It is hard to see many people empathizing with Mark when he routinely makes such terrible decisions. You want him to win, but even hearing his rationalizations -some of his actions are insane.
I think this is an important point - it's very easy to find oneself slipping into the protagonists' viewpoints, in a lot of media the protagonist is 'good', we see the story unfold from their viewpoint, then sympathise and empathise with them, even when they make mistakes, their motivations were pure, and what’s unfolding isn’t due to problems with them exactly.
But in shows like this, in quite a lot of sitcoms with more cringey aspects, the protagonist is not necessarily a good person and they are often undone by their own pettiness, selfishness etc. Certainly in UK comedy anyway. Look at Fawlty Towers, The Office... Blackadder to a certain extent.
So when the article says this -
> It’s natural when experiencing any story to identify and sympathize with the protagonist.
Yes and no - this is something that creators can play with and may make deliberately jarring. See 'Lolita' for an extreme example. The article even brings up Walter White, saying - "we are drawn to root for the primary subject of the story". If you're still rooting for Walter by the end of Breaking Bad... were we watching the same show?
By that point I was hoping Jessie got out of it all alive, because while he was clearly a dumbass with questionable morals, nobody deserved what he was going through, and the abuse he'd put up with at the hands of Walt among others.
Walt was still fascinating to watch and maybe I approved of or disliked some of his individual actions, and we definitely had deep insight to his character by then, but I don't think I'd describe myself as rooting for him or experiencing his story in a particularly sympathetic way. I wasn't experiencing the story through him by then as I might have been early on, if that makes sense.
Hopefully this came across but I'm definitely not always rooting for either Tony Sorprano or Walter White.
Like you say, you experience the story through these dubious characters. Especially on multiple watch throughs you can really come to despise them but the series are so well made that the writers can bring you round multiple times.
There's something about the cognative disonence of how most people experience life there.
I was once told that most people that do bad things just convince themselves that what they're doing is actually OK.
So someone that steals from cars blames the car's owner for leaving it unlocked. That rings true for me. They're not sociopaths, they're bending their reality to justify their actions.
That's obvious criminality but I think that almost everyone is doing something like that to some extent.
For example, just look at the popularity of fast fashion that's almost certainly made with slave labour. At this point in time I don't think anyone buying from Shien[1] or Temu[2] could be in any doubt. They must know, they just don't care. They're still just everyday people.
I wrote a response to this many times, you write some good points. I like how you can keep disconnected and non judgemental while somehow making it appear that both ordering from Temu and grand theft auto are similarly bad.
Ah, I see the confusion. I think you've missed the word "from" there, as in some item taken from a car not the car itself.
Where I live using the words Grand Theft Auto, with that capitalisation, implies the video game of the same name. We don't have the crime of the same name (we call it Taking without Consent).
Since there's been quite a bit in the news about video game censorship, including GTA, I mistook your comment as trying to change the topic to that. My appologies.
Seinfeld also dipped into this, IIRC. it was one of the reasons the series finale ended up w/ all of the main characters in jail and having all of their terrible behavior called out.
