Intimacy With Criminals Becomes Moral Permission

Vincent Pastore, who played Salvatore "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero on The Sopranos, died at 80—the hinge on which television's entire framework for sympathizing with criminals would turn.

The Sopranos didn't invent the morally compromised protagonist. What it established was something narrower and more durable. The idea was that a criminal's internal life, his therapy sessions, his small humiliations and family resentments, functioned as moral credit.

Watch Tony Soprano struggle with his mother. Hear him articulate his rage to Dr. Melfi—and the show didn't ask you to forgive his violence so much as it offered you the neurotic texture of his consciousness as aesthetic compensation for it. This became the template.

Breaking Bad followed the formula precisely. Walter White's mediocrity, his wounded pride, his calculation of ratios between humiliation and chemistry—these became the machinery of viewer investment. The Wire borrowed something adjacent. The idea was that understanding a system's logic from the inside was itself a kind of moral sophistication. Ambiguity rebranded as depth.

Television is a medium built on duration and intimacy—you spend ten hours inside someone's head. That time investment creates identification by default. The formula hijacks that intimacy by using the criminal as protagonist, therapy or monologue as the vehicle for interiority. Violence as the punctuation on his psychology. You don't forgive the violence because it's justified. You forgive it because you've inhabited his perspective so thoroughly that his justifications begin to feel like evidence.

This matters because the same structure now appears everywhere a complicated character needs rapid audience buy-in. The Uber executive who cut corners. The researcher who fabricated data for a reason she can articulate. The politician whose ruthlessness comes with a sympathetic backstory. We live now in an era where access to someone's reasoning is treated as equivalent to understanding.