Wives of AMC

What’s the deal with AMC?  I watch three of their scripted shows and I dislike the wives of the main characters in each show.

That question, a Jerry Seinfeld style boggler, has been rolling around in my head constantly for a few days now.  This question has not kept me up at night but it has bothered me while I’ve been awake.  I suffer the wrath of liking good television with both likeable and unlikeable characters.  It’s a problem for me.  I thought that now would be the right time to get down to the core of the issue.

The three shows that are under surveillance right now are The Walking Dead, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad.  Each show has qualities that make me like it.  Each show also has one character, married to the main character, whom I dislike greatly because of their attitude towards those around them.  It’s a common bond between the three shows and something that I felt the need to highlight right here and right now.

In Mad Men, we have Betty Draper.  She is a stay at home wife who watches over the children and is a spoiled brat in her own.  Brat is used because she acts like a child.  Of course, her husband isn’t the greatest moral being in the world.  That doesn’t excuse the fact that she spends all of her time complaining about her husband, her children, her life, and overreacting to any small misstep in what would be the perfect life.  She lashes out in immature ways that negate almost anything that is done against her.  And she makes choices that are completely the wrong way to deal with situations which adds to the distaste that viewers have for the character.

In Breaking Bad, the wife character is Skyler White.  The problems begin when she begins to make her husband’s decisions for him because of what she wants instead of what he wants.  I’m trying not to spoil the plot here and this is very sensitive to what the plot is.  Let’s just say that she’s trying to force him into turning his entire life one way because of how she feels instead of caring about how he cares in the situation.  That starts the distaste for Skyler.  But during season 3 and 4, she comes to the forefront of the show as a giant hypocrite who is intelligent, yet dumb in the stuff that she is doing.  The hypocrisy largely encompasses everything she does which does not allow me, as a viewer, to feel for the character in any way.  Then there is a whole other part of the plot which to talk about would spoil, but she does something with the smallest shred of evidence that left a terrible taste in my mouth.  If you’ve seen the show, you might understand what I’m hinting at.  It was a major part of season 3.

Moving on, we have Lori Grimes in The Walking Dead.  This is a fairly simple character to describe.  She pitted her husband, main character Rick Grimes, against his best friend.  There are reasons that would be filled with spoilers and that’s not how I want to go about this.  The other reason is that she doesn’t know how to watch her child.  Though, to that point, neither does anyone else with them, really.  They don’t know how to watch any of their children.  Anyway, her attitude is what gets me to dislike her as much as I do.

Those three characters are the wives of the main characters of the shows.  Each of them have parts of their personalities that make me dislike them.  Some of it might come from their husbands and the way they interact with their husbands.  Some of it might come from the situations that they are put in.  But a lot of it is in the characters themselves.  I don’t like any of them.  Each of them makes everything about themselves in ways that they don’t need to.  They make problems out of nothing.  This isn’t really getting my point across right now.  I think the three previous paragraphs did.  At least, I hope so.  Or else this whole entry is a waste of space.

As I said, all of these shows air on AMC.  This is a strange phenomena to me.  Most drama shows have to have at least one unlikeable character in order to build tension and the drama.  It seems odd that all three of these shows have the unlikeable wife character.  Why is this the case?

This probably is nothing at all, but I felt like making a mountain out of this molehill.  Do you agree?  Do you disagree?  It’s all up to opinion.  This is how I feel, you might feel differently.