The
best series ever? John Connors goes back to the start to watch the seasons 1
and 2 of the astonishing Breaking Bad.
When enough people describe a programme as the best ever
it’s bound to make you want to give it a try though this can pall when every
new US drama is heralded thus (and by implication every UK drama is the
opposite). Nowadays you can’t move for
people extolling the brilliance of Breaking
Bad which is strange as the series has recently concluded. Has there ever
been a series ending just as everyone decided it was amazing? The general rule
is that great programmes are in decline when they stop or else they are
prematurely cancelled. Breaking Bad
appears to have concluded at exactly the right moment judging from the reaction
to this month’s finale. Meanwhile, enticed by its glowing tributes I am
starting back at the beginning. The down side is trying to avoid spoilers, the
upside is that I won’t have to wait a year to move from one season to the
next. I could watch it all over the next
few days if I wanted in a Walter White type frenzy! Will it be the best series
ever?
NB There will be spoilers aplenty in this article though
they won’t necessarily make sense unless you’ve seen it.
I remember vaguely hearing about Breaking Bad when it was due to start and to be honest, I couldn’t
think of a drama I’d less like to watch than the tale of an ordinary, rather
dull man who learns he has a terminal illness and starts dealing drugs. Really?
That’s entertainment? I was probably also biased by the fact that I’d watched
the first two seasons of the not dissimilar Weeds
(suburban housewife starts dealing drugs to earn money) and found it rather
dismal. There is generally nothing as uninteresting as shady drug dealers in a
drama because they are all the same; you almost know what they will say before
they say it. Anyway, years have gone by and I’ve not really heard many people
going on about Breaking Bad until
2013. Before this year, it was Mad Men,
Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones that seemed to be the
holy trinity of modern US television drama. I’ve seen them and, yes, they are
good, but is every episode pin sharp and surprising? Is every character as
fascinating as the next? Not really. Not that we usually expect it to be. Breaking Bad on the other hand seems to
have set the bar higher. So high in fact, it is already becoming an all time
classic, something like I, Claudius that
will transcend its era and become a byword for brilliant tv drama.
“I’m awake” declares Walter White, dull but genius
brilliant science teacher soon after he not only discovers he has cancer but
due to a chain of events is cooking crystal meth of such a high quality that he
is propelled into a shady world you and I and most people never encounter. And;
first shock- he’s the Dad from Malcolm in
the Middle! It’s very rare for an actor to accrue two signature roles in a
career but having been the stand out in the excellent madcap comedy that was
supposed to be about the kids but really was about the parents, here’s Bryan
Cranston who I always knew as befuddled Hal driving an RV through the desert (without
his pants) before making a frantic message to his family and then pulling out a
gun! Is there a more intriguing way to start a series? It demands you watch
more to at least find out how he got here. Breaking
Bad seems to relish these sorts of scenes. Season 2 has many- the Mexican
drug song video, the rocking car, the pink teddy bear in the swimming pool. Yet
this is no ruse because the episodes unfold and conclude as perfectly as they
begin.
Being that it’s a series about drugs it is not surprising
how addictive Breaking Bad becomes.
Each episode moves things on to such a point that you cannot resist watching
the next, preferably the following minute! How is it that the writers can make
a show with such a potentially depressing premise so vital? Well when you find
you have limited time left I imagine you’d want to do as much with it as you
can, right? Walt’s brother in law happens to be a police officer so he knows a
little about the drugs trade being the sort of area where you can make
thousands easily and that, combined with an accidental encounter with a former
pupil leads to the immortal phrase “let’s cook!”
Jesse Pinkman, former underachieving pupil of Walt’s has
dealt small but with the product “Mister White” cooks up is moving to another
level. Walt and Jesse are Laurel and
Hardy or Morecombe and Wise or something like that. Their personal chemistry seeps
from the test tube and the lab into a double act that, at various times,
encompasses parent / child, teacher / pupil, psychopath / stoner. Whatever they
do- or fail at doing- it is compulsive viewing. There’s a season 2 episode
where we spend most of the running time with just the two of them in the desert
and gradually things unravel to the point where they are left stranded without
water or any means of communication. Most shows- indeed most writers and
certainly most actors- would struggle to hold your attention in such a scenario
but this episode seems effortlessly entertaining and at times surprisingly amusing.
