‘Imperfect Women’ is a limited series on Apple TV that concluded in April of 2026. It revolves around three women who are supposed to be best friends, but when one of them is murdered, the facade of their friendship falls apart. As the murder mystery unfolds, we find they’ve been sleeping with each other’s husbands, or fantasizing about sleeping with each other’s husbands, and lying about it to each other. First, the dead woman’s husband is the main suspect and then the best friend’s husband becomes the main suspect. The viewer comes to see just how imperfect the women are through flashbacks. We find that every character is an antagonistic person with few if any redeeming qualities. It’s almost bad television, and then again it’s almost good television.

But this isn’t really a review of ‘Imperfect Women’ so much as it’s a review of an emerging trend in television where all of the people in a show are antagonists. This doesn’t mean that the characters are people we love to hate — where the drama unfolds to reveal something about ourselves. It’s more like there’s a lingering annoyance while watching the story unfold where the audience is left asking why we are watching what might best be called imperfect drama.

How to define ‘Imperfect Drama’?

In an Imperfect Drama, the traditional ethical compass isn’t just broken — it never existed. The rejection of the hero’s journey creates a certain discomfort for the audience. It’s not just a character we love to hate, it’s a character we thought we were supposed to like but then didn’t. There’s no place to turn because the narrative has no heroes or protagonists, there’s only antagonists.

In traditional screenwriting for television and movies, there are protagonists or hero characters, and there are antagonists that provoke the hero. As genres evolved, something called the antihero arose, which is a protagonist that isn’t necessarily a good person but the audience still identified with them — within the realm of their lives the audience still rooted for them to succeed. Now there’s an emerging trend where all the characters have become antagonists with no redeeming qualities. So instead of building up to points in the story where the lead character does something heroic within the context of their situation, it seems like now these antagonistic characters do exactly the wrong thing.

What happens to the viewer when watching an imperfect drama that has zero true protagonists? There’s no “good guy” to root for to ground the audience. Every character operates from a place of selfishness or even malice. The plot is driven by the friction between competing agendas, a war of wills. There’s no-one to save the day, only people who navigate the broken circumstances the best. The story becomes a cynical look at the imperfect nature of humanity, stripping away the inherent likability usually reserved for main characters. The viewer is forced into being a detached observer or even an uneasy accomplice. If everyone is a villain, the story stops being about justice and starts being about survival and consequence in an unfair world.

In an Imperfect Drama, the viewer is left wondering why a hero never arrived, and they wait to see who is left standing when the dust settles. This is different than following an anti-hero character where the viewer sees their redeeming qualities and ultimately is left with a better understanding of the hero’s journey. In this emerging imperfect drama trend where all the characters are antagonists, there’s no sense of the heroic. If someone is watching this and they don’t understand heroic concepts to begin with, will they think that being malicious is heroic?

The mindset behind ‘Imperfect Drama’?

What is the Hollywood mindset behind creating imperfect drama with no heroic characters? Is it just part of a natural evolution? There were protagonists who were good people always trying to do the right thing, then there were antiheroes or protagonists who might be bad people but the viewer understood why they did the bad things. Now there is the antagonist non-hero who is a bad person who does the wrong thing and doesn’t feel redeemable.

Or perhaps it’s something different than that. Maybe it’s more of a confession from the creator of the kinds of lifestyles that they’re caught up in, and the kinds of things that they’re doing in their own life. The writers are sharing the ‘ick’ of their lives in a kind of desire to get these things off their chest and maybe even to drag down an audience. It’s a cautionary tale telling us not to fall into the life that they live and the people around them have.

Unfortunately, the most probable explanation is that the writers and producers are just off the mark in understanding the audience. They probably think that they’re creating antagonistic drama as a cautionary tale, as a morality play. It’s seen as a story that the audience will take to heart as they bounce it off their own knowledge of what a perfect drama should be. But this is misguided. In America especially, arts education is gone and people grew up watching reality TV. They look at television as telling them what kinds of people they should aspire to become. The characters on their screen are a blueprint for their life rather than a story that they’re supposed to take into consideration against their knowledge of the art of drama.

We live in an imperfect world where many people in the spotlight antagonize us. The message in all of this is that the way to get into the spotlight and have a life worth living is to embrace the traits we see in the imperfect drama coming to us through our screens. Hurt and play others into submission before they do unto us. It’s a cynical way of looking at the world, and it sullies the reason people turn to arts and drama in the first place. But maybe we must admit, it’s also an accurate portrayal of the times in which we live.