A Retrospective

Thanks to Netflix I have just powered through the first 3 seasons of critically acclaimed Breaking Bad.   All I can say is that I was underwhelmed.  I am not saying the show is not good, I quite enjoyed it actually.  However, for as much talk as the show gets as being put in the same pantheon as The Wire and Mad Men it completely failed to deliver, and I am biased because Vince Gilligan is a fellow Richmonder.

The one thing the show has going for it is strong characters.  Bryan Cranston does an excellent job as high school chemistry teacher slowly turned drug lord.  I can see why he has won an Emmy for it.  What I can't see is why he has won more than one.  His character, while not static, is on a very static path.  There is this slow decay, which granted is hard to pull off, but seems once you get the hang of it, it's there.  He really only plays three sides: happy, depressed, ruthless.  I am failing to see why his performance is considered so much better than Jon Hamm as Don Draper.  Draper has dealt with almost the exact same concerns: a secret that threatens life as he knows it, putting on appearances, ruthlessness in the business world.  We also get to see what inspires Draper, what moves him, what really makes him tick.  I feel like Walter White just is.  He is happy he has money for his family, he is depressed his wife left him, he is ruthless in protecting his drug trade.  For a show that really seems to be basing itself on character there isn't quite as much exploration as I'd like to see.

The this Breaking Bad really does not have going for it is plot.  Constantly I found myself 3 steps ahead of the characters on screen.  (SPOILER ALERT) A simple example comes when Walt needs a way to use his drug money on his family without raising eyebrows.  A few scenes earlier his son set up a website asking for donations for Walt's cancer treatment.  Duh.  If I have to connect those dots for you, please watch this show, you'll be shocked by all the twists and turns.  Season 2 also had a big fail moment for me when they teased the pink stuffed bear in the pool and the body bags in Walt's driveway all season.  Maybe it was because I knew that there were 2 more seasons, but I knew that those two body bags did not contain anyone important.  Then the show tried to tie it all together with a Soderbergh-ian moment of (SPOILER ALERT) Walt letting Jane die, which in turn depressed her dad, who Walt met at a bar who happened to be an air traffic controller, who let his depression distract him, which caused a plane crash right above casa de White.  Except all of these connections came a few steps before the reveal. 

The show really fails as far as suspense.  In The Wire anyone could go at any point.  (SPOILER ALERT) Brodie and Poot murdered Wallace for crying out loud!  I don't get that sense here.  Breaking Bad is almost like "Ok so what's going to get them out of it."  To me that isn't good story telling (and it reeks of Entourage).

While Breaking Bad is a good show, I would not put it in the same category of The Wire, Mad Men, or even Lost (at least with Lost you literally had no idea what was coming next).  It has great acting, but not above and beyond it's AMC counterpart.  It is a decent exploration into the human psyche, but again on par with, not better, than Mad Men.  And it has average story progression with very limited twists that generally aren't shocking because it becomes an obvious twist before it gets there.