HBO is ruining former Mr. Darcies Matthew Macfadyen to Colin Firth

The Ringer

Succession's Macfadyen and The Staircase's Firth were "once most recognized as the perfect embodiments of the glowering heartthrob in Pride & Prejudice, but thanks to HBO, those fuzzy memories are dead," says Jodi Walker. "There is a thin line between love and hate," Walker adds. "There is also, it seems, a thin line between a beloved romantic lead with a sullen heart of gold and a chemise-dropping glower and a despised, often immoral, pompous, maybe-criminal antihero. The former is a well-trodden trope of the romance genre, while the latter exists exclusively on HBO, a network whose casting department insists on taking our most revered Mr. Darcies—our most sopping-wet Regency-era leading men, our greatest bewitchers of body and soul—and turning them into inscrutable villains."