ABOVE THE LAW

JOY PRESS

Hollywood film noir is brought to life by today's Emmy nominees, whose characters tread the line between good and bad

Television history overflows with lawmakers and lawbreakers, sheriffs and outlaws, cops and criminals. In the first halfcentury of the medium, characters' moral standings were as black-and-white as the TV sets that contained them. Heroes and villains were easily sorted, their motives clear and unyielding. But 21st-century prestige dramas and comedies trained us to identify with antiheroes, to crave complex evocations of human experience. The old categories have been corroded, until all that's left is a murky gray area, which today's Emmy nominees have exhibited. Jeff Daniels is nominated for playing men on both ends of the legal spectrum: an F.B.I. agent who warns about al-Qaeda in Hulu's The Looming Tower, and an outlaw in Netflix's Western Godless. Neither character fits the old good/bad dichotomies. The twisted villain nurtures an orphan, while the lawman, as Daniels points out, "has a wife, a family, and two mistresses, and a bull-in-a-china-shop approach to bureaucracy and diplomacy. This is your hero?" Some of the "outlaws" this season have gone rogue as a form of political resistance, as in Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale. Others, as in Showtime's comedy Shameless, have followed perilous paths shaped by poverty or substance abuse. And then there's Ed Harris's Man in Black of HBO's Westworld, who created his own alternative universe in which the limits of good and evil are put to the test. Edie Falco, who played defense lawyer Leslie Abramson in NBC's Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders, says she's grateful to "have been plopped down in the industry" during an era that celebrates beautifully flawed characters. "People are wanting to see that... rather than an ideal."

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