Aired 2008-2013 (5 seasons) on AMC
Created by Vince Gilligan
Currently streaming on Netflix
For a brief introduction to this countdown, click here.
You do not need me to tell you that Breaking Bad is great. Indeed, it is clearly one of the most famous and beloved programs of the past decade. The story of Walter White's transformation from "Mr. Chips to Scarface" is equal parts iconic and meticulous. The performances are absurdly good and have been showered in awards by the television industry. The cinematography is memorably unique and showy without ever slipping into self-parody. And the world-building that makes up what I lovingly call the ABQ Universe was so strong and precise that it facilitated the creation of another show good enough to end up on this countdown, Better Call Saul.
What I would like to do instead is talk about how we talk about Breaking Bad. In other words, I would like to address The Discourse surrounding the show. While Vince Gilligan's creation never reached Game of Thrones-level media saturation, Breaking Bad was still a work of high art that gained enough mainstream attention to become subject to the content machine of our popular culture. Taken one way, this meant that many people not used to moral ambiguity in their entertainment were forced to engage with just that. This went well for some and less than well for others. Taken another way, this phenomenon effectively obligated every professional and semi-professional (and amateur) critic to share their take on the series, which likewise went better for some than it did for others. The total effect of all this is that much of the nuance that differentiates the show from pale imitators got lost in the shuffle.
While such a flattening of opinion may seem like the necessary cost of a niche show out-punching its weight, I think it's best to push back against that impulse. This is essential because even the most informed and well-intentioned part of the discourse sometimes missed the mark, similarly to what I wrote about in my Better Call Saul piece. But more importantly, there's an almost physical pain that comes with one of my favorite things I've ever watched reduced to something that it's not in the cultural memory. More than for anything else on this list, it's worth establishing precisely what Breaking Bad is and is not.
The most obvious place to start is with the viewers who grew to idolize Walt. This subset of fans is far from the largest or most toxic such subgroup in modern pop culture (Star Wars, anyone?) but such a reaction to the show still managed to suck up a lot of oxygen and did actually have some effect on those who made it. It does not take much imagination to refute the veneration of Walter White - Walt's actions throughout the show (murder, terrorizing his family, complicity in the production of a trash drug) are clearly bad by any moral framework. And the events of the show backs this up, as it clearly depicts how Walt's choices lead him to a life of despair, dying slowly, alone with his last remaining bin of money in rural New Hampshire.
Another error is focusing too much on one potential theme of the show while ignoring everything else. Unlike the last paragraph these takes are not necessarily wrong or wrong-headed, but they're still very simplistic ways of looking at the series. The most pernicious example of this is shown through the myriad iterations of the meme that suggests the events of Breaking Bad wouldn't happen in a country where healthcare isn't a prohibitively expensive commodity. While it's true that subsidizing the cost of Walt's cancer treatments are part of his stated motivation for making meth, this ignores a lot of everything else that happens in the show. For one, the costs of his treatments are only relevant for a relatively short time - he doesn't decide to treat his disease until five episodes in and he's in the clear for a long time after his surgery at the end of season two. Also, his former business partners Gretchen and Elliott offer to pay for the treatment, but he refuses out of pride (more on this later). Most importantly, Walt directly spells out his primary motivation right in the middle of the pilot:
This leads to one more interpretation that is both common and at least partially correct, which is that Breaking Bad is something of a morality play about the character of Walter White. It is certainly true that his descent into evil is the central journey of the show, but this does not obligate the show to administer punishment for Walt's sins. The Hays Code which dictated such retribution was ended over 50 years ago. As such film and TV now largely treats us as adults that can make our own moral discernment. Clearly not everyone feels this way. This disconnect was most evident in some critics' negative reception of the finale "Felina," which allows Walt a measure of redemption. For an example of this, here's Willa Paskin's take:
"But as effective as the finale was at this, I really do think it dampens the moral vision of the show. Walt didn’t get a happy ending—death, disgrace, estrangement from one’s family do not a happy ending make—but he did get a sympathetic ending. Walter White—child-poisoner, murderer, drug lord, liar, manipulator—got to prove he really did have a heart."
