Congruous Incongruities? Scoring the Complexities of the Antihero in Peak TV

Despite some recent decline, a prevalence of male antihero protagonists was a defining trend of contemporary peak TV and preceded an increase in complex female characters also labelled as antiheroes/anti-heroine. Cognitive media theorists have identified various strategies aiming to promote engagement with, and empathetic response to, these characters despite their morally contentious behaviour. However, the soundtrack has received limited focus in such discussions despite evidence that it can encourage character identification and audience moral judgement, and some analyses of the musical construction of individual TV antiheroes. Focusing on the murderous protagonists of Dexter and Killing Eve, whilst citing examples of antiheroes in a broader sense from series like House of Cards and The Wire, this chapter contends that the idea of incongruence can productively characterize the sonic construction of the TV antihero. Conceiving incongruence as a lack of shared properties in the audiovisual relationship facilitates identification of several recurrent scoring strategies and perceptual accounts for how these might influence character engagement. In addition to moments where foregrounded music inflects presentation of characters’ dubious acts, incongruent scoring devices include: intradomain incongruities where stylistically or emotively contrasting cues reflect differing facets of the antiheroes and their relationship with their environments; and aesthetic incongruities (between ideological stereotypes and music’s use in various contexts) as the antiheroes directly engage with music. Such devices complement and characterize a series’ wider scoring strategy and may invite attention or emphasize textual artifice. However, despite the differences they present, these devices also demonstrate congruence with other elements of the multidimensional narrative and characters, emphasizing the complexity of the antihero, their music, and processes of engaging with both.