ABSTRACT
Throughout the last decade, the characters of HBO’s legacy shows have become a popular subject of study among television and media scholars. For example, Noël Carroll has investigated viewer engagement with Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), Jason Jacobs has analyzed the philosophy of Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), and Margrethe Bruun Vaage has explored the role of Omar Little (Michael Kenneth Williams) in The Wire (2002–2008). Yet, despite the scholarly fascination with characters from HBO programmes, there have not been any studies that investigate viewer antipathy towards HBO characters at length. In the course of this chapter, using examples from Game of Thrones (2011–) and Girls (2012–), Kroener examines how viewers come to hate television characters, what distinguishes hating a television character from hating characters in other narrative formats, and what function hating a television character fulfils in the viewer’s overall emotional engagement with a television programme. Many of the existing studies on viewer engagement in contemporary television (e.g. the works of Murray Smith, Jason Mittell, and Margrethe Bruun Vaage) investigate why viewers typically engage with antiheroes in a sympathetic manner despite their morally-flawed behaviour. By doing so, these works highlight character traits that elicit sympathy in the viewer. In contrast, Kroener argues that widely despised HBO characters such as Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson, Game of Thrones) and Marnie Michaels (Allison Williams, Girls) lack many, if not all character traits that render antiheroes sympathetic.
