I watched all of Season One. SPOILER WARNING
* Breaking Bad started off a lot broader than I expected. And I’ll be honest, it was hard not to hold that against the show, no matter how many times I reminded myself that The Sopranos spent two seasons as a black comedy about men trying to kill each other over cunnilingus and things like that.
* Mind you, the core family was fine the whole time. Bryan Cranston exudes the air of an actor who knows he has the role of a lifetime every moment he’s on screen. R.J. Mitte portrays Walt Jr.’s disability exactly the way he should, like an otherwise normal teenage kid dealing with one extra layer of crappiness. And though Anna Gunn’s Skyler is written a wee bit too pointedly oblivious to what’s really going on with Walter now and then, she’s certainly believable as a basically happy person suddenly being made to struggle with issues that threaten that happiness, financial and physical alike.
* But everyone else? The bulldog back-slapping brother-in-law, with his off-color remarks and gung-ho DEA attitude? The unbearable sister, meddling and judgmental and prone to referring to people as being “on marijuana”? Jesse Pinkman, a Slim Shady caricature who says “what up, biatch?” on his outgoing answering machine message? Various ésé-spouting Mexican-American gangsters blaring generic hip hop out of their cars and stereo systems? Nuance is hard to come by here.
* Then I started struggling with Walter’s actions, too. There was something too pat about the way he approached, say, disposing of a body like grading a quiz at work. I know that that’s what movies tell us that mild-mannered people suddenly drawn into life-or-death criminal enterprises would do, but a nervous breakdown seems like a far more likely result. The fact that that storyline devolved into splatstick with the bathtub full of dissolved body parts crashing through the floor didn’t help matters.
* I did buy the way he went about figuring out to do with the imprisoned Crazy Eight — basically coming right out and saying that he was bonding with him in an attempt to prevent himself from being able to kill the guy. And I bought the little touches in that storyline, too, from giving him hand sanitizer to use after he relieves himself in the bucket, to the way he wished aloud that Crazy Eight hadn’t hidden a shard of the broken plate to use as a weapon when he first discovered that it was missing. But after the deed was done, it seemed to weigh no more heavily on his mind than the secret of his cancer diagnosis, or whether or not to go back into cooking meth, or whether to accept money from his old lab partner, or whether or not to forgive Skyler for tipping the guy off about the situation in the first place, or whether or not to get treatment…I just had a really hard time swallowing that killing two people, including one time by hand, wouldn’t totally eat him alive.
* But a couple of moments toward the end of this short first season sold me on it enough to keep going. Well, that’s not quite fair — I’d probably have kept going regardless, it’s a perfectly entertaining show. But these moments made me think that maybe it could go from perfectly entertaining to hanging with the big boys.
* The first was the intervention scene, when Walter’s family tries to convince him to get treatment for his cancer. In particular, you could feel the actors playing the in-laws reacting to this material, much better than what they’d been given so far, like drowning animals getting their first big gasp of saving air. The sister was suddenly allowed to show both genuine compassion and express a viewpoint that didn’t conform precisely to our received wisdom about What Assholes Think and Do. Skyler’s benevolence, her facade of creating this safe space where everyone could speak their minds freely, was complicated refreshingly by her simple desperation to keep her husband alive. (Understandable! But not saintly, and that’s the point.) Walter was finally given the chance to truly hash out and articulate how crushingly unfair he felt the cancer to be in a life already proscribed and fenced in by things he never quite felt within his control. Even the buffoonish cop brother had a chance to visibly struggle with his own inability to express complicated, serious ideas in a fashion commensurate with their complexity and seriousness; by the end of the scene, he was quietly crying, though neither the filmmakers nor the actor made a big deal out of it, to their great credit. It was a beautifully done scene, one that convinced me that these were people who contained more than was visible on their surfaces, and/or that the filmmakers were up to the task of showing that to be the case. (There was a parallel track in that episode that, while not quite up to the intervention’s standards, helped flesh Jesse out in a similar fashion: His ability to convincingly clean up for a job interview, his crushed hopes when he realized what he’d be relegated to doing if he were to get the job, his lack of comfort with falling right back into his old ways given what he’d been through, his disappointment in himself for not being able to live up to the standard he and Mister White had set.)
