Breaking Bad

Overview

Created by Vince Gilligan
AMC (2008 – 2013)

The first television show that I became truly obsessed with was Lost. As you might imagine, it was a frustrating love affair. And I wasn’t even watching it live! I didn’t have to wait a week between each one of its 121 (121!) episodes. I didn’t have to wait a year between the opening of the hatch and the introduction of Desmond. Still, it was hard not to become disillusioned and frustrated by what that series became (or didn’t become) over the course of six seasons. Here was a show that had maybe the greatest setup of all time and, like Oceanic Airlines, just couldn’t land the plane.

The second tv show that I became obsessed with was Breaking Bad. It’s a series with a more inauspicious start than Lost. In fact, I had a hard time convincing people to watch it at first. I remember one person at a party who told me that if he were going to watch a series about a middle-aged drug dealer, it’d be the comedy about a hot mom selling weed. Although Breaking Bad ended up in a whole other class of show than Weeds, it wasn’t that crazy of an assessment at the time. The first episodes of Breaking Bad were slow, strange, and often incredibly dark.

Ironically enough, it was these qualities that would ultimately set Breaking Bad apart from Lost, Weeds, and pretty much any other show in history. Its approach was actually not dissimilar from something like Lost. Vince Gilligan and his team would think of something amazing (an explosive wheelchair bell for example), put it in the series, and have to write their way to it. The difference from Lost, was that Gilligan and his team were methodical in setting up these moments. They were never afraid to move as slowly and granularly as possible to make these pay-offs work. If you look at my list below, you’ll see most of my favorite episodes are season finales. While these episodes are all amazing in their own right, they wouldn’t be nearly as good without the rest of their seasons, and the entire series, leading up to them.

When I think of Breaking Bad, I think of a series with complete mastery of television storytelling. Some of that was timing and luck. For as much as I have knocked Lost (a show that I do love by the way), it came at a time when series were expected to do 22 episodes a year with no end in sight. A few years later, Breaking Bad had the freedom to tell one story for exactly how long it would take, all while building to a finale that would satisfy its audience.

Still, that freedom shouldn’t take anything from what Vince Gilligan and his team were able to accomplish. Even compared with the other “greatest series of all time” contenders, Breaking Bad stands alone. Series like The Wire and The Sopranos often felt great in spite of the fact they were on tv. David Chase intended for The Sopranos to be a movie. David Simon aspired for The Wire to be a novel. Breaking Bad didn’t just tolerate the fact that it was on tv, it fully embraced the form! In doing so, it was able to tell the single greatest, most pristinely executed, story in television history. Not bad for a show that struggled to compete with Weeds at first.

Season Rankings

4, 3, 5.2, 5.1, 2, 1

Best Episodes

1. Ozymandias – Season 5, Episode 14
2a. Half Measures – Season 3, Episode 12
2b. Full Measure – Season 3, Episode 13
4a. End Times – Season 4, Episode 12
4b. Face Off – Season 4, Episode 13
6. One Minute – Season 3, Episode 7
7. To’hajiilee – Season 5, Episode 13
8. Dead Freight – Season 5, Episode 5
9. Felina – Season 5, Episode 16
10. Salud – Season 4, Episode 10

Season Reviews

Season 1 – 2008
We’re doing it! The last of the “big four” shows (along with The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men). It’s a bit strange to end with Breaking Bad. It was the first of these shows that I became a fan of. Honestly, it propelled me into being a tv and movie person as much as anything else in my life. Rewatching this first season I had such a strong wave of nostalgia for all the times I had seen it before. It was kind of surreal! I remember watching it over and over with my friends, roommates, and my parents. In hindsight, it’s shocking that not only did they all make it through the bathtub sequence in episode two, but that the show became a legitimate phenomenon. Out of these four greatest series, it finished its run by being (by far) the most popular show. Really, the only series in the 2010s to eclipse Breaking Bad’s place in the monoculture was Game of Thrones.

