On reaching the age of the TV anti-hero

Meditations from my late 30s

Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

It is a funny thing to turn the age of a TV character you know well. I don’t have as strong a reaction, none at all really, to turning the age of characters in novels I’ve read. Perhaps that’s because, in a novel, time is a strange and amorphous thing. One of the more difficult hidden mechanics every author must learn is how to shuffle around, how to hide within their narrative, time itself, for time is a pesky constraint in a dream of language. With TV characters, however, you can see the lines on their faces.

And you judge them, of course, by the actor’s real age. The fictional Don Draper from Mad Men is supposed to be merely 34 when the show starts, but the real age of the character, how he feels on-screen, the weight of his appearance if you will, his firmly adult nature, is determined by Jon Hamm, who was 36 at the pilot. On the other side of the 30s.

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I recently turned 36 myself. And there is a change to self-conception once you are firmly on that other side.

A curiosity: why is that we follow our TV anti-heroes as they progress down this range of mid-to-late 30s? James Gandolfini was 37 when he started as Tony Soprano, one year away, again right past that midpoint.

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