Abstract By accommodating the antihero programs in the context of aesthetic cognitivism on the one hand and philosophical theorizing about evil on the other, I explore insights—ethical goods, as Carl Plantinga refers to them—that these works give us into social and phenomenological aspects of evil, and I argue that they also serve as a philosophical probing of immorality and wickedness. I claim that antihero program is a subgenre of crime fiction and that it continues crime fiction's traditional interest in evil individuals and immoral actions, and I strengthen this view by relying on contemporary research in criminology. My account is based on analysis of the aesthetic features of these works, on the particular aspects of viewers’ long-term commitment to serialized fiction and the affective relations they develop for the characters, most notably their cognitive interest in the stories and the effective ties for the characters.
Iris Vidmar Jovanović (Sun,) studied this question.