Tag Archives: Breaking Bad

I’m starting a twelve-step program for people who can’t stop talking about Breaking Bad

Look, I like Breaking Bad. It’s a good show. But don’t you think that, as a society, we might have crossed some sort of an invisible line? It’s getting out of hand, the daily praise being heaped upon the cast, upon Bryan Cranston. And I’m not trying to take anything away from his performance, from the storytelling or anything like that. But it’s past the point where it’s way too much.

I’m talking about how the phrase Breaking Bad has entered itself into the beginning and end of almost every human interaction. It’s like right after two people meet and say hello, one party is obliged to at least make a reference to Breaking Bad. “How’s it going,” “Good, you?” “Great. Did you see Breaking Bad last night?” “Did I? Oh my God. That was the best hour of television I’ve ever watched in my life.” “Tell me about it! And I thought last week’s episode was as good as it could have possibly gotten.” “Right? I know!”

I went to the doctor the other day for a physical. He sat me down in his chair to look over my preliminary paperwork, and he was like, “So …” and I was filling in the blanks in my head, “So, it looks like you haven’t been to the doctor in a while,” or, “So, I notice that you’re blood pressure is a little up.” But no, he’s looking at my charts, and the first thing he says is, “So, did you watch Breaking Bad this week?”

And what do I say? Like I’ve already made it clear, I like Breaking Bad, OK, it’s a good show. But do I feel it necessary to talk about it with my doctor? “Well,” I told him, “I do watch it, but I’m a few episodes behind.” And he stopped with my papers and looked up at me slowly. “How many episodes would you say you’re behind by?” And I don’t know, my weeks are busy, days and nights have a way of blurring together. “Three? Four? I don’t know,” I told him. And he continued staring at me, clearly concerned, “But … but you do watch it, right? You do like Breaking Bad?”

“Yes,” I assured him, “I do like Breaking Bad.” He looked visibly relieved. “Good, that’s good,” and he went back to my papers. Was he writing that down? Is that pertinent to my medical history? I felt compelled to add something, anything, “I just can’t believe how far they’ve taken Walter White, his character,” and the doctor was like, “I know right? It’s like … wow … they’re taking him all the way.” “Yeah, intense.” “Right?”

And then every Sunday I go on Facebook and Twitter and it’s all Breaking Bad status updates, “Holy crap! I did not see that coming #BreakingBad.” “Just watched Breaking Bad. I do not know how I’m going to make it to next week’s episode!” I swear, I was walking down the street yesterday and there was a guy holding a makeshift cardboard sign that said, “Can you believe what happened last night on Breaking Bad?” and this other guy pulled out his iPad and wrote out a reply, “I know! Right?” and everybody around was just standing there nodding in approval, everyone stuck in awe of how groundbreaking this television series continues to be, and also, that we’re all in on it. You’re in on it. I’m in on it. And you know that I know that we both know that we’re watching it unfold together, the drama of our generation. Well, at least since The Wire wrapped up.

It’s not just social media, it’s all media, new, old. All of the newspapers are constantly running articles, stuff about Breaking Bad heralding a golden age of cable television. The New Yorker did a piece on Bryan Cranston last week and it was almost hagiography, interviews with all sorts of coworkers and Hollywood insiders praising Cranston’s work as the performance of a lifetime.

Again, I’d agree, Cranston is giving the performance of a lifetime. But does it have to leak into every aspect of my life? Can I just watch the show at my own pace without having to compete with everyone I know, trying to prove who likes Breaking Bad the most? Could we just watch an episode and then stay off of the Internet spoiling plot twists immediately after they’ve aired? I like Breaking Bad, but can we, as a species, just cool it, just a little bit?

Regular TV is the worst

I look around at the world, specifically, my world, more specifically, all of the advertisements around the city for the fall lineup of brand new TV shows, and I’ve come to realize that I posses what has to be a superhuman ability to look at just one billboard for a new program before being immediately able to tell whether or not it’s going to make it through even just one season. This power has to be worth something. I feel like the TV execs should be paying me lots of money to save them lots of money. I’m like a guy who can see a train wreck coming, but as of yet, I’ve just stood idly by and done nothing to stop the destruction.

