A Decade Ago, Low Winter Sun Pushed Prestige TV Too Far

"I'm not a bad person." That line, spoken with a soft grumble by Mark Strong, appeared in every trailer and TV spot for Low Winter Sun in the summer of 2013. With the final episodes of its blockbuster crime drama Breaking Bad looming, AMC was looking to launch its next dark, antiheroic drama. Just like Walter White, Strong's character was clearly a bad person: Observe as he took a swig from a bottle of brown liquor and then submerged a man’s head in the sink of a restaurant kitchen. Low Winter Sun, AMC seemed to promise, was about to become the next great TV show where bad men do bad things and sometimes pretend they're good men doing bad things.

Low Winter Sun only lasted one season. Just 10 grim, dimly lit episodes. But it was pretty much dead on arrival, called out by critics for being trite and shunned by AMC viewers who clearly didn't see enough of that Breaking Bad spark in the show. It was the most obvious sign yet that AMC would have trouble replicating the success of its three biggest shows (Mad Men and The Walking Dead being the other two). But beyond AMC, Low Winter Sun marked the nadir for prestige TV as a genre by being the most cliche-ridden version of the dark, nihilistic anti-hero drama that had dominated the realm of critically acclaimed TV.

The litany of shows that preceded Low Winter Sun and made up the male-skewing backbone of prestige TV in the aughts could double as a list of some of the greatest TV shows of all time: The Sopranos, The Shield, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad. Even second-tier shows like Sons of Anarchy and Boardwalk Empire hewed closely to the tenets of the genre: male antiheroes, the ruthless compromises they make to advance, the thin line between cop and criminal. (Mad Men was more of an outlier, except for the fact that Don Draper was absolutely the white-collar version of all of these hopelessly broken "difficult men.")

Adapted from a British miniseries by Chris Mundy, Low Winter Sun paired Mark Strong's morally ambiguous cop with Lennie James' decidedly more villainous cop and set them off to mix it up with the criminal underworld and Internal Affairs departments in Detroit. The promos promised a noir thriller about a man "discovering where his moral compass lies," set against the "broken beauty" of a Detroit that had been so recently been battered by economic disaster. By 2013, though, cultural observers were already catching on to the trend of "ruin porn," where depictions of Detroit's hollowed-out urban landscape were beginning to come across as exploitative rather than explicative. Similarly, Low Winter Sun's doubling down on prestige TV's grim cliches was seen as cheap rather than artful.

The reviews were eager to point out these rapidly aging tropes. Alessandra Stanley's review in the New York Times described the series as "so clotted with bleak cityscapes, shadowy interiors and brooding portent that the narrative sags under the weight of all that mood-setting." Esquire's Stephen Marche called the show a "knockoff" and cited the moment in the opening credits featuring "a dog with a rat in its mouth, which is pretty much the happiest moment in the whole show. At least the dog is winning." Slate's Willa Paskin presented a checklist of all the cliches Low Winter Sun indulged in, including an antihero dealing with violence and moral ambiguity, depictions of sexual violence, the stylistic debts owed to Mad Men and Martin Scorsese, and the literal darkness in the scenes (an element cited in many negative reviews). By the show's second episode, ratings had dropped by half, the first signal that viewers, and not just critics, were turned off.

But perhaps the most savage blow to Low Winter Sun's place in TV history was delivered by one of AMC's network rivals. CBS's The Good Wife opened a March 2014 episode with scenes from a TV show that Alicia Florrick and her daughter were watching titled Darkness at Noon. One look at the show's bald, conflicted protagonist cop and it was clear exactly which show was being skewered. Suspects were shoved up against chain-link fences. Characters spoke in non sequitur dialogue about how some lines should not be crossed ("there are lines, and there are lines"). Alicia's daughter explained the plot as "he shot the other guy, now they're blaming the bald guy, now she's in trouble." If even the network shows were viciously dunking on AMC, Low Winter Sun was obviously a major flop.

Low Winter Sun didn't mark the end of antiheroes on TV nor the preponderance of prestige dramas competing for plaudits and awards. But it marked the moment that the veil was lifted for TV fans and critics, and those elements came under increased scrutiny: the nihilism, the violence (especially towards women), the unrelenting grim tone. As Matt Zoller Seitz put it in his review for Vulture, "If any further evidence were needed that the rugged, anti-heroic white-dude drama is played out, [Low Winter Sun] could be Exhibit A." In the years that followed, grim and gritty antihero shows were shown less deference. One of the exceptions, True Detective — which returns for a fourth season on January 14th — burned brightly for a moment, then took its lumps in its second season, before evolving into its current incarnation. Shows like Bloodline and Ozark have won Emmys but were also subject to jabs about taglines ("We're not bad people, we just did a bad thing") and excessively blue color filters.

These days, prestige TV is more of a designation than genre, encompassing white-collar inheritance farce, historical costume drama, high-production genre fare, satire of the rich on vacation. Elements of the antihero drama still exist within a lot of these shows. But so does AMC's cautionary tale, warning TV creators not to steer too heavily into prestige trendiness. No one wants to fly too close to the Low Winter Sun.

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.