"Yo, can you get the Internet on that thing?" |
Between them Bryan Crantson and Aaron Paul (who plays
Jesse) can hit every dramatic note and make it interesting. The writers have
lots of fun pulling them apart, making Jesse different levels of stupid (the
acid in the bath, the key in the ignition) and Walter overbearing and dangerous
(the clothes shop incident where his son is insulted, the sudden urge to blow up
the car of a motorist he doesn’t like) yet we are with them all the way.
Cranston can be terrifying especially once he loses his hair yet he never gives
in to melodrama. Instead, Walt simmers for much of the time, punctuated either
by volcanic outbursts of rage or simpering lies to his long suffering wife
Skylar. Jesse is mid- twenties but behaves like he’s ten years younger with out
of date garish baggy attire and an attitude that frequently brings him into
conflict with Walt’s cleverness. It’s odd to discover that the original
intention was to kill off Jesse in the episode when he is seriously hurt. This
inspires one of Walt’s most bravura early moments when he walks into the den of
the assailant and lets off home made explosives. How the show would have survived
without Jesse is unimaginable really. Luckily the producers saw the two
together and realised they had acting gold. It’s worth saying too that even
when apart both Cranston and Paul tear through scenes with aplomb. I had a
notion that it would be amazing to see them do some Shakespeare together.
Let’s not forget that the show is about more than just
the two of them though. There’s Anna Gunn who gives Skylar dignity and
fortitude yet you can see the suspicions about her husband’s disappearances and
strange behaviour. That she is also heavily pregnant adds to Skyler’s dilemmas.
Her scenes with Walt are studies in marriage woes and how awkward it is dealing
with such a major bolt from the blue. The scripts delight in Walt’s lies to her
personified by a fabulous scene where he is offering the lamest `explanation`
as to why he might have seemed to have had a second phone where you see
Skylar’s face change as the whole thing becomes less and less likely. They have a son, Walt Junior who has cerebral
palsy and, this being the series it is, is not used to be the show’s moral
conscience. Skylar’s sister and her husband seem more mis matched the Whites. His
macho sarcasm hides panic attacks while she steals. Season 2 introduced more
people to the mix including Krysten Ritter as Jane an ex-junkie girlfriend for
Jesse and the garrolous Bob Odenkirk as Saul Goodman an ironically named lawyer
who provides surprising help. Anyone who saw him in his younger days in The Larry Sanders Show will know what a live
wire he can be.
The scripts so
cleverly work in just enough justification for us to go along with it. At times
it is so subversive, you don’t even know what you are watching! Take the
episode where they nick a barrel of chemicals from a supposedly secure factory.
This is presented as near slapstick and makes you laugh yet what they are doing
will have dangerous implications. More than that, you are rooting for them to
get away with it. How’d that happen? The show revels in such anarchic plot
lines; comedic arguments between them over who will kill someone, the almost
interminable day Jesse spends in the company of a drug addled couple in their
run down house. Perhaps the best one from the first two seasons is their
sojourn as prisoners of crazy drug dealer Tuco in his remote house. What other
shows might offer simply as a tense, sweaty siege slowly morphs into a
hilarious series of incidents involving Tuco’s aged mute uncle and the bell he
uses to communicate.
Of course, the argument against the show would be that we
should not be cheering for people like Walt and Jesse because their success
brings trouble to people’s lives. Breaking
Bad walks quite a line between moral uncertainty and legality. Does it
glorify the cooking and selling of crystal meth? Well a look at the very last
scene of the first season would say not but it is the case that nothing the duo
have done so far had happened without plot justification. In fact the show has
seemed to deliberately steer away from making judgments and to that end the
messages at to what is and isn’t legally right is essayed by Hank and this is
not sent up in any way. Indeed, we do get the perspective of the law for
example one incident where a police informers ends up in a very tricky
situation involving a tortoise.
If you like, the morality of the show is most present in
Jesse who, while no innocent, seems at this juncture less certain about the
more violent acts Walt sometimes wants him to pursue to maintain their place in
the city. To say he just wants to have a good time is not quite the case
though, in the early episodes we learn about his parents’ disappointment in and
eventual ostracising of Jesse. The character does view many things through the
eyes of a child and this enables an effective counterpoint to Walt. Had Jesse
been written as some sort of nastier character the dynamic would be wrong.
