Breaking Bad seems to be trying obnoxiously hard. By that I don’t mean that it strives for relevance or for aesthetic bona fides, though there’s certainly a big dollop of that of that in its we’re-serious-because-we’ve-got-cancer-and-also-meth plotting. But what’s most striking about the writing isn’t the angst or the realism. It’s the events. Our hero, high school science teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) has barely been diagnosed with cancer before he decides to become a meth cook, and he’s barely cooked his first batch before his life is threatened by thugs, and then, hey! he’s killed his first man. This is all within two episodes — as far in the series as I’ve gotten.
None of which is especially improbable for television. But that’s just saying that it’s really extraordinarily improbable. The drug industry is very violent, but if everyone who ever got involved in the industry killed someone in their first day on the job, you wouldn’t have a drug industry, because everyone in the industry and probably in the country would be dead I’m certain meth addicts and providers off each other, but surely they usually take a week or so, at least, between violent murders.
Which is to say that while Breaking Bad makes some gestures at gritty realism, it remains a genre television series. As such, it’s driven by the demands of drama; something has to happen. Guns, car chases, sex, dead bodies, lots of messy blood — you get them all and get them often, because that’s what the audience wants. There wouldn’t be much point in watching a show where a high school scientist just quietly started selling meth out of a trailer, made a lot of money, and then socked it away for his kid’s college fund, right?
There’s a very similar dynamic on the very similarly-themed show Weeds. Like Breaking Bad, Weeds is a story about an everyday middle-class parent (in this case Nancy (Mary-Louise Parker) who experiences a personal tragedy (in this case the death of her husband) and so turns to selling drugs (in this case marijuana.) Weeds is played more as comedy than tragedy…but it, too, is tied to the remorseless genre requirements of having something happen. Nancy is constantly being robbed and shot at when she isn’t having sex with a series of more or less unlikely partners, her travails ever-escalating until the end of the third season when she actually burns down her entire town in a fiery apocalypse.
In the fourth season, Nancy’s family heads to the Mexican border, where she hooks up (in various senses) with drug runners. Said drug runners use Nancy as a front; she is given ownership of a store selling maternity clothes. The store has a tunnel going under the border, allowing the Mexican gangs to transport drugs into the U.S. In theory, this should be a dream come true for Nancy; she is being paid a ton of money, isn’t endangering her life, and can actually spend time with her family. She works nine to five, and then can go home to her kids.
Instead of being pleased, though, Nancy is bored — which doesn’t make a ton of sense for the character as we’ve come to know her, but does make a lot of sense in terms of genre conventions. It’s not Nancy who can’t stand the day to day tedium of not getting shot at; it’s the viewers. If the story is to go on, Nancy needs to do something other than sell maternity clothes…and so, sure enough, she (for our benefit) starts poking her nose where it doesn’t belong. Thus she is confronted with a Moral Dilemma. In the last episode I was able to make myself watch, Nancy sees a young woman come through the tunnel, and figures out that the maternity store is being used as a front not just for drugs but for (gasp!) trafficking.
Sex trafficking is here deployed in a wearisomely cynical fashion. Neither the show, nor Nancy, nor the viewers actually care about the woman who we see supposedly being trafficked. She’s just there there to be young and pretty and victimized; a totem of how far Nancy has sunk. There’s never a question of whether or not she wants to be crossing the border, for example — of where she’s coming from, or where she’s going to. Nobody asks her, nobody gives a shit. She’s not a person — just an excuse for moral panic that can move the narrative along.
This dovetails in depressing ways with how sex trafficking is actaully used in political discourse. As Laura Agustin, who researches migration and sex work, argues, sex trafficking as it is usually portrayed in the media barely exists. Most women (or men) who cross a border and are paid for sex aren’t victims of kidnapping, and while they would certainly benefit from more sympathetic immigration policies and a whole host of services, they don’t necessarily need or want “rescuing”. At the very least, they need people to listen to their stories of themselves, rather than jamming them into somebody else’s simplistic genre narrative of villainy, moral commitment, and heroic salvation.
