Once the heroes, ambitious outsiders have become TV villains

Call it the era of the talentless Mr Ripleys

He is a philandering tech baron; she is a preening actor. When they split up, how much of his fortune should she get? The answer to the big question in “War” is: who cares? As a dispatch from the front lines of duelling spouses and divorce lawyers, the glitzy new drama flops. It is, however, a telling snapshot of a different conflict—the class struggle—waged here by a revealing figure: the working-class villain.

Rags-to-riches fables are staples of fiction, from Charles Dickens to “The Great Gatsby” and beyond. Is it possible, these stories ask, to rise above disadvantage and vested interests, and what does it take to do so? The portrayal of the lower-class outsider as a baddie—in “War” and other recent tv shows—is a striking turn in an age-old narrative, which suggests a fatalistic social mood.

The high-powered solicitors in “War” spend lots of time striding portentously in and out of lifts and saying things that only fictional lawyers ever do, such as “See you in fucking court!” One of them, though, is not like the rest. Played by Archie Renaux (pictured), Johnny is a working-class boy who claws his way into a job at one of the swish, brawling law firms. He has also landed a posh, devoted girlfriend. You might expect the show’s verdict to be: good for Johnny!

Instead (spoiler alert) he is a liar and traitor, sneaked into his job by the firm’s hated rivals so he can spy for them. At risk of being rumbled, he incriminates a blameless colleague. When a snarling superior calls him a “jumped-up little twat”, it is hard to argue. He does the dirty on his girlfriend, too.

Speaking of girlfriends: “The Girlfriend”, a daft hit last year, has the same air of justified snootiness. Laura, a high-rolling mother, distrusts her son’s brassy new love interest. Laura thinks her name, Cherry, is déclassé. Cherry claims her dad was an architect (he was a builder) and to have attended a fancy school (she didn’t). She is disappointingly bad at tennis. Is Laura’s condescension out of order? Au contraire. She is entirely vindicated; Cherry is a malignant sociopath.

Meanwhile in “Sirens” (pictured above), another recent hit, two hardscrabble sisters worm their way into a gazillionaire’s New England estate. Is the imperious matriarch secretly a murderer? No. Instead she is heartlessly usurped by one of the sisters; the other is a sex addict. Or consider “Industry”, a multi-series saga in which Harper, a young black woman from a troubled family, penetrates the citadel of high finance by forging her academic credentials. Before long she is insider trading and back-stabbing her friends. (Tom in “Succession” is an upscale version of these interlopers: a middle-class cynic who tramples to the top by betraying his wife.)

This is a departure. In recent, egalitarian decades, storytellers have generally sided with the underdog. So did many of their predecessors: even Victorian novels that satirise social-climbing—such as “Vanity Fair” and “The Way We Live Now”—tend to ridicule the snobs at least as much as the parvenus. “War” and other contemporary dramas are much harsher on their little guys. If “Slumdog Millionaire” were remade now, its hero might actually cheat to win the quiz jackpot; Rocky might take a fall for the mob in the fifth. Today’s upstart characters are heirs to Tom Ripley—Patricia Highsmith’s anti-hero, who prospers through lies, murder and impersonation—only mostly without his talent.

This newly jaundiced view of aspiration reflects a bleak reality of stalling dreams. Rates of social mobility in Britain and America have long trailed those in other rich countries. From a low base, they have on some measures declined in both places. Research across the rich world has found that, for people from modest backgrounds, going to university is a less reliable leg up than it used to be.

So Johnny’s experience in “War”, as he struggles to capitalise on his education, is representative of his generation. Law is presented as a viperous profession, just as, in “Industry”, finance is a snakepit. In “Sirens” all the women are subject to a rich man’s whims. Life in all these stories is harsh and unfair; to join the wealthy, hustling outsiders first have to beat them. You could see all that as a frank reflection of prevailing conditions.

Except that the tone in “War” and “The Girlfriend”, say, often feels less sympathetic to these efforts than judgmental. It isn’t just that the odds are long; these working-class villains don’t deserve to overcome them. In a pessimistic commentary on a stratified era, they keep being told that they don’t belong—and, by and large, they don’t.

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