This critique is especially odd because the show never denies that Walt has a heart, as obscured as it often is. Even in his lowest hour ("Ozymandias," right after he kidnaps his daughter) he has the good sense to return Holly, absolve Skyler of responsibility for his crimes (through the phone call), and leave town. More to the point, it's downright strange to consider Walt's lack of a happy ending primarily as punishment rather than a logical outcome of the events of the show, especially given how meticulously plotted Breaking Bad is.
I'm not the only one who thinks such analysis is flimsy. Interviews with Vince Gilligan confirm that he feels the same way (We here at Blogacz fully subscribe to the concept of death of the author, but hey if the author agrees with you why not resuscitate him?). In this interview, he says the following about force-feeding the audience:
"I always am reluctant to tell the audience afterward what to think or how to feel. I really prefer it when the audience comes to their own conclusions."
And here's another interview where he rejects the need to punish Walt for punishments' sake:
"It’s in the eye of the viewer. Dying is not necessarily paying for one’s sins. I certainly hope it’s not, because the nicest people that have ever lived are going to die eventually. So it could be argued instead that he did get away with it because he never got the cuffs put on him. [...] So it could be argued that he pays for his sins at the end or it could just as easily be argued that he gets away with it."
It's clear that Gilligan wants us to reject easy analysis and simple explanations. Like most creators who aspire to making something more than pure entertainment, he wishes for the audience to engage with the work and reflect on what it means to them. As such, he has clearly produced a work that's up to the task.
So now here's where I have to actually say something in the affirmative. What then does Walt's journey mean to me? What do I think is the best way to think about Breaking Bad? For me, the answer is to think big. In true Western fashion, Breaking Bad often feels like a small, self-contained story. But if you take a peek under the hood, the show has a lot more to say about society at large than you might expect. One of the themes that's been running through my TV essays is that you're doing yourself a disservice if you examine characters through too narrow of a lens. Focusing entirely on personal moral choices often causes one to miss the forest for the trees. Jimmy McGill is happy to take the easy way out, but that perspective is shaped his time in a corrupt and self-serving industry (the law). Amy Jellicoe wants to burn everything down, but only because she understands from her time at Abaddon that the system is fundamentally broken. And Forrest MacNeil becomes a monster to everyone he knows and loves largely at the behest of his producer, Grant. People can be agents of change or scions of evil, but they usually don't arrive at that destination entirely of their own becoming. To both summarize this and further validate my opinion, I turn to Walter White himself, Bryan Cranston:
"This speaks to my point that everyone has the capacity of being evil. Whether or not you play it out in your mind, or whether you play it out physically in real-life, we have that capacity of dark thoughts. And I think people just need to own up to it and say, “Yeah, we do.” Given the right set of circumstances, education, parenting, loving, hugging, or lack thereof, you can become the best of who you’re supposed to be or the worst of you’re supposed to be."
The best place to start with this analysis is the first episode, which is paradoxically both a great pilot and a bad episode of Breaking Bad. I say that because it does all the things a great pilot should do (establish the story, invoke the relevant themes, give us a reason to keep watching), but most of that is antithetical to what the series does best (move through plot deliberately, pay close attention to character development).
The most noteworthy deviation in this regard affects two of the show's most important characters, Skyler and Hank. Throughout the series, Skyler plays the role of a crime boss' wife with the requisite amount of nuance. She's a fundamentally moral character who nonetheless understands that she has to balance Walt's misdeeds with her own desire to protect herself and her family. In the pilot though, she's far more one-dimensional as a nagging housewife more concerned with her online auctions than with Walt. Similarly, Hank doesn't appear to be the thoughtful, vulnerable brother-in-law we get to know later in the series. Rather, he's brash, cocksure, and everything else you might expect from a run-of-the-mill DEA agent.
But all of this is fine and actually good! We don't need (or even want) a full understanding of the supporting players, because that's not what the pilot is about. Remember that the episode begins in medias res with Walt filming what he believes to be his own suicide note. This means the rest of the episode is effectively the events that led to this impasse filtered through Walt's last-minute "flash before your eyes" vision. And through that lens he sees himself as emasculated by his wife, one-upped by his brother-in-law, and disregarded by his students. And it's this perspective that informs both Walt and the viewer and adds a layer of meaning when he tells Jesse "I am awake."