It’s hard to get away from simplistic genre narrative though. As Breaking Bad and Weeds both know, no one wants to sit down for an evening and watch paint dry. Entertainment is supposed to be entertaining; narratives are supposed to be filled with event. We don’t love violence qua violence, necessarily, but we seem to have a hardwired ineradicable bias in favor of having something — anything! — happen. I think that rage for sequence has a lot to do with (as one example) our inability to turn the drug war off. Kill the bad guys, save the babies, experience moral ambiguity, tune in next week. Nancy and Walt and the viewer turn off their own lives and take a walk on the wild side where, we all like to imagine, stuff happens. Narrative is its own addiction. Who wouldn’t, like Walter and Nancy, give themselves over to its rush?
Breaking Bad gets a little less… rapid as it goes on. You get the feeling when you watch more episodes that they were trying to get a lot into those early episodes so that the audience would stick around. There are episodes where very little happens (there’s a great one that’s primarily about Walt trying to kill a fly that’s in his meth lab). It is over the top a lot of the time, though, sometimes a little too much (the recent season’s finale went a little too far).
Not sure from this is you are planning on watching more of Breaking Bad, but I would recommend watching at least into the second season (they are pretty short seasons) to get a better feel for the show.
Both shows do have a issue with upping the ante, so to speak, as they go on. I found that much less successful in Weeds (I think I gave up on it the same season you did). Breaking Bad is better in that respect as it’s covering a shorter timeline and you can’t help but seeing everything end horribly wrong before it’s over (though I guess Weeds is ostensibly a comedy… so…).
Tucker was telling me I should stick it out as well. I may; I didn’t hate it or anything. I’ve started 24 now, though, which I’m enjoying for its glib slickness; it’s utter crap, but skillfully done. We’ll see where I go after I get through the first season of that.
I haven’t watched Breaking Bad, but I always got the impression that Walter White was meant to be more-or-less a maniac. It makes sense to me that a maniacal person would take things way too far and find himself in an extreme situation – I don’t think that’s too improbable. Does the show have escalation problems like Weeds, or is the insanity more cyclical?
Hey Subdee. White isn’t insane in the first two, and the extreme situations aren’t his fault anyway; it’s mostly bad luck and other people being very confrontational. It’s quite improbable.
I haven’t seen later seasons, but folks seem to be arguing that it does not have escalation problems like Weeds.
Is Weeds still going? Have they put it out of its misery yet?
I don’t think Breaking Bad has an escalation problem. It does continue to escalate through the show (though it is, in some ways, cyclical), but unlike Weeds it feels less like the show runner’s are both escalating the show and trying to keep everything “safe”. Breaking Bad is better at showing consequences of the violence and other behaviors, not just in with death (though there is that), but also in the interpersonal relations between characters.
Actually, I think Weeds would be even worse if they were doing things like killing her kids and turning her into some kind of amoral monster.
Oh, yeah, I don’t think they should’ve done that. But the way they kept escalating the drug world conflicts throughout the show but never having anything really serious happen seemed contradictory. It was like they were afraid to just have a show about a suburban mom drugdealer. It had to be all gangster-ish and such.
Yes, I agree. They needed to just have some faith in the characters.
The underlying politics of “24” get increasingly repellant as the seasons progress. The writing also gets worse, though those two things aren’t necessarily related.
I watched the first episode of Breaking Bad recently, and my reaction was mostly “meh.” But a lot of people seem to be giving in praise, so maybe I’ll try a few more episodes.
I just started watching Breaking Bad. It’s pretty good (especially most of the acting), but like you said, it’s a genre t.v. show. A few episodes in, he threatens a drug dealer with an explosive chemical compound (disguised as meth) in a scene that reminded me of MacGuiver.
