How does the evolution of the way we learn to see “bad guys” evolve as we grow older? That was the interesting question at the heart of a story from the New York Magazine this past weekend. It’s a question I recall thinking about when my kids were younger and there was a moment when we saw a character with a Russian accent on a show and my son immediately assumed he was the bad guy (which he wasn’t). I realized that in many of the shows he had seen, the bad guys did indeed have some sort of menacing Eastern European accent.
Beyond accents or stereotypes, the way bad guys are either rehabilitated (in Pre-K shows) or roundly defeated and exiled (or killed) in programs aimed at older audiences does demonstrate a fascinating shift in how we learn about morality and right and wrong.
This narrative formula will be familiar to almost anyone who cares for a prekindergarten television viewer. Somebody does something antisocial. The heroes get the call. Action unfolds. The villain, it emerges, did what he did for sympathetic reasons, in childlike ignorance of the harm it would cause. The heroes deliver a stern but kind admonishment and a concise moral lesson. The villain understands and apologizes. Everything is mended and at peace.
This is a striking change from broadcast and even cable TV, which featured a much more limited number of shows made for this audience. The child-friendly superhero shows they did offer, like “Batman: The Animated Series” or “Power Rangers,” were aimed at a slightly older crowd — and their villains had little motivation beyond a sick desire to subjugate all of humanity, or steal big cloth bags of cash, or wreak havoc for havoc’s sake. Those villains were either incarcerated or, occasionally, blown up; that was what you did with Bad Guys.
The point the article makes is that we do lose something in these adult themed shows that depict evil doers as simply choosing the so-called dark side because they are motivated by profit or power or simply just a need to bring chaos as a way to disrupt the world’s order. These shows, though more complex, may indeed “manage less insight into the nature of wrongdoing than the average preschooler is exposed to.”