“Can We Make the Villain a White Guy?”
8th July 2026
Drama requires uncertainty.
But there is a creeping challenge across our film and television dramaturgy; progressive ideology, in which we’re told that certain groups are inherently more oppressed, and thus more moral than others.
This sits uneasily with dramatic storytelling, particularly in mixed-race casts, for a simple reason:
Unlike drama, which requires uncertainty, progressive ideology requires moral certainty based around people’s identities.
We all know the moral totem pole that progressive ideology has constructed, with cis white hetero able bodied men at the bottom, and a trans black disabled woman at the top.
,,,
I once attended a lecture by a brilliant black professor on the power of the Wire, one of the most diverse shows in history at the time. She said that the great achievement of the Wire was that there was a broad range of black characters, so no one character carried the moral weight of representing blackness.