I actually like it better than what I’ve seen of The Wire (about the first season). After listening to endless hype about how The Wire is the greatest achievement in the history of t.v., I was surprised that it just struck me as a well-done cop show. The hard-boiled affair between the cop and the prosecutor (who call each other by their last names), the “Look at how clever we are!” scene where they kept using variations on the word “fuck,” the tough-guy cop putting a phone in his crotch and then yelling into it, “You just had my dick in your ear!”… It just kept reminding me that I was watching a cop show. The scenes with the drug dealers interested me a lot more than the scenes with the cops, though.
Oooh; anti-Wire rhetoric. I liked the Wire quite a bit, but I think yours is a reasonable reaction.
Less so if you watch more than the first season.
Especially because the other seasons are a whole lot different from the first one…
I guess the focus does move away from the cops in later seasons…though the cop drama never disappears entirely….
I actually don’t find these two shows have a whole lot in common aside from the extremely superficial plot details of someone from a “normal” family getting involved in drug trade.
If you don’t mind me spoiling a few things, I think what Breaking Bad is really about (which doesn’t become obvious until about mid-season 1) is that Walter is (at least potentially) a very bad man. He’s not just a victim of circumstances, or at least not the immediate circumstances of getting cancer. He’s got something really ugly inside of him and it’s more complicated than just being a criminal. Of course, he also has some good in him, otherwise it would be hard to continue sympathizing with him throughout the series.
Meanwhile, Jessie also develops as a character. I had a hard time with him in the first few episodes, but he’s not as one-dimensional as he seems.
There’s a lot of things that don’t quite work for me in Breaking Bad, but there’s enough about it that I like to keep watching. I’m almost at the end of Season 3 right now.
I think superficial similarities are pretty important. It’s television, after all!
Still, I agree that Breaking Bad is a lot darker than Weeds.
I’m not saying the superficial similarities can’t lead to an interesting comparison. But I think you need to watch more than two episodes of BB in order to get there.
Not if you’re just talking about the first two episodes!
Okay, fine. I’m just saying, the similarities kind of end there. It’s kinda like if you were to watch the opening scenes of Lost Highway and Caché and then say, “Yeah, these two movies are obviously about the same thing,” because they both feature a guy receiving anonymous packages with a video tape of his house in it. And, sure, I think it’s fascinating that these two movies have that in common and I’m sure someone can write a kickass blog post about that. But I think it would be even more interesting if the person writing the post watched the full movies and wrote about how they go off in completely different directions.
PS: Maybe I just want you to watch the rest of Breaking Bad because I want to know what you’re take on it will be. Take it as a compliment. :)
Ugh. you’re > your. Sorry.
Well, I may watch more of it! The other reason that they seem similar to me is that I got driven away for similar reasons. But I may go back to Breaking Bad.
Incidentally, I’m really not convinced they go off in that different directions from your description, I have to say. Nancy isn’t a monster, but the series is in part about her becoming a darker character, and even about her being a darker character than she looks like to begin with.
And like I said, I think superficial similarities are pretty important in a superficial medium like television, in two shows that are both avowedly genre entertainment. The narrative imperatives which make it important to have Breaking Bad be about the creation of a monster are similar to those which make it important that Weeds give us a moral message about trafficking. There needs to be danger and darkness if the voyeuristic fantasy of participating in the drug war is going to work.
I think there are similarities at work, particularly the “I’m doing something wrong but it’s for the lofty goal of saving my family” which turns into the “hey, it turns out my actions are really messing up my family.”
For a lot of these serialized dramas, I think it takes time for the writers to settle and build momentum. The Wire and the Sopranos have moments in their first seasons that are thematically kind of clunky and on-the-nose that you wouldn’t see in later seasons once the writers get more comfortable with what they’re doing.
As for the Weeds comparison, though there are definite similarities to early Breaking Bad, Weeds is the ultimate diminishing returns kind of show. I couldn’t stand it past the second season, while BB just builds a head of steam until it’s just about unbearably suspenseful, with each successive season improving on the previous to this point. It’s certainly a pulpy, mind blowing serial, but it has enough depth to it to make it more than just a genre exercise.