Telling Stories About Yesterday’s Hero for Today’s World: The Script Development of the Chilean TV Series Heroes (2006–2007)

This chapter addresses the ways in which screenwriters create the persona of the anti-hero in the Chilean TV miniseries Heroes (2006–2007), a six-part historical series about Chilean national heroes, currently used as educational material in Chilean schools. In the writing of this celebratory series, the key challenge was to create engaging characters who could be perceived as national “heroes” in the context of a contemporary series, when in fact, their historical actions were those of “un-heroic” real people, people an audience would consider to be “anti-heroes”. To consider this challenge, the chapter traces how the screenwriters of Heroes created the character of the hero/anti-hero as both protagonist and antagonist. In the chapter, firstly we outline the situation the writers were faced with in researching and recreating the real-life characters of Bernardo O’Higgins, José Miguel Carrera, and Manual Rodríguez. This includes the challenge of delving into the psychology of characters who were by present-day standards prejudiced misogynists who mistreated women, ordered murders and fathered illegitimate children whom they ignored, and presenting them as heroes, particularly when the target audience was school children. We distil these as a means of considering the creation of the anti-hero in the script development of Heroes.