Maybe you need some convincing. Well, my proof is going to be up for interpretation anyway. And since I’m just starting to see the advertisements for this fall, I can’t really point to a ton of this season’s new releases. But, today for example, I saw this billboard for a new show called Park Ave 666. I’ll bet any one of you a solid hundred bucks that this show doesn’t make it to seasons two. What’s it about? I have no idea. Here’s what I do know.

It’s on either ABC, CBS, or NBC. It doesn’t really matter, they’re all basically the same exact network. I see one of their logos and it automatically registers in my head as “regular TV,” like not-cable, like it’s more than likely to be terrible. But it would be unfair and not really that sensational if I were just writing off every single major network TV show. They do something cool every now and then. I’m trying to think of one. I mean, Lost was popular, right? Heroes, while it expanded too rapidly into a red giant of lame disappointment and bloat, it was pretty intense for at least two seasons.

But Park Ave 666, I know it’s on regular TV. The billboard showed some old rich guy giving a devilish smile to the city. How do I know he’s rich? The title has Park Ave in it, and he’s wearing a suit, so I’m pretty sure he’s rich. Why would I describe the guy’s smile as devilish? Because of the 666 part. Without having read anything about the show at all, I’m assuming it’s about the devil living as a really rich person in some penthouse on Park Ave. It sounds awful. And even if I’ve gotten it wrong, the premise of the show, it doesn’t matter, it’s too late. Everybody else is probably already thinking the same thing, and so the advertisers, the marketing gurus or whatever, they’ve failed to make this show even worth trying out. I give it six months.

This is the problem with awful TV shows. They’re usually just copying something that’s already popular and then dumbing it down for regular TV. In the above case, there’s the blatant rip-off of the Devil’s Advocate. But whereas that movie was original, engaging, over-acted, sure, but still pretty original, I can guarantee this TV show is going to have more to do with generic soap-opera non-drama than anything to do with the devil or anything resembling an interesting story.

Everything is ripped off, and it never works. Remember all of the billboards for ABC’s Pan-Am last year? It’s four ladies, and they’re wearing 1960s stewardess outfits, and it’s an airline that doesn’t exist anymore. Could they have made it any more obvious that they were trying to rip off Mad Men? And Mad Men, a show about absolutely nothing other than cool costumes, booze, cigarettes, and non-characters doing non-action and having non-conversations, only marginally works because they were the first show to do it. I can just picture the genius green-lighting team at ABC. “Well, the 60s are huge right now. I’m thinking Mad Men, but let’s focus on the women. And also, stewardesses. And also, I’m terrible at my job.”

There’s a lot of good stuff on TV. But the other ninety-five percent makes me physically sick. What I don’t get is, it’s not like I’m even being controversial here or going against the grain. I’m not even talking about my own personal likes and dislikes. You notice I’m not talking about shows like Gossip Girl or Glee, shows I could never see myself watching, but that I can at least see how they attract viewers and stay on the air for longer than a year. I’ve never met one person that watched Kings or Ringer or Pan Am or any of the other non-shows that perennially sprout and die like weeds.

Can’t the networks just put together a couple of focus groups before they start throwing money at shows that’ll never make it further than a year? No, it’s much easier to look at already successful programs and put together a proposal, something like, “Well, Breaking Bad has never been more popular. So I’m thinking a show about a woman. And she’s bipolar. Right? OK, so she starts making heroin to pay for her bipolar meds. Cool? Terrific! OK, this show’s going to be on channel seven though, so nothing too explicit. And no syringes. The sponsor’s said no syringes. I don’t know, think of something. I don’t know, we’ll call it Shooting Up, or Nodding Off, or Nobody’s Watching. It’s going to be a smash hit!”

TV Review: Breaking Bad Season Four

I just finished watching Breaking Bad season four. I really hate to do this, but spoiler alert from here on out. For anybody who doesn’t watch the show, you really should. So stop reading this, watch the show, all of it, and then as soon as you’re done with the season four finale, come back and read this. Seriously, get to it, it’s going to take you a couple of weeks, dedicated only to watching Breaking Bad, back to back to back, just so you can catch up to where I’m at. I’m not even caught up fully. I think season five is on the air right now. Whatever, I hate watching TV shows as they air, because I always forget what happened the week before. And then things will be getting really interesting and the episode will end and you’ll want so much more, so you stick around past the credits hoping they’ll do one of those, “next time, on Breaking Bad,” type teasers, but every once in a while it’ll be like, “In two weeks, on Breaking Bad,” and you’re like, goddamn it, two weeks? What the hell? And you go online to find out what’s the deal with the holdup, and it’s Labor Day or Arbor Day and AMC doesn’t want to risk losing any viewers who might be out celebrating whatever minor holiday might be getting in the way. But I’m not going anywhere. Just play it!

