Look at the characters that are the stars of some of the most popular TV shows over the last dozen years.  The heroes aren’t the good guys anymore — they’re the bad guys.

• Dexter (“Dexter”) – Serial killer
• Vic Mackey (“The Shield”) – A really bad cop & murderer
• Tony Soprano (“The Sopranos”) – Mob capo, murderer, serial philanderer, you name it
• Tommy Gavin (“Rescue Me”) – Alcoholic, schizophrenic, serial philanderer, constantly assaulting people, homophobic, sexist, racist
• Walter White (“Breaking Bad”) – Drug dealer
• Nancy Botwin (“Weeds”) – Drug dealer

If you look within the motivation of each of these “bad guys”, you see that each one of them doesn’t necessarily want to be a bad guy, but that it was an easy road to take to get them out of their problems & deliver themselves to the place they want to be.

If you look even deeper within each show, virtually every one was created by or starred an actor who was a child of a Baby Boomer, or otherwise born in the 1st half of “Generation X”, i.e., 1963 to 1973.  You can probably blame sanctimonious Baby Boomers for creating these kids and endowing them with their own self-indulging personalities & entitlement disorders.

Look at how the same demographic & their kids eat up this type of character.  They see these characters & their situations in themselves, and they feel that it’s OK to skirt the law, hurt others and generally dispose of people like yesterday’s trash SO LONG AS it helps them get what they want.  Scruples & integrity are not found in Generation X’s dictionary, and they’ve passed that mentality down to the latest generation of adults, Millennials, who grew up having all the latest gadgets & the instant gratification of microwaves, cell/smartphones, the internet, etc.

Even the so-called good guys have massive flaws in their character.  Look at Dr. House & a host of shows with (mostly) good guys who have a lot of “issues”.  People are so soft nowadays that they can’t even say the word “problem”, much less deal with them.

Don’t forget that Boomers started this fringe behavior by worshiping their own anti-heroes long before these shows came about, like James Dean, Marlon Brando, the TV show “Dallas”, the Godless music called Disco, the Me Decade of the 70’s, protesting, drug use, etc.

Yes, the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree, assuming it ever falls & instead decides to stay attached to the limbs — more adult kids are living at home with their parents than ever.