"In 'Breaking Bad,' Hal shouldn't have turned in Walter. And Skyler just didn't care. There was no family sticking with family."
Essentially that's what my Mexican-American friends observed when we were deconstructing television's anti-heroes. What they focused on was the lack of what conservatives call "family values." I hadn't ever seen that angle.
But they were right. A meme running through most of the anti-hero programming is raw selfishness or, as with Hal, allegiance to abstract concepts such as law enforcement. And isn't that what does them in.
Had Don Draper on "Mad Men" cared more about Betty and the three children, he might not have descended into drunkeness and lost his job.
Tony Soprano on "The Sopranos" gives his daughter Meadow the SUV he grabbed from her boyfriend's father, a hopeless gambler. He wanted to "teach her a lesson." Tony, just like Carmella, is clueless about what being a family is about.
For the all-important campaigns in 2016, the GOP can play with this meme, showing clips of isolation and indifference from those iconic shows. That can resonate, more than wholesome looking chior boy types preaching about abstractions.