* The second came a couple of episodes later, after Tuco beat Jesse up and stole his meth and money, when Walter goes to Tuco’s place to steal it back. When he gets back to his car after blowing up the room and working out the deal with the stunned but impressed Tuco, he lets out a primal growl of exhilaration, pumping his fists and pounding on the steering wheel. And suddenly I could understand why the murders didn’t destroy him like I thought they would — like I thought they ought to, frankly; suddenly his fun but kind of cheap outbursts of vigilante justice — roughing up the bullies in the clothing store when they made fun of Walt Junior, blowing up the loudmouth Bluetooth guy’s sportscar at the gas station — seemed less like “hey, wouldn’t it be funny if we ended the episode like this?” and more like signposts on a road to a destination. The destination being “Walter White is actually dangerous inside.” For whatever reason, some innate tendency toward risk-taking, thrillseeking, intimidation, and violence that had never had a chance to express itself until now was out, and the mild-mannered science teacher was now a bald-headed suicide bomber growling out his triumph with a lap full of hundred dollar bills. When they called the show Breaking Bad, they didn’t just mean going bad in terms of breaking the law — they meant that some rough beast was slouching toward Albuquerque to be born.
* And that’s the fundamental difference between Breaking Bad and all of the other shows I’ve watched that I’d consider to be the Great TV Dramas. The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, Mad Men, Battlestar Galactica, Twin Peaks, even the less self-consciously Great Lost or the flawed Boardwalk Empire or the very young Game of Thrones were basically stories about men and women dealing with the consequences of moral codes they’d formed long ago and adhered to for years. Even in cases where circumstances recently changed for them in such a way as to force them to confront those consequences much more urgently or directly — a new sheriff in town, a new Hand of the King, a plane crash on a mysterious island, interplanetary robot genocide — the value systems we saw them working with were already in place before the cameras started rolling. On Breaking Bad, however, Walter White is becoming a changed man before our eyes. At times it’s just as baffling to us as it is to poor Jesse. In the end, I suppose it’s no surprise that I finally cottoned to the show when I felt like I’d gotten the lay of the land for what he’d changed into, and how he’d behave from now on. Suddenly the show had become the kind of show I’m familiar with as being prone to greatness.
* The show really lucked out in this respect: What a fucking transformation from Bryan Cranston simply by shaving his head! From “Dad who enjoys his daughter’s soccer games” to “police still have yet to identify several of the bodies found in the crawlspace” with the glide of a hair clipper. Years of closely reading comic books and learning to take every aesthetic quality as an intentional vector of story or tonal information has left me really fascinated by the impact a character’s mere physical appearance can have on the story he’s in, and this is as good an example of that as Jon Hamm’s prodigious handsomeness making Don Draper bearable.
* It also paid more attention to the aural dimension of filmmaking than probably any of the shows I listed above save, I dunno, Twin Peaks? The drones and buzzes in Walter’s head when things are going really badly for him are a totally effective tool in their arsenal. I don’t know why more shows wouldn’t go for that kind of thing.
* And let’s be honest, I’m predisposed to appreciate any show that uses its lead character’s relative willingness and ability to slip it to Anna Gunn as a barometer for his state of mind. (Although is it really a barometer of anything but whether or not he is a living heterosexual male with a functioning penis?)
* Anyway, I thought the very last episode was a bit anticlimactic. I like that Walt’s thinking big with the meth operation, and again, I’m deeply okay with rogering Anna Gunn. But the main takeaways from this episode — that Walt can go toe to toe with a druglord and that said druglord is an enormously unpredictable and violent meth-addled lunatic — were already established with much higher stakes in the previous episode — instead of hosting tense junkyard meetings, Walt blew up Tuco’s office; instead of proving Tuco’s propensity for violence by beating up some unnamed underling, the show proved it by beating up Jesse. But even still, I’m excited to see if my armchair psychoanalysis of Walter holds water in the following seasons. What up, biatch.