OK, wow, I’ve gotten myself way off course here. I really wanted to talk about the season four finale. I’m going to try to do this with as little in the way of explaining as possible, but there’s a lot, so bear with me while I completely butcher four year’s of great storytelling into about three or four mediocre sentences. The main character, Walt, is a high school chemistry teacher who starts making crystal meth in order to pay for his lung cancer treatment bills. Over the course of the series, he winds up working for this big time drug distributer. But by season four, the boss wants Walt dead. Walt wins, by hiding a pipe bomb under a wheelchair at a senior center where the boss has come to visit/euthanize one of his old elderly rivals. The bomb goes off, and you see the explosion from outside the old guy’s room. And then the drug boss just walks out.

And you’re like, what the? How could he have survived that? But then the camera pans around and you realize that he didn’t, not really, because you were at first only looking at the boss from one side. As the camera rotates around, you’re shown that the other side of this guy’s face has been completely blown off, like much, much worse than Harvey Dent’s was in Dark Knight. He straightens his tie, and then drops dead.

My point is, the whole season was so good, so carefully written, without a single hole in the plot. Why did they feel the need to add such a gruesome little twist to an already great show? It didn’t need to be done. All it did was freak me the hell out. Just go to Google images and type in “Breaking Bad Gus face” and you’ll immediately see what I’m talking about. It’s the stuff that my nightmares are scared of. And why? It didn’t really add anything. Just the fact that Walt got this guy was good enough. They might as well have had him walking out of the room holding his own intestines falling out of his stomach. And you know what the title of the episode was? “Face Off.” Get it? Because it’s the final confrontation between Walt and Gus. And also, because his face gets blown off.

It’s a pretty lame critique, but I love good stories, and I hate how they are often peppered with unnecessary scenes of overly gratuitous violence. Jesus, I sound like an enraged PTA member here. I’m not trying to make any broad points about society or violence or anything other than, from a purely personal point of view, I get these gross images in my head and they’re hard to shake. It’s why I stopped watching Boardwalk Empire. It’s like, OK, we need to make a show. Period piece, cool. Interesting characters, awesome. Compelling stories, fantastic. OK and let’s throw in a really long scene of some guy getting his throat sliced open, but he won’t die instantly, he’ll hold his hands to his throat to try to stop all of the blood from falling out immediately, and so it’ll be this long, protracted struggle, and he’ll keep gurgling and making all these terrible I-just-got-my-throat-cut-open sounds, and then he’ll falls to his knees, but just before he dies, he’ll take out a knife and stab some other guy right through the knee, not the leg, but specifically the knee, and you’ll hear the other guy’s kneecap crack in half, and all of the fluids underneath the kneecap will just pop, and now this guy will be bleeding too, and everyone’s bleeding, and I don’t even remember what this episode was about in the first place, because I’m too busy trying not to throw up.

I’m not saying don’t have the violence, but maybe just don’t get so graphic in how you show it. With violent scenes in great movies, there’s ways of doing them without zooming in on bones popping through flesh. Isn’t it an old trick to pan away from the violence, and so you only see the shadow of the violent act on the wall? That’s not so bad. It’s like sex scenes. Movies can do sex scenes without getting past a certain level of being too graphic. In fact, I think they have to, because if it is too graphic, it’s porn, and they won’t let you show it in a regular movie theater. And it takes away from the movie anyway. The Dark Knight Rises had a sex scene, but it was like two seconds long. It would’ve been ridiculous to see Bruce Wayne getting it on with Talia al-Guhl for any longer than we already did. What? I told you there were spoilers. So yeah, I guess violence has a similar threshold. Anything too graphic, and to me, it’s like violence-porn. I’m imagining somebody making movies of just crazy gross gruesome nonsense, like a slow motion shot of somebody’s hand going through a meat grinder or something. Maybe somebody would like that, I don’t know. But don’t put that stuff on regular TV shows, especially not the last episode of a really great season.