Bad people, good movies and TV shows.

While the breadth and diversity of this year’s Golden Globe nominees defies simple classification — with its mix of drama and musicals, TV and film, and productions scattered around the globe — one recurring theme can be found in the prevalence of antiheroes, what might be called the “J.R. Ewing syndrome,” a reference to the character that galvanized the hit Reagan-era serial Dallas.

If unpleasant, difficult and occasionally murderous people can be tough to be around in real life, they’re often a lot of fun to watch. That seemed especially true of TV’s dramatic categories this year, but spilled over into film, including, controversially, the tandem of ruthless attorney Roy Cohn and his young protege Donald Trump as depicted in The Apprentice, which garnered nominations for Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan in those roles, respectively.

The drama and limited series fields were particularly rife with complicated characters during the most recent eligibility period. They range from the conflicted protagonist and stalker in Baby Reindeer to the cool con man in Ripley, the mob bosses in The Penguin and Griselda (joined on the film front by Emilia Perez) to the ruthless dictator in The Regime, the assassin in The Day of the Jackal to the shadowy spies in Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

Even entries in the most broadly popular category, cinematic and box-office achievement, reflect some of these less-admirable qualities, as evidenced by the sequels Deadpool & Wolverine and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

At its core, all of these projects are motivated by the lure of multifaceted characters whose vices range from amorality to committing genuinely evil acts.

“We need stories that speak to the complicated nature of our times,” series creator Richard Gadd said in accepting the limited-series award for “Baby Reindeer,” seeking to explain the trend to those who might have wondered about the popularity of such darker concepts.

Granted, there’s a long history of this in movies and television, although the roots of these modern iterations in TV can perhaps be traced most directly to the start of this century, as HBO’s The Sopranos bled into more ambitious basic-cable series such as The Shield, Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

While the rise of the anti-hero might not reflect a world in which most of us would want to live, they have demonstrated, time and again, that they can create fascinating places to visit, and revisit — at least, through the divide of a theater screen or from the safety of our living rooms.