Having said all of that, I really can’t escape thinking how insane it is that this show became as popular as it did. Out of any great show I can remember, it has the least assured debut season. There are some technical reasons for that. The writer’s strike cut this first run of episodes from 9 to 7. There were some major decisions that Gilligan and his team made on the fly, the most significant of these being to keep Jesse alive for the rest of the series. But it’s a strange season, particularly with the knowledge of what the show will become.

The lasting impression I have of Breaking Bad is of complete mastery. My recollection of the series is of nothing being out of place, down to the smallest detail. It’s of anecdotes about how the meth lab in the series was so well put together that one could actually cook meth in it. Yet in this first season, there are missteps! We have threads that the series will never explore. The dangling line about Walt needing to call his mom, for instance*.  And more than in the later seasons, your suspension of disbelief has to be really high. Walt can just disappear for hours and days on end? At the same time that meth-making equipment is being taken from his lab? All while characters like Skyler can smell it on him? Or how about the end of the season? The explosion Walt causes at Tuco’s HQ is amazing, but how does he not blow himself up?

I don’t mean to knock the series. Even in a down season (relative to the rest of the series), the show is unbelievably entertaining. Gilligan, more than anybody I can think of, knows how to ramp up pressure on all his characters. He does it almost methodically. Walt’s talking to Hank? Why not have Jesse call him at that exact moment? But this is the point I’m coming back to. In the first season, Breaking Bad almost strikes me as the most well-done crime procedural in history. Like if you heard some show on CBS was actually unbelievably good. It reminds me of Lost in that way! The big difference though is that while Lost’s first season was its best, Breaking Bad only gets better from here.

*Edited to add: I was totally wrong on this. In Season 2, Walt will use visiting his mother as an excuse to do a marathon cook in the desert. Moreover, Skyler will confirm that Walt has been lying when she calls his mom and learns he was never there.

Season 2 – 2009
Season 2 is often thought of as the weakest Breaking Bad season. Not that it’s weak, per se, but compared against the rest of the series…well, you know. Rewatching this season, I actually think it’s a small step up from Season 1. The main complaint about this season stems from its ending and the events leading up to it. That’s totally valid. Breaking Bad is a series that prides itself on being as realistic and methodical as possible. The end of this season results in a series of interconnected events in which we see Walt’s actions inadvertently lead to a deadly plane crash over Albuquerque. This interconnectedness even involves him unwittingly having a drink with the father of the girl he will let die in the next episode. It’s something that feels ripped from the Lost universe. Moreover, throughout this season, Gilligan and his team heavily foreshadow a disaster. We repeatedly see wreckage and body bags at the Whites’ house. I have to imagine that some viewers felt let down by the fact that these events end up having nothing to do with the central tension of the series.

But let’s focus on the positives because there is a lot to like in this season. And while Breaking Bad was good from the start, I think this is the season where you first see flashes of greatness. For one, this season introduces us to some incredible characters and actors. You get Krysten Ritter’s Jane, Giancarlo Esposito’s Gus, Jonathan Banks’s Mike, and Bob Odenkirk’s Saul. Gilligan also lets Walt and Jesse’s relationship really flourish. Plus, we get to see Jesse as a person outside of Walt’s universe for the first time. I also think this season is a great showcase for Gilligan’s writing style. We see countless incidents of Walt and Jesse being in impossible jams and somehow working their way out of them. It’s something that will only get better as the series moves forward.

More or less, I think that’s the takeaway of this season. In a vacuum, perhaps Season 1 is better than Season 2. It is certainly a much tighter and focused season. But Season 2 is where Breaking Bad starts to feel like the show it will ultimately become. There are some hiccups along the way, but I’m not sure that the final seasons of the series would have been nearly as good without it. I suppose we’ll find out!