Walt’s viewpoint is more complex though not necessarily more mature. He has
bottled up rage which sometimes explodes, he starts his journey into crime for
his family though there are already signs during season 2 that he is learning
to selfishly enjoy his new sideline. His declarations about his `territory`
make him sound almost like the vicious Tuco and we see quite early on Walt is
capable of physical brutality.
The picnic was ruined when they realised they'd forgotten the salad dressing |
The one aspect of the show were I suspect most viewers
are prepared to be led unknowingly is the science of it. Various scenarios
require Walt to spout all kinds of chemical knowledge and he soon takes on the
mantle of Heisenberg who was a real life German theoretical physicist who
rather gloriously invented something called The Uncertainty Principle which
pretty much sums up Walt’s situation. Don’t bother Googling him because it’s
all the kind of stuff that only Physics geeks would understand, unless of
course you are a Physics geek though you can find out where to buy a Heisenberg
Hat as worn by Walt’s alter ego.
Breaking
Bad
is as much a metaphor about a mid life crisis as anything; about lost
possibilities and potential and how some people seem to get ahead whereas
others are left behind. This fuels much of Walt’s inner rage but is never presented
without large dollops of self doubt. There is a striking moment when Walt
declares that when he first learned he had cancer he thought “why me?” and now
he learns his tumour has shrunk by 80% he still thinks “why me?”. Perhaps he
can only carry out the acts he does because he assumes he will soon be no more
and it will be interesting to see how this plays out as he continues to live. One
curious element is Walt’s contradictory behaviour especially at the end of
season 2. He goes out of his way to save Jesse from substance induced oblivion
after Jane’s death yet days earlier had earned over a million dollars selling
all his remaining meth to another dealer something he also missed the birth of
his daughter to undertake. It is as if he is slowly substituting one family for
another though he may also be excising his guilt over his complicity in Jane’s
death. The whole issue of whether Walt actually likes Jesse or not is an interesting
undercurrent because he ends up doing more for him than you would expect.
Season 2 is a master class in plotting as various strands weave together in an audacious final episode that ends with a mid-air plane collision that leads to that strange image of the burned pink teddy bear floating in Walt’s pool which has been popping up from time to time thus ending the season with the same image with which it began. How this happens to be could be construed as just a bit too clever; after all what are the chances of these coincidences coming together? Yet it’s as much the way it’s done as what is done that impresses. Storylines intermingle in a way that provides surprises galore because we only see half of it. Skylar’s deconstruction of Walt’s mountain of lies - which incidentally Anna Gunn delivers with such grace and restrained anger – is kicked off by two words (“which one?”) and all happens in one subsequent scene. The revelation of Jane’s father’s occupation is so left field that you are left open mouthed when things go wrong and all of a sudden the body bags outside the White’s house make sense too. This ability to know what to show and what to tell overrides any doubts that would otherwise linger about the verisimilitude of what we are watching. Vince Gilligan says he was partly inspired by Ray Bradbury’s classic sci-fi story The Sound of Thunder in which an accident involving a time traveller in prehistoric times alters all subsequent history.
Season 2 is a master class in plotting as various strands weave together in an audacious final episode that ends with a mid-air plane collision that leads to that strange image of the burned pink teddy bear floating in Walt’s pool which has been popping up from time to time thus ending the season with the same image with which it began. How this happens to be could be construed as just a bit too clever; after all what are the chances of these coincidences coming together? Yet it’s as much the way it’s done as what is done that impresses. Storylines intermingle in a way that provides surprises galore because we only see half of it. Skylar’s deconstruction of Walt’s mountain of lies - which incidentally Anna Gunn delivers with such grace and restrained anger – is kicked off by two words (“which one?”) and all happens in one subsequent scene. The revelation of Jane’s father’s occupation is so left field that you are left open mouthed when things go wrong and all of a sudden the body bags outside the White’s house make sense too. This ability to know what to show and what to tell overrides any doubts that would otherwise linger about the verisimilitude of what we are watching. Vince Gilligan says he was partly inspired by Ray Bradbury’s classic sci-fi story The Sound of Thunder in which an accident involving a time traveller in prehistoric times alters all subsequent history.
So, at the end of the first 20 episodes is Breaking Bad as amazing as people say?
Of course it is, in fact it is rare to find a show that exceeds the hype made
around it. Time to move on to season 3!
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