I’m just into season 4 of AMC’s Breaking Bad and will be writing more on it in the coming weeks. But for now, some excerpts from Ross Douthat and Chuck Klosterman, both singing the show’s praises. First, Douthat:
“Breaking Bad,” by contrast, is a much simpler and less obviously ambitious enterprise. It’s premise — a cancer-stricken chemistry teacher, Bryan Cranston’s Walter White, turns to meth-cooking to build a nest egg for his family — is cleverly conceived, but in certain ways it opens into a fairly conventional crime story: Well-meaning guy makes bad choices, gets in over his head, guns go off, etc. The Southwestern milieu is vivid enough (the show is beautifully-shot), but the show is hardly Dickensian in its scope or social realism: It certainly has no ambitions to do for the drug culture along the U.S.-Mexico border what “The Wire” did for the drug culture of Baltimore — or, for that matter, what “Mad Men” wants to do for the culture of privileged white New Yorkers in the early 1960s. Its canvas is more limited, intimate, and even domestic, and its characters’ motivations, while not exactly simple, are far more transparent than the infinitely-ambiguous impulses that move Don Draper, Betty Draper and Peggy Olsen in “Mad Men.”
But there are great virtues in simplicity and transparency. I was struck by this while watching an ad, of sorts, that AMC recently put together to coincide with the “Breaking Bad” finale. It features Jon Hamm offering what no doubt seemed to the AMC suits like the highest possible compliment — a comparison between Cranston’s White and his own Don Draper.
Both characters, Hamm says, “find themselves up to their ears in the more than they can control,” which is true enough. But then he goes on: “The sad part of it all is, these decisions that set them on this path, they make them with the best intentions.” And watching, I thought to myself: That’s true of Walter White — but after three seasons of “Mad Men,” I have absolutely no idea what Don Draper’s intentions are.
This is part of that show’s appeal, obviously: We keep coming back to “Mad Men” in part because we don’t quite understand what makes its protagonists tick. But mystery can be an artistic crutch as well as a virtue, and what’s struck me watching “Breaking Bad” is how much more invested I am in its charactersas human beings than I am in any of the leading players on “Mad Men.” (The supporting characters on Matthew Weiner’s show — your Roger Sterlings and Joan Holloways — are more relatable, perhaps because he’s invested less time and energy in making them seem so intensely mysterious.) If Don or Betty or Peggy were suddenly killed off, I know I’d be shocked and I might even be a little bit moved. But it wouldn’t feel like a punch to the gut, the way many of the deaths on “The Wire” and “The Sopranos” did, because I don’t entirely believe in Weiner’s creations as flesh-and-blood people. As a brilliant (if ever-so-slightly pretentious) screenwriter’s experiments in telegraphing psychological complexity, they’re impressive and engaging and sometimes even transfixing. But I’m not as invested in their fates as I might be if their motivations were a little less complexified, and their psyches somewhat more transparent.
Whereas I believe in Walter White, his family and his friends. They aren’t just objects of interest and curiosity and occasional sympathy, the way Don Draper is; I actually care deeply about whether they live and die. And for all of the artistic strengths of “Mad Men,” that caring is enough to convince me that “Breaking Bad” is the better show.
As someone who has watched all of Mad Men and most of Breaking Bad, I think that’s a fair assessment. Now Klosterman:
Breaking Bad is not a situation in which the characters’ morality is static or contradictory or colored by the time frame; instead, it suggests that morality is continually a personal choice. When the show began, that didn’t seem to be the case: It seemed like this was going to be the story of a man (Walter White, portrayed by Bryan Cranston) forced to become a criminal because he was dying of cancer. That’s the elevator pitch. But that’s completely unrelated to what the show has become. The central question on Breaking Bad is this: What makes a man “bad” — his actions, his motives, or his conscious decision to be a bad person? Judging from the trajectory of its first three seasons, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan believes the answer is option No. 3. So what we see in Breaking Bad is a person who started as one type of human and decides to become something different. And because this is television — because we were introduced to this man in a way that made him impossible to dislike, and because we experience TV through whichever character we understand the most — the audience is placed in the curious position of continuing to root for an individual who’s no longer good. And this is not a case like J.R. Ewing or Al Swearengen, where a character’s over-the-top evilness immediately defined his charm; this is a series in which the main character has actively become evil, but we still want him to succeed. At this point, Walter White could do anything and I would continue to support his cause. In fact, his evolution has been so deft that I feel weird describing his persona as “evil,” even though I can’t justify why it would be incorrect to do so. Gilligan detailed this process in a recent interview with Newsweek: “Television is historically good at keeping its characters in a self-imposed stasis so that shows can go on for years or even decades. When I realized this, the logical next step was to think, how can I do a show in which the fundamental drive is toward change?”
