(Possible minor spoilers for the entirety of the series Breaking Bad. And seriously? You haven’t watched it yet? It’s on Netflix! Go! Go now!)
By Brian Long
Last night saw the end of Breaking Bad’s penultimate season leaving me and other fans waiting with bated breath to find out what will happen to our “hero” Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and his sometimes loyal partner, sometimes enemy Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul). No doubt if you are a TV fan in any way, shape, or form you’ve heard of AMC’s series Breaking Bad and you’ve also no doubt heard the extreme hyperbolic statements thrown around like “best show on television” and “if Jesus owned a TV he’d only watch this and Little People, Big World.” And frankly, these statements are true. But this article isn’t another tongue bath for the series; this is me asking the question why has this show been so effective and why has the critical praise been so heavy? To me the answer is simple: change.
This should come as no surprise to anyone who is a fan of the series. In the very first episode of the series, Walter White more or less lays out what will become the trajectory of the series to his chemistry class by saying “chemistry is change” and that it is “sudden and violent.” The progression from “Mr. Chips to Scarface” as series creator Vince Gilligan has often referred to it has been a fascinating one. After the revealing and shocking final shot of last night’s episode, it is clear that this is no longer the Walter White who would cook meth in his tighty whiteys. He has grown into the villain we all knew, but secretly hoped he would not become. Part of what makes the series so fascinating is watching that change, and it makes it so refreshing from the average television program where formula is not only the norm, but a necessity. I find this change so refreshing that Breaking Bad has ruined me for other TV shows. As a wise man once said, once you go Break, you can never go back.
Let’s face it. Television is very much a viewer based medium. Accessibility is a key factor in a show’s survival because it makes it easier for the average Joe Channel Surf to stumble across the series and begin watching. Continuity becomes a kiss of death. It is the same issue the comic book industry has been dealing with for years. With nearly HALF A CENTURY of back story for some its characters, how can anyone be expected to hunt down a copy of Action Comics #1 to catch up on Superman stories? So, histories are rebooted, continuity is updated to make it more accessible, and the cycle continues for another twenty years before the status quo is wiped clean again. This same method is applied to television on an almost weekly basis. But from a storytelling perspective, it seems wrong. People grow and change, and so does any good fictional character. Viewers sometimes get tantalizing hints that maybe the show will get a drastic shake-up (House is in prison this season, guys! This’ll probably be totally different than that one time he was in a mental hospital in the season opener and then they never mentioned it again once he was released at the end of the EPISODE) but the status quo will inevitably return in a few weeks and the long time viewers will be patted on the head as if to say, “There, you got your little taste of a new story, now sit back and enjoy the same thing you’ve been watching for seven seasons.” cough cough Everything that has been run on CBS since 1997.
Why should I let this bother me? Am I just being a raging nerd? I don’t think so. I think ultimately it comes down to storytelling suffering if the experiences the characters go through don’t change. Why should I care about any kind of action that a character undergoes if it ends up having no effect on them? Obviously the main character will never die on a TV show, so stakes are already low, but when you remove the idea that the character will experience something and then probably never speak of it again, you essentially wrote a story that could never have happened and wasted everyone’s time. Throughout the course of Breaking Bad, we’ve watched the complete moral decay of Walter and Jesse. The two men have essentially damned themselves and had two very different reactions to their equal and opposite actions. Formula is not necessarily a terrible thing; in fact, a series can easily maintain a formula and still have characters that grow from their experiences. Take what is for my money the other best show on TV, Doctor Who. Doctor Who’s formula is always the Doctor finds out about a problem, the Doctor fixes the problem. But the past two seasons have revolved around two of the Doctor’s fellow time travelers growing and maturing from their insane encounters with aliens and totalitarian robots. In the most outlandish of shows, we find realistic growth and that is truly a spectacular thing.
Breaking Bad’s final season will begin sometime next year and perhaps I’ll end up being wrong. Maybe Walt’s wife Skylar will have contracted amnesia in the off season and forget her husband is a drug dealer and various other components will be reset to their first season status quo, but until that day let’s never forget that change is good, and damn good to watch.
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