Season 3 – 2010
As you can tell from reading these previous entires, I have become a bit consumed with the question of what is the greatest show of all time. Having watched The Wire, and rewatched The Sopranos and Mad Men, all I’ve learned is that whichever show I think is the greatest is likely the one I’ve watched most recently. I honestly don’t feel any closer to being able to say that one is definitively the best. However, after rewatching the first two seasons of Breaking Bad, I did have the sense that for as much as I like it, it was one show I could take out of the running. While its first two seasons are good, they’re certainly not The Sopranos good. So what happens in Season 3? Breaking Bad more or less delivers the greatest season of television ever. So much for an easy out.

So how does Breaking Bad get so much better at this point? The stakes, for one, are much higher. In the first two seasons, Walt is mainly dealing with the prospect of being caught. Here, he has to face the prospect of getting him, and maybe his entire family, killed. What else? The antagonist here, Giancarlo Esposito’s Gus, is not only a level up from Tuco or the DEA, he’s one of the best television villains ever. Along with Jonathan Banks’ Mike, Gus presents a foe that Walt and Jesse can’t outsmart. What’s more, Gilligan brings us behind the curtain for scenes with just Gus. We never had sense of Tuco as a person outside of seeing him with Walt and Jesse. Here, we see just how smart, methodical, and ruthless Gus is. Frankly, we know Walt and Jesse are in a jam even before they do.

As much as all of those things add up to an unbelievable season (which they do), the thing I’m most struck by is the run of all-time episodes that Season 3 goes on. “Sunset,” “One Minute,” “Half Measures,” and “Full Measure” are all unimpeachable hours of television. They also exhibit Breaking Bad’s greatest strength. In each of these hours, Gilligan presents us (and his characters) with an impossible dilemma. We’re forced to root for outcomes that go against our best instincts. In “Sunset” we root for Walt and Jesse to outsmart Hank. Yet, in “One Minute” we root for Hank to survive, even if it keeps Walt and Jesse in peril. This idea is taken to its most extreme in “Full Measure” in which we are forced to root for Jesse to kill an (almost) innocent man, Gale, in order to save himself and Walt. It’s as high-level storytelling as you can do and it’s perfectly executed. Television literally doesn’t get any better than that.

Season 4 – 2011
The end of Breaking Bad’s fourth season is the best any tv show has ever been. It is quite literally the peak of peak tv. I don’t even think it’s that close. I’ve now watched this run of episodes at least a half dozen times and it still mesmerizes me. I can’t even imagine the thrill of watching this run, and in particular the final two episodes,”End Times” and “Face Off,”with fresh eyes. So because of this stretch of episodes, I’ve always defaulted to the thought that Season 4 is the best season of Breaking Bad and maybe any show ever.

Now, compared with the previous season, the beginning of Season 4 is a little slow. Well, maybe not the season premier, “Box Cutter,”  which has one of the best and most chilling moments in the series. But after that, the next few episodes are a slow and steady escalation of the stakes in the series. We don’t have the wild mid-season thrills of “Sunset” or “One Minute.” So in a vacuum, perhaps Season 3 actually has more highs than Season 4?

But, as I’ve already said, the end of Season 4 is the best any show has ever been. So how can I really lament a slow build-up to get there? Especially because it’s in this relatively slow build up that the show establishes so many incredible dynamics. It sets up Gus as an impossible foe and maybe the best villain in television history. It forces what seems like a permanent wedge between Jesse and Walt and even gives Jesse a new mentor in Mike. It puts Hank right on the heels of Walt, Fring, and the entire Los Pollos Hermanos operation. And it forces Walt, without money or a friend in the world, to laugh hysterically to himself as he faces his imminent death in that crawl space.

The best part about these threads is that none of them are independent of each other. Logically you can’t root for both Gus and Walt. But how can you root against Gus when he methodically takes out the entire Don Eladio cartel? Or against Walt as he rigs together the most unexpected explosive device of all time? The same goes for Hank. You desperately want him to discover the truth of Los Pollos and yet that would put an end to Walt, Jesse, Mike, Gus, and the entire series.

