Why 'Breaking Bad' is the greatest thing on television

As the final run of the acclaimed US drama begins on Netflix, could Breaking
Bad teach Hollywood a lesson?

Photo: REX FEATURES

By Jenny McCartney
4:35PM BST 10 Aug 2013
10 Comments
For some time now, the British viewing public has essentially been divided
into those who have and those who havent yet seen the US television
show Breaking Bad. The people who havent seen it may be dimly aware
that it is an enormously successful series in America. They might even know
the bones of the plot: that it is about a middle-aged Albuquerque highschool chemistry teacher, Walter White, who discovers that he has
terminal cancer and turns to the illegal manufacture of crystal meth in
order to make enough money to provide comfortably for his family after his
death. Perhaps they will make a small mental note to catch it sometime, if it
ever comes to mainstream British television.

The people who have seen it mainly by means of box set, which delivers
the episodes in tantalisingly finite batches have quite often become
obsessed. They seem a little feverish about it, asking other friends: Have
you seen Breaking Bad yet? with a particular urgency which, to be honest,
can be a bit off-putting to the uninitiated.
Still, I stumbled on Breaking Bad by accident one night, when my husband
was watching it, and pretty soon I was hooked too. Some nights we inhaled
two episodes. On New Years Eve last year, we cheerfully waved our friends
and family off to parties, put the children to bed, and polished off three in a
row: a bit of a binge, but worth it, the television equivalent of an excess of
vintage champagne. As you travel through the series, the sense of danger
sporadically thickens, tightens and relaxes again, but the inexorable
direction is towards the heart of darkness. The creator of the show, Vince
Gilligan, describes Walter Whites dramatic trajectory as from Mr Chips to
Scarface.
Yet since the first eight episodes of Series Five finished, fans have been
suspended in a state of high anticipation, awaiting the eight and final
episodes to come. The burning question of how the saga of Walter Whites
expanding drug empire will end has been tormenting aficionados. Hes now
definitely getting very close to Scarface, or perhaps something even harder
and darker, more precisely focused in his ruthlessness. Unlike Al Pacinos
cocaine-addled character, Walter doesnt sample his own merchandise: his
high comes from winning the criminal game. Tomorrow, the first of the final
episodes is aired in the UK on Netflix. It is the beginning of the end.
Weve had box set fever before, of course, with series such as The
Sopranos, The Wire, and Mad Men, but Breaking Bad which has won
multiple Emmys has triggered perhaps its most extreme outbreak yet.
Like The Sopranos and its lead character of Tony Soprano, played by the
late James Gandolfini it features a protagonist who is also an
antagonist. Ross Douthat of The New York Times eloquently summed up
the difference between Tony Soprano and Walter White thus: Walter
deliberately abandons the light for the darkness while Tony is someone
born and raised in darkness who keeps rejecting opportunities to
claw his way upward into the light.
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The critical acclaim for Breaking Bad also represents the most recent
triumph for the medium of television. As recently as 15 years ago, television
was routinely considered the poor cousin of film. Cinema, it was thought,
boasted the panoramic vision, the auteurs and proper actors, the big ideas,
the philosophical depth: television churned out soapy schlock for loyal couch
potatoes, its long-running series staffed by over-tanned B-list performers,
whose fading professional dreams were massaged by their regular
pay-cheques.
If that generalisation ever contained a grain of truth, the grain has long
since been pulverised. Cinema, of course, still retains its power to move and
mesmerise: as a film critic, it is impossible for me not to hold the sheer
capacity of the medium in respect. Yet in recent years the studios have too
often seemed to believe that success lies in bludgeoning audiences into
awed submission with spectacle rather than enticing them with close
developments in character and plot.
Superhero blockbusters might dominate the multiplexes, but for certain
audiences their constant diet of toppling buildings and earth-shattering
explosions has begun to pall: its like being in a room with someone who
only ever speaks at the top of his or her voice.
Is Breaking Bad the best television series I have seen? Yes, if by best one
means possessing a narrative strong enough to nail viewers to seats, while
making us care about characters we might once only have despised.
Spectacle is when we gawp at a tower block collapsing, and reach for more
popcorn. Drama is when we are rendered breathless by the fear of what
might happen to a specific individual in a single room on the 12th floor. One
of the rules of Breaking Bad is that the drama is always in the driving seat:
in this case, the drama of how badness can creep into a mans character
bit by bit, choice by choice until it has slowly consumed him from the
inside, leaving only a hollow where the soul should be. Finally, it peeps out
through his eyes. For all his intelligence, Walter seems oblivious to the
takeover but we can see it.
Brian Cranston, the actor who plays Walter, has a wiry body and an acute
gaze; his character is a wolf in suburban lambs clothing. As a teacher, he

might seem like a bit of a stickler; as a drugs manufacturer, he is a

perfectionist. He despises sloppiness, and yet he is increasingly willing to
take the most outrageous risks. Walter seethes with paradoxes: he lowers
himself into the toxic criminal underworld with an apparent purity of motive
the desire to provide financially for his pregnant wife Skyler (Anna Gunn)
and their teenage son with cerebral palsy yet the nature of his business
places his family in enormous danger from Mexican cartels or their US-based
representatives.
He displays, at times, extraordinary diligence and courage in the service of a
corrupt and corrupting enterprise: all his positive qualities flow into a vast
negative. Walters vigorous efforts to dominate the crystal-meth business
are like a dark parody of the American dream of enterprise and reward. The
closeness of death, in some ways, has freed him from the dull constraints of
good behaviour: he has less to lose.
The characters that surround him are equally highly drawn: in particular, his
former pupil and fellow-criminal Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) a feckless, drugtaking, impulsive youth, but who has more essential humanity than his
former teacher. And in a twist that adds rich dollops of irony to family gettogethers, Walters robustly determined brother-in-law Hank (Dean Norris), is
also a senior detective in the Drug Enforcement Agency.
Breaking Bad is certainly a violent series, unfurling as it does in a world
wherein violence is the ultimate means of economic conversation. It is also a
highly moral one: throughout the series, in a string of differing, extreme
situations, each character reveals sometimes surprisingly the relative
elasticity of their ethical code. Actions are taken, and rebound upon their
perpetrator; killings exact their toll from both the victim and the murderer;
no death is free of consequences.
There is a current, deepening conversation about violence in Hollywood
films: in recent years, even comic-book inspired films have frequently
become bloodier, more amoral, more explicitly complicit in and excited by
death and torture.
The real debate is not about the presence of violence, but the treatment of
it. Breaking Bad is a series that eschews didacticism but remembers, as so
many of the finest films of the 1970s did, that moral arguments are the
most exciting ones audiences can have. It doesnt fetishise brutality, but
shows the audience as much as they need to know to understand the weight
of what has happened.
The gripping, complex subtlety of its drama makes directors such as
Tarantino, with his pseudo-ironic flip-talk and lasciviously spurting fountains
of blood, look like a stalled high-schooler playing with a ketchup kit. When
Breaking Bad finally ends, it is one moment when Hollywood not known for
its humility might usefully kneel before the small screen, and take notes.
Jenny McCartney is the film critic for the Sunday Telegraph