‘Heroes Reborn’ and ‘You’re the Worst’ Take On Latino Veterans’ Experiences

As African American characters claw back territory they’ve long been denied on national television, drawing huge audiences to shows like “Empire” and “Scandal,” it’s become increasingly obvious that TV lags in other areas: Asian characters who are neither tech-support workers nor sex objects, characters of Middle Eastern descent on shows that don’t deal with national security and Latino characters in general, among others. But while it’s not quite a trend yet, I noticed that two series this fall, NBC’s science fiction extravaganza “Heroes Reborn” and FXX’s romantic comedy “You’re the Worst,” have made a little headway by creating characters with a specific confluence of race and experience: Both shows have characters who are Mexican American veterans.

If these Mexican American characters are the result of individual creative visions, rather than a concerted effort to represent an underrepresented segment of the population, they have stumbled onto a real trend. Though traditionally underrepresented in the armed forces, the number of Latinos in the military has been growing in recent years, and the number of Latino veterans may double by 2024. A 2013 demographic report on the U.S. military found that 11.6 percent of active-duty military personnel identified as Hispanic.

NBC didn’t have a full episode of “Heroes Reborn” to screen for critics before the Television Critics Association press tour in Los Angeles in August. But Ryan Guzman, who plays Carlos Gutierrez, led with his character’s military experience.

“He’s a Mexican American Army veteran who is coming back from a tour in Afghanistan and is being thrust into a heroic spotlight where he doesn’t feel comfortable and he’s having an identity crisis with himself as well as dealing with the world around him and dealing with a loss of someone very dear to him,” Guzman said. “And he’s at kind of a crossroads as well where an immense opportunity is kind of presented to him and he doesn’t know if he’s worth it at all. So I connected with my character quite a bit, because there’s been quite a few times where, especially in this industry alone, where you kind of question if you’re worth being this role or if you’re worth being on this show or anything, and it’s a beautiful character.”

If “Heroes Reborn” wants to avoid stereotypes of tragic veterans and to figure out how to make Gutierrez’s ethnic background a source of actual details that define the character and drive his behavior, rather than simply another shade on the show’s color palette, series creator Tim Kring might do well to look to a very different series, FXX’s scabrous sitcom “You’re the Worst.”

One of the four main characters is Edgar (Desmin Borges), a veteran and recovering heroin addict who lives with his friend Jimmy (Chris Geere). He suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, which manifests in sleeplessness and terrifying nightmares. But Edgar is many things other than his military experience. He’s a hopeless romantic who encourages Jimmy to pursue a relationship with Gretchen (Aya Cash) and comforts Gretchen’s best friend, Lindsay (Kether Donohue), after her husband dumps her in horrifyingly public circumstances. And he’s a fantastic cook, an arena that both draws on his heritage and lets him care for Jimmy and Gretchen in a way that the pair, united by their hugely arrested development, are unable to do for each other.

Borges and Falk have delivered a deadpan style for Edgar to use when telling his most horrifying war stories. And the show has a sly tendency to make fun of the way people react to veterans. In one first-season episode, Edgar is invited to speak at a memorial dedication, only for his speech to be cut short by a councilman eager to hear a band perform, and to be taken in by a group of method actors who want to steal his life story for a forthcoming movie. When Edgar visits a military chaplain for help in negotiating his increasingly complicated friendships, the priest mistakes him for a potential leaker, calling military intelligence to warn that “I think we’ve got another Snowden.” And when a heartless VA administrator tries to guilt Edgar out of asking the government to pay for medication that would help him sleep, Jimmy finally steps up to help the friend who does so much for him.

“We had this guy come in and talk to the writers’ room,” Falk said of his efforts to treat Edgar respectfully. “And he basically said, ‘Treat us like anyone else when you’re writing us. We’re ballbusters.’ He personally has a lot of issues that Edgar does. But he said, ‘Me and my buddies get together, and talk s—, and make fun of each other,’ so I sort of took that as license to try to render him as three-dimensionally as possible.” (It’s worth noting that Latino veterans appear to find jobs and health insurance at higher rates than some of their counterparts.)

But while Falk enjoyed the challenge of trying to take “the insane-making red tape that veterans have to go through to get health care, [and] to render that entertaining,” in the second season of “You’re the Worst,” it was important to him to expand Edgar’s identity beyond his military service. The result is a hobby, Edgar’s attempt at improv comedy, and the new friends he finds through it. “He doesn’t know if he’s good or bad at it, he just knows that this is another avenue that he’s ready to explore,” Borges told me. “I come from a very improvised sort of background, but I never would have thought to put that in for this character.”