I'm glad somebody else has noticed

At the end of a Guardian book review about a killing psychopath in a dystopian future New York (which he quite likes), Adam Roberts makes this observation:

Still, Sternbergh has created a memorable main character here. He is an unvarnished, murderous psychopath, happy to kill for money, no questions asked. On occasion, when the whim takes him, he'll even kill without getting paid. Yet it doesn't take long for us to warm to him, and by the end of the book I was keen to read the second Spademan novel (which Sternbergh is currently writing). A big film deal has already been signed. What's the appeal?

It's a question with larger resonance. Think of some of the biggest TV serials of the last few years: The Sopranos; Breaking Bad; Dexter; Game of Thrones. These are all shows with psychopaths at their centre, not as baddies, but as the heroes. Dracula used to be a straightforward villain; nowadays vampires are our heroes even though their stock-in-trade is still (of course) killing people. When Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes boasts that he is a "high-functioning sociopath" and executes press barons in cold blood, we are not appalled. On the contrary, we lap it up. So what's with all the lovable murderers? Shovel Ready suggests, in an oblique kind of way, that the issue is one of a broader social disengagement, but I think there's something more designedly amoral going on. Sternbergh's thriller whisks us along so effortlessly we may miss the point at which we start to think: "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if I could just break the bonds of all those petty frustrations of my day-to-day with a little bit of the old ultraviolence?" This may not be an entirely morally healthy thing to be doing.

I have been up front about my distrust and dislike of the "loveable murderer" theme ever since it started to appear in movies (I would say) in the early 1990's.   (Perhaps with Silence of the Lambs, I would guess.  Pulp Fiction didn't help.)   Are other people finally starting to notice there is something "off" about it?