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| Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is winning in Breaking Bad. |
«««« Breaking Bad. Created by
Vince Gilligan. Sundays at 9pm on
AMC, starting August 11.
Whoever
said evil is "banal" never watched AMC's Breaking Bad. Whether this
month's final run of eight episodes are good or bad (signs point to
"good"), the show's legacy as a contemporary classic is secure. With
it, series creator Vince Gilligan has joined David (The Sopranos) Chase, Matthew (Mad
Men) Weiner, David (Deadwood) Milch and a few elite others to become one of
true storytelling auteurs in
broadcasting.
It was
five years ago—though it seems longer—we were first introduced to Walter White
(Bryan Cranston), a mild-seeming high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with
Stage III lung cancer. Facing a mountain of medical debt and with little left
to lose, Walter decides to put his knowledge of chemistry to work synthesizing
crystal meth. Partnering with a former student and ne'er-do-well meth-head
Jesse (Aaron Paul), Walter bumbles his way through the art and politics of the
drug trade. Almost against his own expectations, he and Jesse prosper. Through
the show's first five seasons, this reasonable, mostly-decent individual
evolves into a creature barely recognizable to his wife (Anna Gunn) and, more
disturbingly, to himself—yet all the while never losing the sympathy of the
audience. Apparently, the last half-season will tell the tale of what Walter
reaps for the bumper crop of sin he has sown.
Like
any mad scientist, Walter's rationality is his super-power and his curse. His
skill with chemistry allows him to fashion MacGyver-esque solutions to his
various problems with crazed junkies and nosey cops, but also leads him farther
and farther from any sort of redeeming humility. Early in the series, he
jokingly gives himself the alias "Heisenberg" after Werner
Heisenberg, the physicist who promulgated the "uncertainty principle"
that limited what we can inherently capable of knowing (and, one presumes, of
controlling). But by the crest of his criminal ascent, Walter is using his
alias to strike terror into his competitors—no inside joke intended, and no
room for uncertainty left.
Like
all the best series, Breaking Bad is
not just addictive from the very first episode. It also contains layers of
complexity that reward second and third viewings, and which a mere two-hour
feature film could never touch. The comparison with one of those weighty 19th
century novels is more apt than most of us realize. The novels of Charles
Dickens, for instance, were never stand-alone products, but the literary
equivalents of TV series, coming out in the form of eagerly-awaited
installments. Nor do the novels of Dostoevsky have anything over Breaking Bad as tales of moral
transformation set within a perfectly observed social canvas.
Unlike
series like Mad Men or The Wire, Bad is primarily driven by character, not some exhaustively
rendered setting. Nor should it best described as an ensemble piece, like The Sopranos. Though Gunn, Paul, and
Dean Norris (as Walter's DEA-agent brother-in-law) are all terrific, Cranston's
Walter White is really at the core of what makes this show so compelling. While
we occasionally
look(ed)
for redeeming signs of humanity in Tony Soprano and Don Draper, Walter's corruption is
perhaps the most compelling moral arc in the history of television. The show's message—that rationality and
the best of intentions can still have deeply problematic outcomes—isn't new,
but the truth rarely is.
When someone has gone
beyond the point of no return, is there really no way back? Stay tuned.
© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro
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