Breaking Bad: Overrated?? [part 1]
Okay, so ever since the finale of Breaking Bad and I'm a little bored I google "Breaking Bad" and "overrated" to see if anyone on this goddamn planet will voice my opinion, or if I really am just crazy for not getting swept up in the "greatest TV show of all time."
There's been a few articles in this extreme minority of mine written over the show's run, but nothing since the finale, now that we have the whole picture. The best, by far, is the A.V. Club's take on the show - which simply claims that the show isn't as nuanced or complex as people make it out to be - but look to the comments and you'd think John Lennon was saying he was bigger than Jesus again.
So I get it. I know it sucks to just go taking dumps on things, and it sucks to read about how your favorite show isn't the bestest of all time, but goddammit, I feel like we've all been a bunch of teenagers going on and on about the literary delights of Twilight and we just need pop culture's English teacher to sit down with us with a knowing smile and ask us all just why we like Twilight so much - while slipping East of Eden into our backpacks and encouraging us to keep reading, keep thinking, keep watching.
I'm disappointed because I want a better, more concise writer than me to tackle this, I want to read a more intelligent mind parsing through this stuff, but all I got is me, a few hours free this Monday morning so I figure I'll try to get this stuff out as clear as I can, Doctor.
1. BREAKING BAD = SOAP OPERA
First, let's just clear up what Breaking Bad is. It's a melodramatic, white middle-class soap opera family drama crossed with a sexy, great action film.
Is that bad? No! It just means this is the fuel in the tank. People watch Breaking Bad because "they're addicted" or "they don't know what's going to happen next." I binge-watched for heads on turtles, Skylar cheating on Walt, and for Walt's Wyle E. Coyote style plans. You really didn't know what was going to happen next, and this makes the show compelling. This is what makes the show good.
But it does not make the show a penetrating social drama or morality tale that has anything complex or interesting to say about human nature, American society, or even the show's main topic, drug trafficking.
Walt's "descent" is the first thing any reviewer seems unable to get past, as if the notion of watching a good man go evil hasn't been done in film (The Godfather, Scarface, Star Wars) or TV (our current crop of popular TV shows is nothing but antiheroes) or anything before (Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment, Julius Caesar). The show's best move is that it stretches it out over 5 seasons, but this does not make it, as 99% of the internet or your friends may tell you "genius."
In fact, it's one of the easiest stories to tell - guy goes from Point A to Point B. It's as simple as narrative gravity. The delight of the show then is waiting for moments where Walter White cracks and we begin to see his new, emerging, terrifying alter ego. But it's not like that's hard or difficult to accomplish, and the show makes a few clunky decisions along the way.
Par example, everybody's favorite example of a "no turning back" point for Walt is the end of season 2, where Walt coincidentally arrives at Jesse's the moment his girlfriend ODs on heroin. Walt could call the police, could roll her to her side, do something - but he just watches, horrified, until she dies. This sets into a motion an absurd chain of events that the show has been teasing for two seasons that ultimately has nothing to do with Walt or this little event, but the writers really, really want it to.
The first problem is with this little situation - if the writers' intention (and it is) is for us to watch Walt make a "bad" decision with terrible, unknowable consequences, then it should've been a much more defined decision. Instead, Walt's just paralyzed, unsure of what he's just walked into, and although for selfish reasons he'd probably prefer the girl gone I don't think we've reached Heisenberg levels of manipulation yet. He doesn't even necessarily know she's ODing at first - he's just walked in to find a girl throwing up. He can't call the police for a million reasons, and he's not sure how Jesse will react if he finds him there. So he just does nothing - not sure of what to do.
This would be fine - a very nuanced moment, actually, where Walt accidentally allows a death, something he'll have to come to terms with and will ultimately inch him further towards Heisenbergdom, but the writers clearly want it to be much more than this, ending the season with an absurd dramatic flourish that sounds like something an undergraduate writing student would come up with - the girl's death leads to her depressed and grieving father (an air traffic controller!) to rather purposefully (or just negligently) collide two commercial planes over Albuquerque (an event, it should be added, that is relatively forgotten about after a few episodes.)
I guess this is supposed to be a gesture towards the idea of how interconnected our lives are, the ripples our decisions can have that unintentionally affect other people (something The Wire is 400x better at showing realistically and plausibly). Or, as Vince Gilligan puts it "It's a butterfly effect. All these gears have been turning, this particular outcome was stuff Walt put into motion a long time ago by choosing to cook crystal meth."
Not exactly subtle symbolism there, and a bit of a frustrating moment after we've spent two seasons being teased with body bags and charred teddy bears floating around Walt's pool.
Now The Wire is a show all about connections, and the way characters' decisions affect others - but the effects are much more subtle and nuanced. When Kima is shot halfway through season 1 McNulty blames himself for pushing the case far enough that she was hurt - a similar, Gilligan line of thinking that connects all the story elements to one person's decisions - but is quickly cut down for thinking that way. Life's much more complex than that, and it's narcissistic and pointless to think it all goes back to one person - and ultimately, the same is true for Walter White. The real person at fault in the airline incident is the grieving father. For Walt or anybody else to think otherwise would be a little…weird. I like to think Albuquerque is still chugging forward despite one science teacher's decisions to break bad. (And maybe this is the ultimate blow to Walt's ego: life will go on without him, the fears of every dying person.)
But maybe this has more to do with the show's failings as a "morality tale" overall. We feel the writer's presence in this Event as a judgment from above - literally, from the writers' room. They don't think Walt's doing good stuff, so they invent a sign from above that confirms this. Real life is much more complex, and while bad, immoral decisions can have ripples of shitty consequences, there's not really a Writer's Room in the sky keeping us accountable...
…Or is there? Because I think Breaking Bad ultimately thinks so, which is why some of Walt's journey from "Mr. Chips to Scarface" is so silly. But I'll talk more about that next time on...
BREAKING BAD IS OVERRATED????
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