That's a pretty ominous blog title, I think, but I couldn't really come up with one that accurately describes the subject of today's adventure: my attempt to catalog and express my thoughts on Breaking Bad.
But wait! Don't be dissuaded if you have not watched the television show or have and don't enjoy it. This is all about my thoughts on it, not really the show itself, and, as mentioned in the title - you should care what I think.
For a long time I resisted watching Breaking Bad, Mad Man, The Wire, etc., because I didn't really see the appeal of watching an hour of dramatic television that was, at the end of it, going to make me sad. I will happily devour every critically acclaimed comedy I can - the I haven't gotten into Girls yet, also kind of because it seems like it will make me sad - because laughing is fun and happy and whatnot. And it's much easier, generally, to get into comedies even if you're late jumping on the bandwagon because they're generally less serialized and, again, happy.
In my youth, of course, I watched a fair number of dramas, especially those of the Joss Whedon oeuvre. Now you may argue that Buffy and and Angel were more dramedies then straight-up dramas, which for the most part I'd agree with. But the difference between a show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which got more and more dramatic as the years went on, and a show like Breaking Bad isn't just that BTVS has its moments of humor - Breaking Bad is at many times really a black comedy.
No, the difference is that even though the characters of Buffy are well-written, fully realized and engaging and I cared about what happened to them, I at no point thought of them as real people. Why, you ask? Because the external conflicts that were causing the plot movement of the show were, literally, not real people. They were vampires, demons, gods, bunnies, etc. So as much as I cared deeply about these characters, I did not think that the things happening to them were things that could happen to anyone.
Not so the characters of Breaking Bad or, I theorize, most of the prestige dramas I've so put off getting invested in. The Walter White character - a broken down schoolteacher, wasting his potential at a low-paying high school job, coming to grips with a terminal cancer diagnosis and faced with leaving behind a life that in so many ways falls short of expectations - seems painfully, painfully real.
His decision to start cooking meth? Well, I suppose that's less real, but the way the show handles all the ensuing conflicts is grounded in a realism that indicates this is what really could happen. I got frustrated in the early seasons by the way that Walter and Jesse seemed to take one step forward followed by two steps back (a description Walter himself uses at one point) but I suppose that's actually what would happen if a mild-mannered high school teacher tried to ingratiate himself into the criminal underbelly of New Mexico.
It's this reality that made the show unappealing to me at first - I want to watch television to escape, not to watch the moral destruction of people who I could, theoretically, meet walking down the street. But once I started, that's what got me hooked. Breaking Bad is exhilaratingly unpredictable, just like normal people are. You may know how the plot would unfold if this were a television show, but in a way, it's not, because the characters on it don't behave like they're on a television show (other than the whole meth cooking drug empire thing).
By now you're probably really bored of me thinking out loud about my television tastes and making uninformed pronouncements about what makes this show both uncomfortable to watch and impossible to stop watching. But onward I will push, because I have some thoughts about the episode I watched last night that tie back to an earlier post about why we real people get so invested in the lives of fictional people.
(Plus, it's my ultimate goal to someday write for The A.V. Club, and I need to work on fine tuning my pop culture analysis and online brand. So expect these sorts of entries every once in a while.)
This entry is long and rambling and probably uninteresting and I'm unlikely to edit it for grammar slip-ups, but I promise to end it after the following list. Without further ado, a list of things this show makes me think about, especially thoughts inspired by a powerful scene in the season four episode "Salud" where Walter breaks down while conversing with his son, Walter, Jr.
1. While watching Breaking Bad, I am almost always thinking about death. This would probably be more the case if I was watching the show live, as it happened, instead of binge watching where I generally know what characters make it to what season, but even so I'm never quite sure if everyone's going to make it through an episode - and frequently they don't.
2. As a result, this show makes me think about God, religion, the afterlife, etc. quite a bit, probably more than I'd like to. Because it's so real, I sometimes think of myself as a character in the universe of the show. One of the recurring themes of the show is the interconnectedness of everyone's lives...therefore, what if a decision made by Walter White leads to me getting hit by a car tomorrow? Obviously that's not going to happen, but it still raises the issue in an uncomfortable and stimulating way.
3. The conversation I alluded to made me think about parental relationships in a way the show has danced around before but never confronted as directly as it did last night. The image of a parent literally apologizing, in tears, to his son, weeping that he's "made mistakes" - makes me think about the difficulty of being a parent and the high standards we children hold them to, when really, do we think we'll be any better? It's amazing, I think because of my age I simultaneously related to both the father and son. If your parents have screwed something up, you don't want your parents to apologize to you when you're the child, you just want them to be better. But when you're the parent, you need them to understand that you did your best, and that it's hard. Not being a parent, at least, that's what I imagine, and the show makes me a little bit terrified about that prospect. (Disclaimer: My parents are wonderful people and I love them very much. That doesn't mean that any of us are not flawed people with issues and conflict and all the ordinary parts of such a relationship.)
4. A secondary point on number three, and then I'll be done. The next day, on the episode, Walter and Walt. Jr. have another conversation where the father explains his ultimate concern is how his son will remember him. In that moment, we touch on basically all the big thoughts mentioned above: death, the afterlife and parental relationships. But it also makes me think about a general theme of my life, as I'm a person who's moved halfway across the country and rarely speaks to many of the people I knew in grade school and high school. I know I was annoying then, and I regret it. I think I'm way cooler now, but it doesn't matter, because many of the people I knew in the past already have their memories of me locked in. This is fodder for another, longer blog post down the road, but it's something I didn't even realize Breaking Bad was spurring me to think about until I, you know, thought about it.
So there you go. Now you should go start watching Breaking Bad.
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