The influence of the women at the top is rather a fork in the road for Walter, Tony, Dexter, Jax, and so many others. They all choose to travel on the less desirable path of their own accord. The pattern of controlling women just gives each program a little something more psychoanalytical for fans to dig into if they so please. The personalities of each criminal mother can even be interpreted as playing a part in the wives each of these men ends up marrying.
Walter’s maternal influence in his upbringing is unclear at best and non-existent at worst. Skyler White (Anna Gunn) represents the opposite of this ideal; she’s overbearing, uptight, and often asked by her husband to climb out of his ass and give him some space. This dichotomy between who Walt chose to marry and her assumed differences compared to Walt’s mother makes fans wonder whether he was actually trying to find stability that he didn’t get in his earlier years.
Walt rebels against Skyler, choosing to liberate the confines of matrimony with methamphetamine. Skyler turned into public enemy number one according to ignorant machismo-infused frat boy fans at home, but a critical and audience reanalysis of her character since the series finale has allowed cooler heads to prevail. Skyler is a moral person. Being rigid isn’t a crime, but poisoning children and bombing nursing homes certainly is.
When looking at how similar Carmela Soprano (Edie Falco) is to Tony’s mother, Livia, it becomes a lot trickier than when juxtaposing Walt’s mother and wife. Carmela shares some parallels to Livia, but she’s also a distinctive character. Both Carm and Livia knowingly go along with their husband’s mob life. They also victimize themselves while overlooking deeper sins committed by the men in their lives. Whacking someone in the crime family? All in a day’s work. Cheating on your wife or putting your mother in a nursing home? For shame! Tony is bombarded with lectures from both his mother and wife in regards to domestic atrocities, but hardly ever made accountable for the occupational transgressions.
The male antiheroes of the Golden Age of Television have equally complicated female characters in their orbits, but ultimately their sins belong to them. While Walter got both overactive involvement and no guidance at different times in his life, his transformation into Heisenberg can be blamed solely on insecurities and an ungodly-sized ego. Tony tries hard to please a mother who can’t be satisfied, then has a chance to redo a similar relationship with Carmela and incessantly ignores her pleas for fidelity.
We can proclaim that the women of these shows make their presence felt, but the men make the final call in how their journeys form. Maternalistic power was only wielded by these ladies due to an instability deep within the psyches of the evil men at the top of the ticket. They lorded over their fates and used their mothers and wives as an excuse for wickedness. It makes all of these classic series fascinating interpretations of the misogyny lying in the wake of American society and it’s one of the indelible legacies of the antihero era.