6. Breaking Bad
What can I say about Breaking Bad that hasn't already? Vince Gilligan's hard-edged neo-western about a terminally ill chemistry teacher turning to a life of crime is a work of legend and a well-documented masterpiece, and I really can't disagree with that. I watched the whole thing a few months after it finished, and that was a time where I was really getting into film and television properly and exploring my love for both mediums. As such, Breaking Bad is a piece of TV with huge significance for, and it quickly became a touchstone for why I fell so in love with the moving image as I did. Vince Gilligan is and always will be one of my favourite artists in any medium, and the world he built here is just such a perfect vision of what television can be: taking a fairly straightforward concept and using longform storytelling to broaden it out into something huge and deeply engrossing
You all know the story by now. Walter White gets a terminal cancer diagnosis and begins cooking meth with a former student of his to make sure his family will be taken care of once he goes. From there, it's a woozy dive into the Albuquerque underworld as Walt and Jesse find that this endeavor might not be as straightforward as they anticipated. The first season of this show is a little slight compared to what comes later, but push through and you'll be rewarded with one of the largest and most deeply compelling pieces of TV ever made, a modern tragedy that speaks to the unspeakable darkness inside us all. Personally I don't think it's about Walt's corruption as much as it is his awakening, where the story is about a bad man unlocking the distressing depths he's capable of sinking to
It built on the difficult main characters that TV was progressively presenting us with, the difference here being that unlike your Tony Sopranos or your Dexter Morgans, Walt isn't presented as a bad man straight away. No, that's something we discover gradually, as he's confronted with the dark forces of the underworld and consistently outdoes all of them by becoming colder and more evil than any of the gangsters he encounters. It makes us sympathise with him before carrying that empathy through his descent into villainy, and the results are striking and routinely shocking. Just when you think Walt hits his lowest ebb, he does something even more deplorable and the stakes become much higher, and often a whole lot bloodier. Of course, none of it would mean a damn without Bryan Cranston. The "whould've thought the dad from Malcom in the Middle had it in him" jokes are easy to make, but Cranston gives an absolute masterclass in every single scene. It's rightfully lauded as a perfect performance and you'll hear no argument from me. His transition from bumbling milquetoast to sickeningly evil kingpin is nothing short of stunning. All hail the king indeed
But every performance here is just as good, and every character is fantastically integrated. I love Jesse's transformation from slack-jawed scumbag to a victim of tragic circumstance, as well as the polarizing but entirely in character hardening of Skyler's heart. Anyone that sees her as anything other than a broken woman suffering from the cold machinations of her abusive husband is clearly missing what the show is going for, and she's really the audience's main link to the humanity of the story for most of the show's run. But my three favourite characters by some distance are Gus, Mike, and especially Saul. The show really comes alive when they enter the fray, mainly because they lend so much more depth and personality to an underworld previously occupied by generic stone-faced gangsters. Giancarlo Esposito is sociopathic perfection, Jonathan Banks nails Mike's eternal dead-eyed exasperation, but it's Bob Odenkirk who steals the show as TV's greatest comic relief. Saul Goodman is obviously a character with a bigger life outside of Breaking Bad, but as a recurring imp flitting out of Walt and Jesse's lives as they float further up shit's creek, it's hard to think of an actor more capable of embodying him than Odenkirk. And to think he was only supposed to appear in three episodes...
It's epic TV, keeping the world on the edge of its collective seat with those legendary final episodes. I've talked about Mad Men, The Wire and Twin Peaks as seminal landmarks in making television what it is, but for me, the golden age officially started with Breaking Bad, with the word of mouth spread and the Netflix streaming boost, as well as the way the show just perfected long form storytelling, making its slowly unfurling narrative as addictive as the product Walt and Jesse were cooking up. The plot progression is forceful and exhilarating; Gilligan excels at a slow-burn so intense that, when things do explode, they do so in a breathtaking and often entirely literal way. All the while, the show is stewing away and asking seriously hard hitting questions about moral decay, social decline and familial obligation. It satisfies both sides of the brain in perfect tandem, a intellectual and thematically rich character study that also happens to be perfect roller coaster television, too
Stylistically it's a total thrill, too. From its giddily borrowed, blood-soaked western influences and the incredible soundtrack to Gilligan's highly distinctive style of shooting from inside barrels and boxes and the highly symbolic reoccurring images that add to the show's mythological feel, the ballad of Heisenberg is rich with exciting creative choices. Again, it really does feel like modern legend, incorporating elements of Greek epics, Shakespearean tragedy, American folk stories and antihero crime cinema to create this really specific narrative voice. It's also got an incredibly deep emotional core, lamenting Walter's descent into darkness and pondering the poison that needs to exist in a man to drive him to this low of a moral ebb. The visual storytelling is obviously striking, but it conveys some devastating truths, too. Gilligan doesn't just know how to tell a story, but to present it visually and match its ideological heft with a delivery of emotion and information that borders on the poetic
Its a show that you can find somewhere near the top of every list of the best shows ever, and for good reason. Breaking Bad really doesn't need any more praise at this point, but the fact that it's so routinely celebrated all the same is proof that it really is the game-changing classic that it's always billed as. And that's the best thing that I can say about it for people who haven't seen it before: it really is that good. It's a show that I think television, and pop culture in general, will eternally be in debt to. It really changed the way I look at how stories are told on screen and invited me to deeper interrogate the media I consumed, and for that I'll always be grateful. Breaking Bad, I'll never forget the special love I have for you
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