The brilliance of Season 4 is that it puts every character in an impossible predicament and somehow works its way out of it. Obviously some characters don’t survive, but even when they die they go out in spectacular fashion. My point with all of this is to say that the last minute of Season 4 remains just about the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. I’ll never forget the first time I watched it. Even knowing what happens, I still get chills watching it unfold. It’s the cap to a perfect season, probably the best in the television history.

Season 5, Part 1 – 2012 
In some ways, the first part of Breaking Bad’s final season feels like a victory lap. Within the series, the table is almost entirely reset. Gus is gone, the meth lab is destroyed, Hank and the DEA are (temporarily) off Walt’s trail. As Walt put it at the end of Season 4, he’s won. I remember watching the show live and wondering what they would really be able to do for this final season. You could have seen a world in which the end of Season 4 was the end of the series.

On top of all of this, Season 5 marks the point at which Breaking Bad exploded in the monoculture. Everyone had finally caught up on Netflix. In just a couple of years the show went from being a hidden gem to prime contender as the greatest series of all time. There’s no way of knowing, but it feels like this knowledge bleeds into the series. Breaking Bad in Season 5 is far more daring and confident than ever before. It almost mirrors Walt’s own cockiness.

Which is where I’ll say that I mean all of this in a good way. I think this swagger was incredibly beneficial at this point. As I’ve already said, Season 5 starts out as something of a blank slate. The show has an almost impossible task. It has to reel us back into an entirely new operation, all while knowing that whatever Walt and Jesse get into, the end is right around the corner. Think about the Los Pollos operation. That plotline extended from the middle of Season 2 all the way to the end of Season 4. The series has nowhere near that amount of time left. On top of that, there’s certainly an element of disbelief to everything Walt does at this point. He just survived Season 4 by the skin of his teeth. Could he really convince everyone to get back into business?

This is where Breaking Bad’s new self-assuredness kicks in. It helps gloss over these inconsistencies and cut-corners (features which had never existed in the series’ history until now). There are a couple of hiccups. Mike’s death feels a bit unlikely. Other plots, like Walt and Jesse’s relationship, feel rushed. But these moments are overshadowed by the thrills of the season. The magnets plot in the premiere and the train robbery in episode 5 are all-time highs. The same goes for the brilliant montages and musical cues. The “Crystal Blue Persuasion” sequence, in particular, is wonderful. Most importantly, this season nails the most important moment of the entire series. In its final minutes, Hank realizes who Walt really is. It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for and the perfect transition to the end of the series.

Season 5, Part 2 – 2013 
I recently wrote about how I had come around on Mad Men‘s finale to the point where I thought it might be the strongest of any great show. While initially I found it disorienting and anticlimactic, in rewatches I’ve admired its subversiveness and complexity. The series closes with each of our main characters in unfamiliar destinations. Pete Campbell becomes a family man, Peggy falls in love, Joan chooses work over a relationship, Don finds (some) peace. I really admired that Weiner chose to have his characters grow and change even when it seemed counterintuitive to the show we had been watching.

Watching the last season of Breaking Bad, I have to wonder if subversion and complexity is overrated. Breaking Bad‘s final stretch of episodes is so good, and so fitting to the show that it is, that you almost wonder if it were preordained. It’s hard to imagine that this is the work of writers sitting in a room and figuring it out. It’s that good! And after watching this ending for a second time, I can’t imagine what it would have looked like had Gilligan and his team gone in any other direction.

Now, Breaking Bad and Mad Men are two very different shows. And while I think Mad Men did right by having characters grow and change in its final stretch, Breaking Bad does right by doing just the opposite. This final stretch of episodes centers on Walt finally reaping what he’s sowed over the course of 4 and a half seasons. It’s not about growth and transformation. That’s already happened. The ending of Breaking Bad is about a man who can no longer escape the transformation he’s undergone. In some way, it’s about whether he, and the people around him, can finally accept it.

