There’s a lot of chatter that this is the golden age of the anti-hero on TV. A lot of TV shows are picking grey, morally complex, not necessarily good guys as their leading men/women. You’ve got your Tony Sorpanos, your Don Drapers, you Walter Whites, your Reginas, your Rumples. Even cosmic hero types like The Doctor get heavily shaded, questioning their own goodness (AKA: s8 of DW) and even to a much lesser extent Emma Swan’s own brief internal struggle in this arc. You’ve also got characters who are usually absolutely villains in “regualr” narrative being given a good side–like Lucifer on Fox’s new crime show (which is delightfully charming and you all should watch).
Contrast this to–say–the age of the superhero when superheroes were GOOD. Capital G, full stop. Superman in his red and blue emphasizing American superiority and strength. There were moral complexities in his stories, but you’d never call him “gray” necessarily or question his own hero-hood.
I’ve mused on this before…but I think it’s largely because our world is becoming increasingly grey and complex. I don’t know who the villains/bad guys are anymore, and if you’re living in America then take a look at our current election and the insane gulf that separates the two candidates and the overwhelming responses their supporters and naysayers give out. I think TV is trying very hard to capture this moment in time in which nothing is clear and there are no real heroes. Even those traditional heroes–cops, for one–are being shaded in different lights becuse of racial and class and gender issues.
If our society is telling us that there are no heroes and that anyone can be a villain depending on who’s telling the story, then TV is naturally going to reflect that. And that’s okay because TV is a mirror to society and it should be. But the problem is that OUAT doesn’t know to work through those issues. It just makes the heroes into villains at the drop of a hat (like stealing a baby and infecting it with darkness) and turns villains into sympathetic figures without really sitting with what that actually means.
There’s a great piece by I think the Hulk Critic once who was musing on why movie goers like Loki more than Thor and it came down to that: people respond to antiheroes more because cut and dry heroes don’t exist in our world. So they always fall flat because you can’t flesh out something that isn’t real outside of media.
This is my way of actually rationalizing some of OUAT treatment of their heroes and villains and why they can’t seem to make their non-villains complex or interesting and why the writers quickly bore of them and then in several cases chop them out entirely.