Mr. Beta

I'm on record as not liking the traditional alpha male much. To me, these are the guys in eighties romances who hate all women except for the heroine, and she has to prove herself worthy. But now we're hearing about beta males, and you'd think I'd really like them. But no. I must confess, they don't do it for me either.

Wallander

I say this after having watched one and a half seasons of Wallander, probably the ultimate beta male show. Wallander is based on several best-selling mysteries written by the Swedish novelist Henning Mankell about a Swedish cop named Kurt Wallander. Possibly because of his nationality, Wallander suffers from a terminal case of angst. He's continually being reminded of the nastiness of mankind, particularly wealthy Swedish mankind. But what really got to me was Wallander's breakdown, which came early in the second season. He was pursuing a nasty neo-Nazi who had burned down a migrant worker camp along with shotgunning an innocent immigrant. When Kurt finally caught up with him, the neo-Nazi started to turn the shotgun on him. So Kurt shot him. Fatally.

In any other cop show, that would probably be it. Clearly self-defense. Clearly somebody whose death isn't exactly a loss to society. But not Wallander. Kurt goes into a tailspin. He turns in his badge and disappears for six months. When he returns, he's a broken man.

Now you'd think, given my dislike of alphas, that I'd be one of Kurt Wallander's biggest fans. I mean, here's a cop who's so sensitive that killing somebody, even a neo-Nazi who's trying to kill him, throws him into a clinical depression. If that ain't beta, I don't know what is. But perversely enough, that episode was enough to convince me I didn't want to see any more of the series.

There's a thin line between sensitive and dopey, you see. I'm not in favor of a return to the Stallone/Swarzenegger tradition of gunning somebody down and tossing out a quip, but I'm also not in favor of going overboard in the opposite direction.

Rylan

I found myself wanting to introduce Kurt Wallander to Rylan Givens, Elmore Leonard's quirky hero in Justified. Except that I'm fairly certain Kurt and Rylan would have nothing to say to each other, not speaking one another's language in more ways than one. Rylan, you see, works in a very different environment, surrounded by hardscrabble poverty and murderous meth dealers. He doesn't have the luxury of Kurt's moral qualms, although he does run into (and arrest) the occasional wealthy scoundrel in the course of the show. He doesn't kill people for fun, but he doesn't hesitate to protect himself or those around him.

By Wallander's standards, Rylan is impossibly quick on the draw, but I'd argue that Rylan's actions are never unjustified (hence the title of the show). And Rylan himself is never less than serious about what he does.

And that's maybe the difference between the eighties alphas I find annoying and the contemporary alphas I like. Because I like Rylan a lot for one major reason: he knows his stuff and he's not a jerk. Eighties alphas were jerks; contemporary betas like Kurt Wallander are frequently ridiculous. But Rylan? To me, Rylan's just right!