We come back to this later in the season in the fifth episode "Gray Matter". After dealing with the situation with Crazy 8, Walt swears off the life of crime and appears to be resigned to his fate. When Skyler finally finds out about the diagnosis, she calls a family meeting to urge Walt to seek treatment. In a touch of the show's wry humor, everyone gets a chance to air their thoughts with the "speaking pillow" before Walt does. When he finally wrests it away he frames his decisions as a matter of choice. "Sometimes I never feel like I actually make any of my own choices," he begins. "All I have left is to choose how I approach this," he continues before he describes how he'd rather die peacefully at home than in the throes of chemo. Walt is a man with (almost) every possible advantage to lead a successful life in our hyper-individualized society. And in many respects he has done just that! But the cruel irony of this scene is that, whether he's being honest with himself or not, he doesn't feel like he's been able to take the reins and reap the benefits of this privilege until it's too late.
What furthers this irony is that our individualistic society also makes you pay for your own healthcare. Which means Walt's perspective on his treatment is further informed by the fact that he has two options to pay for the treatment: 1) become a drug lord, or 2) accept a gift from his old business partners, Gretchen and Elliott. So he does indeed have a choice, but it's an extremely constrained one. And while the latter option may seem like the obvious choice in a vacuum, there are specific complications that make it significantly less desirable for Walt (which is why he ends up choosing option #1). We get some sense of this earlier in the same episode. When the Whites attend Elliott's birthday party it's clear that Walt feels uncomfortable in such an extravagant setting and at least a touch resentful of his rich friends. Later in the season two episode "Peekaboo," Walt's aborted lunch conversation with Gretchen keys us in further when he calls her a "little rich girl just adding to your millions." There's clearly some class resentment here, even if it's never quite spelled out explicitly in the text. Luckily, we have some extra-textual evidence of this from Alan Sepinwall's book, which I have copied here:
It's clear the Walt we see in Breaking Bad is driven by failure and resentment. Whether that resentment is fairly earned or not (this is a separate debate from the subject of this essay, but probably a little bit of both!), this is how he feels and this is what will inform his decisions from here on out. And as we see over the next couple of seasons, these decisions lead to victory for Walt and death and destruction for all who get in his way. By the time he's ascended his to throne, this desire for his own glorification above all else has calcified itself in Walt's mind. When he invites Jesse over for dinner in the season five episode "Buyout," Walt shows him that his meth empire is all he has left and as such he is in the "empire business." His desire to control his destiny has lead him to a place where he has as little choice as ever, so what can he do but trudge on and continue to up the body count?
But this is all fundamentally a lie. Walt has always had the choice to stop all of this and atone for his sins, but due to a combination of stubbornness and circumstance he holds out until the final episodes. It is then, when sitting alone in a bar in New Hampshire that he finally makes the (correct) choice to end all of this and do what he can to free those who remain from their burdens. Is this decision driven in part by spite at seeing Gretchen and Elliott on the TV? Yes, but it's clearly also motivated by a desire to fix what he's broken. When he returns home and confesses to Skyler ("I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was....I was alive."), it's perhaps his first truly honest moment of the show.* Throughout the show, Walt uses his agency to make terrible choice after terrible choice. What the finale communicates then is that no matter what you've done, you always still have the choice to do something that at least resembles good.
*The dishonesty Walt refutes here is his constant use of the excuse that everything he does is for his family. But when everything comes to a head in "Ozymandias" and he's left screaming "we're a family" to them, that facade begins to fall. I think it's in that moment that he begins to realize that his conception of what it means to support his family was completely wrong, and that moment as much as anything drives his actions over the rest of series. Just another reason why it's one of the best episodes of TV ever.
In the end, whether or not Walt "deserves" redemption is besides the point. As I hinted at earlier, it doesn't take a particularly developed sense of morality to be able to condemn his actions. What does take a more discerning eye is understanding how a human being could become so broken as to cause all of this destruction. And what takes the temperament of a saint is allowing even the greatest of monsters a window for reconciliation. If we're being fair, Breaking Bad probably doesn't spend enough time on the latter, which likely contributed to the sense of whiplash for both the viewer and the critic alike. But because of the show's careful and meticulous commitment to showing us what drives Walt to make the choices that he does, it's clear that Breaking Bad wants us to take full accounting of Walt as a human being, extremely significant warts and all. That it avoids judgment for judgment's sake is a virtue, and is a large part of what makes it one of the best shows of all time.
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