Antagonist

A university professor once asked a television producer for help. He’d built a genuinely good initiative, made a polished film explaining it, and put it in front of audience after audience, where it landed on deaf ears every time.

The professor comes across as kind and dedicated. The system he designed works. The problem, it turns out, is that the film had no enemy. You can’t sell a great system without showing what the system is designed to defeat.

The professor’s initiative existed to fight slow, suffocating bureaucracy. So where was the bureaucracy? Where were the towers of cobwebbed paperwork stacked from floor to ceiling? Show us that first, and suddenly we’re leaning in. Who wouldn’t want to watch that go down?

An antagonist is everything standing between your protagonist and their goal. Whatever form it takes, without one there is no story.

And a good enemy does far more than create obstacles. When Richard Nixon ran for president in 1960, his head of advertising boiled winning down to a single rule: you need a first-class villain to make a first-class hero. We understand things by what they’re set against. Choosing your antagonist isn’t one decision; it’s two, because the enemy you pick defines the hero who fights it.

Which is why the strongest antagonists are always opposites. Vince Gilligan pitched Breaking Bad in four words: ‘Mr Chips to Scarface’. The Joker tells Batman, ‘You complete me’, and he’s right: the great antagonists embody everything their protagonist is not, and everything they’re afraid of becoming.

The best antagonists also know exactly where to aim. They attack the thing the protagonist holds most dear, usually family, real or proxy, and the audience becomes consumed by one desire: see the threat destroyed.

That’s why the goal and the antagonist are so often the same thing. The goal is simply the death of the enemy.

So where do you find yours? Well, what’s the biggest fear of your time? Once it was witches. Later it was communists. Netflix’s Adolescence became the most talked-about show of 2025 by mining the fear every parent now carries about what the internet is doing to their sons. Your audience is already afraid of something specific. Your job isn’t to frighten them; it’s to name their fear and build a story that promises to help beat it.

Once you’ve chosen your enemy, obey the one law of antagonism: it must build. You can’t win a fight by trading equal blows; every punch has to come back harder, a snowball growing as it rolls.

There’s a deeper reason enemies hold us like this. We don’t just use enemies to build stories. We use them to know who we are. The novelist Rachel Cusk called an argument ‘an emergency of self-definition’, and that’s what a story is too: a great antagonist forces the protagonist to confront who they’ve been, and defeating it lets them become someone new.