Breaking bad
By 
A few months ago, I semi-binge watched the first four seasons of Breaking Bad, and the first three or so episodes of the last season. I haven’t watched the rest of the final season yet, as I guess I got sort of burned out on the show at that point. (This may be because the fifth season was feeling rather tacked on after the main narrative arcs had been resolved, in a way that reminded me of the final season of The Wire.)
Anyway:
I think there’s something to this, although it should be unnecessary to point out that if you thought Walter White and Tony Soprano were the heroes of their respective dramatic universes, you missed the point.
This all reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to mention, which is that Trump’s status as a convicted felon makes me long for the return of a little bit more bourgeois respectability in our decadent culture — that is, the kind of respectability politics that would reject someone out of hand for high political office simply because he was a convicted felon.
Now I admit there are downsides to that sort of attitude. For example, a very unpleasant feature of Great Expectations are the paroxysms of disgust that Pip goes into when he discovers the money from his secret benefactor is coming from a transported criminal. (Pip is obviously reflecting Dickens’s own attitude in this regard). Magwitch’s money has no connection to his criminal past: it was honestly earned after he was transported, but the thought that it has come from a convicted criminal is too much for Pip to bear.
The longing for bourgeois respectability can certainly go too far, in other words. But it can just as certainly not go far enough, and as a culture we’re very much in the latter rather than the former situation. Trump is a charismatic figure for so many people for reasons that are related to why so many people find Tony Soprano and Walter White and Avon Barksdale charismatic. But as entertaining as charismatic sociopaths can be, admiring them as people is a massive category mistake.
In the context of prestige TV, that category mistake only has aesthetic implications. In the context of presidential politics, the stakes are rather different.