Given that I've spent a lot of time in the last week or so, leading up to tonight's season 4 premiere (10 PM EST on AMC!), thinking about Breaking Bad, I figured I ought to try and squeeze a good blog post out of it.
A few quick facts, for those hopelessly out of the loop: Breaking Bad stars affable, middle-aged TV star Bryan Cranston (formerly of Malcolm in the Middle) as Walter White, a genius-level chemist trapped in a high school teaching job which he initially supplements with shifts at a local car wash. He has a son with cerebral palsy (Walter Jr., played by R.J. Mitte) and he's losing interest in his marriage to Skyler (Anna Gunn). In the pilot, he's diagnosed with lung cancer, and turns to manufacturing high-quality crystal meth to provide for his family after he dies, with the help of a former student-turned-small-time-dealer (Jesse Pinkman, played by Aaron Paul). Season 3, which ended on a nail-biting cliffhanger for Walt and Jesse, ended last June. The show has now been off the air for over a year, and the much-lauded third season, in which the show defined itself as utterly unlike anything on the air now or ever, has sparked the discussion: is Breaking Bad worthy of being called the best TV show of all time? The main sticking point is David Simon's still-venerated Baltimore crime epic The Wire, which I will discuss here.
First: I think that this question is a bit premature (but I'm going to talk about it anyway, because I want to). The Wire has five full seasons and a solid finale. Many consider the show perfect; though I admire it, I think it contains glaring flaws. Breaking Bad, on the other hand, has only two full, thirteen-episode seasons (the first was a brief seven-episode run). Also, it has taken some time to find its own voice: the second season is a remarkable work of television, but the third finds a groove that sets it apart. The Wire basically arrived on television fully formed. In time, Vince Gilligan's creation may prove to be a superior work of art. But the discussion will only get more interesting.
So: what makes Breaking Bad a great show? I argue that it is the purest example to date of the sheer potential of television as an art form. AMC has marketed the show recently as an adrenaline-pumping thrill ride, and while those who have watched it know that the shootouts and explosions repeated in every spot are uncommon occurrences and scenes of urgent conversation and tense, occasionally funny confrontations are more frequent, the show's main appeal is its unpredictability. Here, a direct comparison to The Wire proves useful: Simon's show is an ultra-realistic take on the police procedural that overlays traditional dramatic narratives on his bleak view of a crumbling American metropolis. A canny viewer of the show knows that in all likelihood, the bad guy is going to get away in the end, the corrupt politicians are going to keep pocketing your money, and the detectives are going to keep drinking. Simon's editorializing and classical storytelling (the word "Dickensian" is thrown around by journalist characters in the final season) make the show compelling, but not unexpected.
Breaking Bad, on the other hand, feels improvised (and it is, creator Gilligan has cheerfully admitted), but successfully. The second season made use of a recurring flash-forward device to build a sense of dread, climaxing in the finale's apocalyptic repercussions for Walt's actions. Though it was compelling, and there were surprises along the way, you had a sense of where you would end up. Not so in the third season: a threat is introduced in the very first episode which has the feel of an over-arcing plot thread, but at the end of the very next episode, the same threat comes knocking on Walt's front door. The writing staff toss aside convention and classical story arcs for the sake of constant unpredictability and even an episode which stops the plot dead in its tracks to give us a one-act play peeling back the layers of our heroes (in the loosest sense) even further, the only anchors for the audience remaining the astonishingly well-developed characters of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman.
(An aside: as boneheaded and frustrating as the Emmys can be, Cranston's three consecutive Best Actor prizes are well-deserved. I challenge anyone to watch this entire series and name a better performance by an actor in the history of television. Also, I get great pleasure out of watching Michael C. Hall grimace and golf clap year after year. Aaron Paul also stepped up his game significantly in the third season, and struck gold last year as well.)
So what makes Breaking Bad better than The Wire? For me, it's simple. Any blogger or essayist waxing effusively about the virtues of Simon's benchmark show will inevitably drop the phrase "novelistic" into their discourse. To be sure, TV is not the same as cinema. But Simon is not a born filmmaker, and he knows it. The series is lacking in visual energy and unfolds, indeed, like a novel, each episode a chapter (Simon even includes an epigraph quotation after the theme song). The show is dense with procedural detail and long conversations in which even the most diabolical hood rat proves capable of uttering a profound analogy for the broken political systems of Baltimore.
Does this make The Wire a bad show? By no means. But it's not pure television: it's the work of a print journalist with a message so urgent and well-formed he didn't see the need to examine the medium's particular strengths and weaknesses. I often think that Simon's writing style, in which everyone speaks with his distinctive, literary voice, would have been better suited to a massive crime novel. But there's also the argument that The Wire, along with Arrested Development, broke down the conventions of conservative, episodic television (the police procedural, or the sitcom in AD's case) and showed the potential for invention within the boundaries of an hour-long drama.
But I would also argue that Arrested Development's importance to the existence of Party Down or Community does not necessarily make it better than either of those shows. Just as Breaking Bad's endless narrative experimentation and boundless visual energy elevates it above the comparatively conservative, occasionally preachy tone of The Wire (a character introduced in season 3 basically exists to function as Simon's mouthpiece and give monologues about how broken the system is, a cringe-worthy misstep). If all that separates television from cinema is the convention of episodes rather than individual short films (see FX's Louie), then the episodes themselves can defy narrative expectations in a way that feature film couldn't, at least without becoming "experimental" and losing its audience.
Argument in a nutshell: The Wire proved that it was possible to make a TV show that wasn't just trying to be entertaining TV. Breaking Bad establishes itself as a show that's not trying to be a movie, or a novel, or a theater piece. It's trying to accomplish the most within the medium of television by taking advantage of its strengths and remaining constantly restless, looking for the next big leap into what the audience won't see coming. In this way, it's a groundbreaking show, and in a way that The Wire and AD, each existing half-in-half-out of well-trodden TV territory, never were.
[If this clumsy essay has inspired you to check out BB, don't make the mistake of tuning in for the current season without catching up from the very beginning. Three seasons of twists and turns and constant character evolution should be experienced as purely as possible.]
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