During the course of the past few months, there has been one show that has been talked about to considerable heights. Every time I turn on the internet or listen to a show, they're talking about Breaking Bad with the same interest I expect people to have given other shows before the invention of TiVo. They speak highly of it as this great show with twists coming out of nowhere.
To say the least, it created a certain amount of intrigue that made me wonder what I was missing out on. In truth, I haven't watched enough to stereotype the AMC network's choice of shows, but between six episodes of Mad Men and five of the Walking Dead, I got the impression that they were very cinematic shows. However, those two shows have yet to grab me for an entire season (though I plan to catch up on Mad Men at some point). Despite my lack of interest in the AMC shows, I respected the network for it's ambitious shows with complex characters. I felt they were all but extinct from TV. I felt that TV itself was no longer a water cooler topic besides bad reality shows on ABC or FOX.
Yet, in the past few months, I have heard so much of Breaking Bad that I just had to give it a try. The reason I didn't hop on immediately was because I was deep into my Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon which proved to be more of an endurance test at times and I felt damaged my opinion of that show. While I think it had a stellar cast and some great episodes, it's 144 episodes was daunting and hard to keep track of. I didn't get them done until mid-October.
After taking a few weeks off, I finally decided to do it. I was going to challenge myself to watch all four current seasons of Breaking Bad in the last two months of the year (to allow it to better digest) and determine if it deserved all of those Emmys. If Bryan Cranston really was that good. If AMC really deserves miles of respect.
Thanks to Netflix, I was able to start right away with "Pilot." If a show had ever attempted to grab me in five minutes, it was this one. Knowing nothing about the show, I met Walter White (Bryan Cranston) in the middle of the desert, no pants, talking erratically into a hand held camera. Within those first few moments, I was asking myself "Who is this guy? Why is he here? Where are his pants?"
It took five minutes to get me hooked on the sheer fact that I wanted to know more about these characters. It continued to develop as the rest of the cast was introduced, including DEA agent and brother-in-law Hank Schrader (Dean Norris), his wife Skylar (Anna Gunn) and cerebral palsy son Walter Jr. (R.J. Mitte), Hank's kleptomaniac wife Marie (Betsy Brandt), and Walter's partner in crime Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul).
In the pilot episode, they are not so much introduced as much as thrown into situations that raise eyebrows, including Hank taking Jr. to talk to a hooker as an anti-drug spiel. Jesse is met falling from the second floor of a girl's house. Almost no one seems normal at this point, but they seem established enough to continue living in this universe of Albuquerque, New Mexico as Walter becomes a meth cook out of an RV in the desert.
This is all just the "Pilot" episode, so there was plenty of reason to keep watching. What amazed me most about season 1 was not only that Cranston was a really compelling actor, but that almost every episode had a dramatically complicated cliffhanger at the end. It left me wanting to watch the next episode immediately, which I normally did. Within a week, I had seen 10 episodes and had no intention of slowing down. This universe was amazing.
It wasn't just the characters, either. Each of the directors managed to bring a flair to the episode. The show WAS cinematic. Some of the trademarks that seemed to arrive every other episode included meth cooking montages, excessive time lapses, killer song choices, and some type of war with the Mexican drug cartels. It all ended beautifully in the end of season 1 with "A No-Rough-Stuff-Type Deal," which saw Jesse and Walter steal from a high security compound and make meth for a dealer who beat up his assistant in a junkyard.
I thought that was insane for the show. Season 2 only made things darker and weirder, including the introduction of pre-credits teasers, which progressed to show a teddy bear in a swimming pool. What did it mean? This show had developed midway through season 1 that it had a knack for callback, and I kept wondering what this teddy bear had to do with the plot. While I will say that I think the resulting product was disappointing for the bear, the build-up to it was phenomenal, and included a relationship with landowner Jane (Krysten Ritter) that resulted in one memorable heroin trip.
The stakes also rose episode-to-episode during season 2. What I appreciate about this show is that they didn't make any character dumb. If anything went wrong, it was all because of human error or slipping through the cracks. The amount of times things almost ended was insanely high, yet it was all plausible enough to keep the show going.
The best example of this high stakes came in the episode "Better Call Saul" which not only introduced Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), a corrupt lawyer, but also presented an early sign that Walter was become the villain in the story (though it was better portrayed in the previous episode's opening song "Negro Y Azul") as he blocks the view of a DEA van so that Jesse can frame another guy for a drug deal based on Saul's accommodation. The result was five minutes of intense distraction.
There were some other great episodes that prove that this show deserves all the respect it gets ("Peekaboo","Breakage"). Overall, I think that while season 2 progressed the story a lot and produced a lot of memorable episodes, it was still only a small example of what the show could do. During the time, it presented Walter getting a trial separation from Skylar and Walter turning up naked in a Mexican convenience store ("Bit By a Dead Bee"). What season 2 established was that it wasn't a fluke. This show was going to go really dark. It was going to push it's characters into strange, new places.
The most notable introduction was the Salmanaca family, which included Uncle Tio (Mark Margolis), who became one of the best characters on the show despite no dialog. His simple communication through a service bell would become one of the show's most haunting features, but was the start of darker stuff that would develop deep into season 4.
By season 3, Walter was contemplating leaving the game, but kept finding reasons to stay in. In introduced the Counsins (Luis and Daniel Moncada), that eventually went after Hank and became menacing villains in the series. It also set the building blocks for season 4 by Walter opening up to Skylar about his meth cooking job, and Walter and Jesse going into business with Gustavo Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), a suave owner of Los Pollos Hermanos and most successful dealer to Mexico. Walter and Jesse begin working in the super lab (the RV was torn down in season 2) and things get hairy. Meanwhile, Walter and Skylar try to launder their money by investing in a car washing company. This causes Walter to just be more carefree with the money anyways, showing Skylar's dedication to the actual cover-up of the money.
