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Can the serial killer on “Wicked City” work as a main character on a network show?

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Wicked City (2015) is not the first network show to feature a serial killer, even though many people think that serial killers are more properly the domain of premium cable. However, since the rise of the anti-hero in the form of characters like Tony Soprano and Walter White and the so-called Third Golden Age of Television, these dark and damaged individuals have become more and more common on network programming. On TV Guide’s list of the “Scariest TV and Movie Serial Killers”—a list that included not one but two Hannibal Lecters, both the The Silence of the Lambs (1991) version and the NBC Hannibal (2013) version—the number of TV serial killers outnumbered the number from feature films.

Granted most of those are either on cable, like those on Bates Motel (2013) or American Horror Story: Asylum (2012), or guest characters on shows like The Mentalist (2008) or Bones (2005). Even so, some of the scariest, creepiest killers are on one of the major broadcast networks: NBC aired the recently cancelled Hannibal and the short-lived Aquarius (2105), clearly demonstrating there is room on broadcast for a serial killer.

What makes Wicked City’s Kent Grainger different is less that he is on a network and more which network he is on. In recent memory, ABC has made a name for itself with its TGIT Shonda Rhimes’ dramas—a male serial killer preying on young women is a marked departure from Grey’s Anatomy (2005) and Scandal (2012). The anthology series was moved up to an October premiere after the network pulled Of Kings and Prophets (2015). Paul Lee, the president of ABC Entertainment, explained that Wicked City was “our highest testing pilot of the year with millennials.”