1. I don’t think the notion of episodes operating as discrete artistic units disallows continuing narrative. Twin Peaks, Deadwood, The Wire, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Friday Night Lights, Sandbaggers, Downton Abbey…I mean, those are just off the top of my head and based on my tastes, but those shows were pretty successful at expressing plot and theme on both the micro and the macro. I’m not saying that every single episode has to start from scratch, just that the form is what the form is, and pretending it’s something else because you’d rather be making a five-year mini-series doesn’t do anyone much good, because regardless of intention your product is going to be ingested as discrete units in an open-ended chain.

2. I guess I should also say that I think that Breaking Bad (at least what I’ve seen) does function in the way I describe above. The story of Walt “going bad” is told in each episode. Critiquing how that story is told in each episode, and certainly over the course of a first season, is not less valid than critiquing the show as a whole – just because later episodes might contradict earlier ones doesn’t necessarily change the earlier episodes.

3. Pulp Fiction is NOT a set of short stories. Pulp Fiction is a single movie made as a pastiche of a collection of short stories. There’s a huge difference. Pulp Fiction is designed and presented as a single artistic experience, not as a collection of units.

4. As per #2, it doesn’t mean that later episodes have to inform critiques of earlier episodes, either.

5. My argument is largely theoretical/formal and I have no opinion on the actual view of killing on display in any of these three works. Or at least none well-formed enough to be pertinent in this discussion.

No, swindling people isn’t OK as long as one isn’t benefitting. However, there are only so many hours in the day that I’m going to spend criticizing people’s conduct. I prefer to reserve it for situations where people are being wronged beyond having their feelings hurt. Until Before Watchmen, there has been nothing DC has done that they couldn’t or wouldn’t have done under a book-industry standard contract in which Moore and Gibbons retained copyright. And yes, I wrote retained copyright. Under U. S. copyright law, creators own the copyright for their material until they explicitly give it up contractually.

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ELMER is a window into an alternate Earth where chickens have suddenly acquired the intelligence and consciousness of humans, where they consider themselves a race no different from whites, browns or blacks, and push to recognize rights for themselves as the newest members of the human race.

ELMER tells the story of a family of chickens who live and struggle to survive in a suddenly complicated, dangerous and yet beautiful world.
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http://alanguilan.com/sanpablo/elmer/

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/105247/what-if-chickens-demand-equality

http://forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/2011/gerry-alanguilan-on-creating-elmer/

I mean, art is theft, always will be. Publishing-the-Business, it appears, is slavery at its core. Not only that, but it strangles the creative theft that bears it, and us all, up.
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Sheesh! Is it possible to cram more nonsense into a few lines?

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R. Maheras says:

…You’re picking and choosing your examples here to stack the deck in your favor. Why should the book publishing industry count and not the game and film industry? I say they ALL should count, since creating is creating, regardless of the industry.
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Yes; in theater, playwrights are treated like royalty, have a vast amount of control over productions of their work. Yet in cinema screenwriters — though exceedingly well-paid — are treated like crap, everyone free to do whatever they feel like with their work. Both are expensive performance-based art forms, but what a difference!

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If anything, comics has more in common with film and video game production than with book publishing, since most productions in comics are collaborative efforts…
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Not to mention, the routine usage in comics of continuing characters, or a specific “universe” created by others…

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Robert Stanley Martin says:

DC deserves criticism for perpetrating swindles for as long as they insist on exploiting the benefits of that conduct.
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(??) So are swindles OK if you don’t make any money from them? (“Just trying to keep in practice,” says the old grifter.)

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…They swindled [Moore] out of ownership, but as long as they treated that ownership as strictly nominal, I don’t see how it mattered all that much. If Moore and Gibbons had retained copyright, I wouldn’t begrudge DC their right to continue publishing the book. It’s standard for a publisher to retain a publishing license for as long as it keeps the book in print.
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Moore and Gibbons didn’t retain copyright, because they never had the copyright to begin with. Don’t have my original periodical issues handy, but in my accessible first Watchmen collection, it notes in the indicia:

For that matter, whatever a creative fiasco Before Watchmen might turn out to be, they’re perfectly in their legal rights to do whatever they wish with the characters.

I think people are hearing me as saying that the problem is that the show is immoral. As I tried to say to Suat, that’s not necessarily the issue. The issue is that it’s been praised for its thoughtful take on morality; for having a unique and profound moral vision. Whereas, to me, mostly its moral vision seems confused and mired in genre conventions that it doesn’t question or even really seem aware of.

2. Breaking Bad is most definitely a sustained narrative. Its intent is tell the character arc of Walt, to show how he turns into a bad guy.

3. Pulp Fiction is actually a set of short stories that share characters.

4. The disadvantage of serialized TV for a single narrative is that once a chapter has been filmed, you’re stuck with it. That doesn’t mean that the later chapters are any less important in interpreting what the story is trying to say than in a film or novel, though.

5. Finally, I don’t take issue with someone only talking about a part of a story. It’s just that anyone who’s seen the last 2 seasons of BB knows that it takes a far more negative view of killing than either Pulp Fiction or Dirty Harry. (Not that I have a problem with Pulp Fiction’s less moralistic take on its characters’ actions. That’s not the point of the film, any more than the point of BB is to critique our health care system.)

But Pulp Fiction is a singular artistic unit, whereas a serial television show is a larger whole made up of individual singular artistic units. By its very design, Breaking Bad has to be ingested and reacted to in pieces. The person sitting down to watch the pilot as it airs has no guarantee that (a) the show will continue as long as its creators want or that (b) the creators even have a plan. Nor is that necessary to critique the pilot, or the first season, as standalone units. This isn’t like critiquing a movie based on the first ten minutes, or critiquing a graphic novel based on one out-of-context page. Noah is addressing what should be fairly complete pieces of a larger puzzle. A TV show may be novelistic, but it ain’t a novel. Different rules apply.