What’s really amazing to me about Breaking Bad‘s final stretch of episodes is how it fits everything the show has done before, but to a biblical scale. Throughout the series, we’ve watched as Walt and Jesse are driven against each other. We’ve watched as their plans have gone disastrously awry. We’ve watched how every solution they come up with, no matter how miraculous, just leads to a bigger problem. So how does this final stretch of episodes end? Hank exploits Walt and Jesse’s fractured relationship to catch Walt. Walt’s solution, to have Uncle Jack and the Neo-Nazis kill Jesse, goes disastrously awry. Walt manages to avoid being caught and arrested, but gets Hank and Gomez killed in the process. To top it off, he hands Jesse over to Uncle Jack out of sheer spite.

As a viewer it makes you face everything you’ve rooted for and liked about the series with a new perspective. Walt is acting no differently from how he’s behaved all series. But now, his pride has gotten Hank and Gomez killed. It’s gotten Jesse captured by a group of villains so evil that we can’t even root for them.

Honestly, the series could have ended there if it chose to. It would have been a perfectly fitting, albeit dark ending. But, I have to say, I’m thankful that Gilligan and his team decided to give the audience a little salvation. Sure, Walt can’t right the wrongs he’s committed. But he can use his brain for one more amazing, impossible solution. It’s the best of everything that Breaking Bad has been or done, and it’s the perfect send-off to the series.

Appendix

Attached are reviews from my first two viewings of El Camino, Vince Gilligan’s 2019 Breaking Bad movie. The first is from when the film first came out. The second is from a rewatch after revisiting the series.

2019 Review
In many ways, this is the ultimate tv movie. I think your enjoyment of the film will be a 1:1 correlation with your enjoyment of Breaking Bad. This film does not work if you have no knowledge of Breaking Bad. The film also operates more closely to a television show than a movie. We follow Jesse through what feels like three compressed episodes of Breaking Bad. In the show, Gilligan would meticulously show what his characters were doing before unveiling the central dilemma. It works in that format because these instances are short and contained. We are compelled by the mystery, get a deeper level of the story with a reveal, and return for the solution. This is not how movies are typically set up. Here, for instance, the first act essentially starts with Jesse arriving at Todd’s house. In a normal movie, we would know why he’s there and what he needs. We don’t have that information in El Camino. We follow Jesse simply because we’re already watching the movie. Over the course of the second act, Gilligan explains what Jesse is doing, and the stakes and significance of why he’s doing it. All of that is to say, I think it still works. Breaking Bad is my favorite tv show of all time. This movie is on par with its good episodes, though maybe not its great ones. Gilligan remains the best filmmaker at presenting an unsolvable problem and having his character figure their way out of it. The way the fridge and the shootout unfold are both masterfully done. I did enjoy the cameos and flashbacks. Often, I felt like they provided a deeper level of reason and pathos for the events of the movie. Some of them were certainly more “fan service-y” than anything else. But hey, I’m a fan. This film was extremely well done and continued my favorite show of all time. To knock it for not being masterful feels unfair.

2021 Review
When I first watched this film, I praised it for essentially being three good to great Breaking Bad episodes rolled into a movie. However, that was my assessment after not having seen Breaking Bad since it left the air in 2013. Watching it after bingeing the series, I have to say it doesn’t quite rise to that level. Which, to be fair, makes sense. Breaking Bad is maybe the greatest series of all time. Its stretch-run was as close to impeccable as you can get. Moreover, how could you have a great episode of Breaking Bad without Walt, Skyler, Hank, Marie, Saul, or Mike? My point is that El Camino is good, but it’s not that good. I should say, everything in this movie is, of course, extremely well-done. The performances, the writing, and the direction is all top notch. Frankly, Gilligan is as good as anybody at what he does. But there are some elements that don’t work perfectly. The movie has to employ flashbacks to include the other Breaking Bad characters we want to see. It strikes me that this movie is in a kind of no man’s land. It’s not at the level of the best Breaking Bad episodes and it’s not really capable of being a standalone movie. Still, this is two more hours of Vince Gilligan and Aaron Paul exploring the Breaking Bad universe. I would be a fool to complain about it.