passage immediately makes us aware that something is profoundly wrong, and in fact, so profoundly wrong we immediately recognize it as a parody, a send-up or a mockery:

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    “I’m tired, Sam, so very tired,” said Frodo, pulling at the chain around his neck.

    “Well, master Frodo, I could carry it for a while—at least until you’re feeling more like yourself,” said Sam.

    “Sure—have the fucking thing,” said Frodo, tossing Sam the ring. “I was only in this for the money, anyway. Find your own way out of Mordor, sucker.” Frodo’s laughter faded into the distance, and Sam realized how totally, unbearably alone he was.

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This is especially true for television, where characters were defined for a long time in the most primitive, repetitive, and simple-minded way imaginable. Television networks believed that their viewers were barely higher in intelligence than a marmoset, and substantially less clever. And so, week after week, Archie Bunker would make the same stupid, misogynist and racist comments toward his family, friends and neighbors (and All in the Family was arguably one of the better shows on television). I still remember on Laverne & Shirley that every single arrival of Lenny and Squiggy was heralded by the same door slam, and the same “Hello!”  Whole episodes of Happy Days would pass by with little more than Henry Winkler giving the audience a slow grin and extending his thumb upward, barely different from the standard episode of Star Trek in which Kirk is transformed into two Kirks, one slightly more horny than the other, and who are eventually reconciled: McCoy calls Spock a “pointy-eared, green-assed alien freak,” everyone laughs, and the Enterprise sails off into the sunset. And so on.

Then things began to change. All in the Family morphed into Married with Children (perhaps someone could continue the experiment, calling the show Noun Preposition Noun). The underachievement, racism and misogyny were the same, but now presented as a kind of blunt, traumatized parody—where Archie Bunker had once been humored by everyone around him (don’t tell the Big Other he’s dead), no one was invested in Al but Al—what saved him, in fact, was the identical, infantile venality of everyone around him. In this phase, “character” began to become a simple “function,” as if Al Bundy was saying: “I’m not really like this, but I say and do the same things week after week, punctuating the show with my well-known catch phrases, not to give my character consistency, but to show that I have none—everyone is the same, frantically repeating their character most “typical” behaviors lest you—and they—realize that there’s nothing there.”

Now the compulsion to even act out an amusing imitation of a character seems to be gone. “Characters” exist only for a short duration of 4-5 episodes, before they show their “other side.” This logic is usually predicated on the idea that the more radical the shift, the better (in order to show that the idea of stability and consistency in character no longer applies). The loving mother turns out to be the psychotic murderer; or the psychotic killer turns out to be the caring philanthropist (both from Heroes). Meanwhile, on Lost, the scientific rationalist might change places with the a man who places all his belief in irrational faith—and then, after 3 or 4 or 10 episodes, they’ll switch back. Characters exist in a stable form only in order to radically alter themselves at a later date. On 24, Jack Bauer and his colleagues take this to a kind of logical extreme, in which the viewer perceives every character as (as Zizek says of the femme fatale in film noir) a “fan of inconsistent, hysterical masks.” This week, will Jack tell the enemy that nothing will make him betray his country (and then suffer horribly because of his loyalty), or will he betray everything he’s ever known (and suffer horribly, etc.)? It doesn’t matter, since he’ll reverse the procedure the following week.  One of the reasons that I’ve stopped watching Heroes is how relentless it deploys this logic of the inconsistent character: this week’s villain is last week’s hero, and vice-versa, and what passes for a character’s “development” is often just a series of completely arbitrary and radical, almost tectonic, shifts.

Not every show, of course, does this, some preferring to maintain a kind of “romantic realism” to their characters (see The Wire, although even there, there are some of these radical shifts, particularly in McNulty). But I see more and more shows in which this logic is the primary logic of character development. Character development now means “turning a character into his or her opposite in less than 15 minutes and then flipping him or her back in the following episode.”

The trick (in both a positive and negative sense) with these shows is that the character change is presented as a ruse, a deception, or an alternate reality, a shift in the space time continuum. Jack Bauer preserves his consistent and all-too-abstract “love of America” through thick and thin, as he tortures his friends, colleagues, daughter, as he blows up the White House, gives terrorists nuclear codes, you name it—he’s still “jack Bauer” underneath. Just don’t ask what that “Jack Bauer” is, or you might realize you don’t really have much of an idea. If this strikes you as essentially deceptive and dishonest, you’re right—it seems to be the standard postmodern “I don’t believe in this thing any more, but let’s continue to act like we do believe in it—the alternative of its absence is unbearable.

Except that the absence is not, in fact, unbearable, as Mad Men so ably demonstrates. We actually do quite well with characters who are founded on nothing. The capable leader Don Draper may have started life as a pants-wetting private named Dick Whitman (and don’t think for a moment that his transformation from a Dick into a Don is an accident) who steals his superior officer’s identity when a convenient opportunity presents itself. Neither Don nor Dick has the slightest idea who he is, and it is a cause of some anxiety for him. I say “some” anxiety, since he doesn’t work particularly hard to conceal his identity theft, and seems as ready at times to give up his second life as he was to give up his first They’re both pretty miserable, in fact. But like the Antonioni films of identity exchange that Mad Men is based on (The Passenger, L’avventura—released by “Janus Films,” by the way), the viewer doesn’t mind watching characters without character—in fact, they exert a kind of unholy fascination, as does the femme fatale in any halfway decent film noir and quite a few bad ones (see the crazy and crazed Detour, for example).

So, by all means, give me characters without consistency. Just make the honestly nothing, not this pretense of something. Sometimes nothing can be pretty refreshing.