I’m not even going to link the stupid list, because it really made me mad. But you can find it if you haven’t seen it yourself: the “100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century.” Obviously, any list like that is going to be incredibly subjective, and there was a lot of discussion about shows that were missing or underrated by the list. But I didn’t see many people having the same level of visceral negative reaction that I had when I realized just how many of those shows I found aggressively counter to my tastes. It was a moment where I realized just how different I was from a mainstream media consumer. Sure, there were some choices I did agree with – Andor, Squid Game, The Good Place, to name the most noteworthy – but just so many shows that I despised were given top ranks. And I have decided it’s time for me to articulate why I feel the way I do about those shows.

Now, I have been through plenty of times in my life where I eschewed the mainstream on purpose. In my younger years, that’s probably how I would have explained this away. But I’m past that…I hope? I feel like I have gotten to the point where popularity is neither a pull nor a push for me, and I can just enjoy things regardless of prevailing opinions. Yet my tastes have failed to align with the mainstream in any meaningful way. Through multiple conversations and some introspective searching, I think I have identified the key things I am looking for that the typical prestige drama doesn’t give me.

Step 1 – Engage My Imagination

For a long time, I was worried that my attachments to genre fiction and children’s media had conditioned me so that I couldn’t “grow up” and enjoy media that most people considered “adult.” But as I have reached an age that I can (I feel) legitimately call old, I’ve become a lot more cynical about people who tell me that things like Mad Men or The Sopranos or The Wire are grown-up dramas for adults. Shows like these are as much about fantasy, escapism, and wish fulfillment as anything that I enjoy. The difference is that they hide behind a veneer of realism that allows people to consider them serious works of literature in ways that media for children isn’t. And as a result, many adults unfortunately view this realism as a necessary element for “grown-up” media.

The thing is, this impulse is not new. There was a time in western culture when “reading novels” was scorned as unserious, and many of the works we canonize as cultural touchstones were considered frivolous at some point. People have long tried to separate media into serious and unserious so that they can see themselves as serious and educated. But this desire is based in an insecurity of identity, an imposter’s syndrome of adulthood. I have realized that my years as an intentional iconoclast did serve to free me from this insecurity. I am not afraid to enjoy things others may consider unserious, and this opens me up to a much wider selection.

Why, then, isn’t The Wire remotely interesting to me? It’s still good, right? Sure, and while I might criticize those who look down on other people for their tastes, I would never try to take away someone else’s sincere enjoyment. But since I still have so many non-realistic choices available to me, I have found that I enjoy shows more the more my imagination is engaged.

The closer a setting gets to the here and now, the less likely I am to be interested. I find it hard to care about corporate politics or narco-drama or a wealthy family’s internal strife. I don’t feel pulled into those worlds because there’s so little I don’t already know about them. No matter how well-written or well-acted characters are, I get bored quickly if they’re acting in front of the psychic equivalent of a blank white wall, and that’s how I see “realistic” settings. (Note that historical dramas like Peaky Blinders and Shogun get a bit more leeway from me because they exist at greater distance from my own experiences.) And this is probably the clearest notion that I can find that my preferences may be tied to my neurodivergence.

Step 2 – Give Me Characters I Like

This is one of those complaints that many people have in some form or another; we all crave characters that are relatable or enjoyable or inspiring. For me, I have sometimes experienced a near-visceral sense of betrayal when a character I find uninteresting gets narrative priority over characters I like. An example of media that has done this is Battlestar Galactica, which repeatedly tortured, abused, and eventually killed off characters like Dee and Cally while keeping around and even redeeming the abusive asshole Colonel Tigh and the supremely uninteresting Gaius Baltar. (BSG could be a deep dive all itself in terms of how the things I like and dislike are in opposition to both the creators and popular opinion.)

And it’s not that I want all my characters to be bright and cheery or positive and inspiring. The Good Place succeeds because every character is deeply flawed in different ways. But they’re not caricatures. They’re not flat. They grow and change, and they come to understand themselves. Tigh and Baltar, by contrast, are rewarded with story centering and disproportionate success despite never really changing or growing. The alcoholic abuser Tigh is rewarded with leadership and an unkillable wife (spoilers, I guess). The massively narcissistic Baltar is rewarded with a cult following that sees him as a messiah. The writers seem to revel in the trashiness of such characters in ways that just put me off.

I’m never a fan of series that fill my eyeballs with despicable characters a la Breaking Bad, but I am more directly upset when I feel like a series has a mix of characters I like and ones I dislike and gradually sidelines all the ones I like while elevating the ones I don’t. Game of Thrones has this problem because the books have that problem. I fundamentally disagree with Martin about who is interesting, so I have reached a point where I no longer care if the books ever finish and I no longer care what happens to any of the spinoffs. And that series angers me more than something like Succession because I never even considered caring about Succession.

But ultimately, the thing that drives me away the fastest is what I see as a lack of real humanity. And this is where genre fiction actually has an unexpected advantage. I like comedy that puts real people into absurd situations (like The Good Place) as opposed to absurd people into real situations (like Seinfeld). And in many ways I feel the same about drama. A lot of narco-fiction, police procedurals, and political dramas create heightened situations using more extreme characters. Because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have conflict. But when a setting is unrealistic, it becomes more important for the characters to behave in more human and relatable ways. The characters, not the setting, become the anchor for the audience, so they need to be written in a way that favors that.

Step 3 – Tell a Story

I tend to be much less interested in procedural series. I crave an overarching plot, a metastory, or a clear linear narrative. The closest thing to a procedural that sits firmly in my top 5 is Leverage, and that is definitely a non-standard example. (It could be taken as an example of a situation where the characters are SO good that they compensate for the other two aspects, but there’s more to it than that.) In general, though, I need a big story. But also, I need a coherent story that demonstrates a certain amount of planning and structure. Otherwise I find myself losing interest pretty quickly.

So many series I might otherwise enjoy fall apart in this respect. Usually, this seems to be a result of early episodes writing checks that the conclusion can never cash, either because of a Mystery Box approach or because the writers are just not as clever as they think they are. The German time-bending series, Dark, is a prime example of this, and I have ranted about it (and BSG) before. Now, it’s entirely possible that some of the quickly-cancelled series I loved, like The Peripheral and Dark Crystal, Age of Resistance, would likewise have failed to stick the landing. Sadly, we shall never know.

But, you may be thinking, Breaking Bad tells a story! Mad Men tells a story! Succession tells a story! And yes they do, in the sense of having a narrative, but to a large extent it is a difference of a character-driven or even premise-driven narrative vs a plot-oriented story. The latter is what I prefer. One way to think about it is this: if the characters and setting persisted, could you do another season? If yes, then it is not a single cohesive story in the way that I want. A narrative can continue indefinitely; a story has an ending.

Checking the Boxes

Hopefully it’s clear that these are very much my personal preferences. I know that many people might agree with my dislike of despicable characters, but fewer people are likely to share my strong preference against realism. These criteria are not going to be useful to most people. Ultimately, this is one of those articles that I can show people who want to recommend things to me as kind of a “read this first.” And while I can’t necessarily answer the question posed in the title, I am definitely looking at this list and realizing it’s a “guide to Eric’s brain” in many ways. So…maybe?

At best, the generalizable information here is that there is nothing inherently more “adult” about realistic prestige dramas. Just because something may be accessible to younger audiences does not mean that enjoying it is a sign of immaturity. Maybe you can use this as a framework to examine your own tastes. Maybe there is something that you’ve tried to enjoy and just couldn’t, and now you can try to articulate why.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to continue my current rewatch of Babylon 5.