Why Do We Love Anti-Heroes Like The Gentlemen's Eddie Horniman?

I just finished The Gentlemen season two, and I still haven't fully recovered. If you've watched it too, you already know exactly why it's all anyone's talking about right now. We love anti-heroes like Eddie Horniman because watching a flawed, morally ambiguous character lets us safely explore impulses and instincts we'd never act on in real life, without the guilt, the risk, or the consequences that would come with actually doing it ourselves.

Video embed placeholder, Jack to insert final video URL

Loving a Criminal on Screen Isn't a Character Flaw

Eddie starts the show as a war hero who inherits a country estate. By season two he's running a criminal empire across two continents, and reviewers keep landing on the same comparison: this is Eddie's Breaking Bad moment, a good man's transformation into someone he doesn't recognise. The bit everyone's actually talking about isn't the crime, it's watching him claw his way out of situations that should have finished him. That's not you being a bit dark. Watching someone break rules you'd never break yourself is one of the oldest, safest ways your mind gets to explore the parts of you that don't get much daylight.

Your Brain Runs a Different Rulebook for Anti-Heroes

A 2013 Journal of Communication study by Shafer and Raney found something that upends how we usually think enjoyment works. With a traditional hero, we like them because we've judged their actions as good. With an anti-hero, that order breaks down. The researchers found moral judgment barely predicts how much we enjoy watching someone like Eddie. What predicts it instead is whether the story gives us permission to look past what he's doing, a process psychologists call moral disengagement (Shafer & Raney, 2013, DOI: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01682.x).

You Don't Have to Like Eddie to Be Hooked on Him

A study of 313 viewers backs this up. Morally ambiguous characters were liked less than straightforwardly good ones, but the research found they were just as gripping, just as suspenseful, and just as enjoyable to watch, sometimes more so (Krakowiak & Oliver, 2012, DOI: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01618.x). Liking someone and loving to watch them are not the same thing, and once you separate those two, the whole appeal of a show like this makes a lot more sense.

You Like Him First, Then Your Brain Justifies It

Research on how we judge fictional characters found something almost backwards: we often decide we like someone before we've judged whether their actions are right, and then we bend the moral judgment to fit the liking, not the other way round (Lee & Shapiro, 2014, DOI: 10.1111/comt.12031). So when Eddie does something genuinely awful and you catch yourself thinking, well, but, that's not a lapse in your morals. It's how narrative psychology says most of us are wired to watch.

The Real Reason He's More Relatable After a Rough Week

There's a study that found something worth sitting with. When people were reminded of their own flaws before reading a story, they responded more warmly to a morally ambiguous character than to a straightforwardly bad one, more warmly than people who hadn't just been thinking about their own mistakes (Krakowiak & Tsay-Vogel, 2014, DOI: 10.1111/hcre.12050). Seeing your own imperfection reflected back, safely, in someone else, seems to be part of the pull.

What This Says About You (and When It's Worth a Second Look)

None of this means you should worry about loving a good gangster story, and it definitely doesn't mean something's wrong with you for wanting Eddie to win even when he's doing terrible things. It means your brain is doing exactly what healthy brains do with fiction: trying on a version of yourself you'd never actually become, from a completely safe distance. The only time it's worth a second look is if the pull to escape into someone else's chaos starts crowding out dealing with your own.

Therapy in London