It is also the season where Jesse goes from being the sidekick to his own, unique character. He begins yelling at Walter about things he disagrees about. He begins to not trust him. In a sense, this is the moment that Aaron Paul broke out and showed his ability to act just as tough as Cranston. With Giancarlo Esposito also become the show's greatest, enigmatic character, it stepped up it's game not only in dark storytelling, but also in it's acting. Everyone was so complex by this point that it felt like someone needed to crack any moment, which was the appeal of the show that continued to draw me in.
In the most current season 4, back story to Gus is given, Jesse and Walter spend numerous episodes apart, and Skylar becomes a very intriguing business woman, who eventually just cheats her way into ownership of the car wash. With exception to Jr., this season was polarizing for most characters. Hank wasn't in the DEA anymore and in a wheelchair from the Cousins wounding him. Walter didn't seem to show any signs of quitting. Meanwhile, coworker Mike (Jonathan Banks) takes Jesse under his wing to do errand runs, which rubs Walter the wrong way.
The last five episodes of this season are the darkest that it has gotten, and it has a lot to do with Walter breaking down and finally taking up the mantel of being a really bad person and the overall conflicts of Walter either staying or getting killed by a misconception that he told Hank about it.
Again, when things get close, Walter sets them back with car accidents and using neighbors as decoys to see if his house was infiltrated. Meanwhile, Jesse is recovering from bad things that he has done and trying to be a better person by taking care of a woman and her child, who got poisoned. By the end of "Face Off," the show is in a conflicting new place. Will Walter really be able to retire without any trace, or will something go terribly wrong?
This show's biggest achievement is making an episode to episode question of how far will the next episode go. With performances that got more compelling as the seasons went on, and stories equally as perplexing, it's a wonder that the show has managed to maintain it's intensity through the whole thing without making any comical moments too comical or dramatic moments too intense. There was a lot of fighting, but it was all called for.
What I love about the show is not only the characters, but the ability to analyze what it means to be a man in society. Walter originally sold meth to save up money for his family when an impending cancer would kill him. In a way, this is what every man wants for his family: a substantial wealth to live happily on. There are also polarizing versions, including Hank, who was mostly the cocky, brave one who wanted to appear macho to everyone. Jesse was the young, naive character whose mostly been established as the one who aged and matured the most since episode 1. Gus is just a guy who got screwed over and wants revenge.
There are numerous sides to the coin, but in a way, it explores masculinity in society better than any show currently on the air. It doesn't show it in muscle bound heroes, but flawed individuals who end up naked in convenience stores. These are realistic (in the show's context) characters who have realistic problems, and it explores what happens when their good intentions go wrong.
However, it can also be established that the women in this show also feature some analysis of women in society. They're flawed just like their husbands, but they stand by them and want the best for them. In Skylar's case, it's laundering the money discreetly without raising suspicion. For Maria, it's standing by a handicapped man who complains about minerals all day. For Jane, it was drugs. There's numerous ways to look at it, but most of all, it's a dissection of dysfunctional humans in the 21st century.
Where Mad Men explores masculinity in the 50's, I felt that it doesn't deliver as well because the stakes cannot be as high as Breaking Bad. It's mostly internal and while that will make for interesting story lines, it doesn't allow them to take as many risks as Breaking Bad. That's not a bad thing, but it keeps it from having the same impact that the show has.
Overall, I love Breaking Bad for being a really good show with great writing, great characters, and great practical effects mixed with montages and time lapses. The music is great. I loved close to every moment of it, and the fact it resonates so well with me is also a testament to it's impact. I was very disappointed to finish it and know I had to wait a long time to see the next batch.
So, what was my favorite character? It's a two way tie between:
Jesse Pinkman - Say what you will, but I think he has shown the most range from episode 1 to the current batch. He started off an ignorant drug dealer and has slowly surpassed Walter in the realms that he becomes Gus' side man during business trips and he cares for a woman and her child. He has developed towards a good person, which is a great polar opposite to Walter, which also makes this show very intriguing and shows a small silver lining to it's future.
Gustavo Fring - How can you not like this guy. He is a very complicated man who runs a successful chicken fast food joint. He is very mysterious and tends to hide his face behind a video camera, and he is not afraid to stand in the way of gunfire. He is fearless and takes everything with a very stoic tone of voice. He won't let anyone stand in his way, and he's not afraid to slit your throat ("Box Cutter") if you're not working out. He is the ultimate loose cannon while being very well mannered. He'll mislead you into unexpected ways. Don't mess with him, because he is unstoppable.
Favorite season?
Season 2. It's actually hard to determine, but based on favorite episodes, season 2 wins. It introduced so many bizarre camera techniques and sent characters into interesting directions, creating infamous moments (like in "Peekaboo") and proving that there's a lot of complexity to these characters. It also introduced Saul Goodman, Jane, Heisenberg and Gustavo Fring. This is the moment the show went form being just a really morally complex show to being the dark, weird one that it would end on. It also had the best follow through of any season to date. Don't get me wrong, the following seasons are very good, but when it comes to personal favorites, season 2 wins.
It also gave us this song.
I cannot wait for more of this show. It's so good that I intend to buy all of the seasons the moment I get financially able to. It's addicting and I recommend that you check it out, too. It really is one of the best things that I have seen on TV. I want you to understand why.
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