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Breaking Bad

 "Breaking Bad" is about love, sex, and death; it's funny and subversive; it has a snappy, alliterative title and a memorable opening-credit sequence. 


A man abandons his lofty intellectual dreams to become a teacher. Later, a cancer diagnosis shakes him. If there isn't a God, if life can be so random and awful, then why not make some cash in the world of methamphetamines?

Walter White shows smarts in certain ways; he manages the nefarious kingpin Gus Fring, and he extracts himself from Fring's watch (while also keeping his stooge, Jesse, alive). Walter wards off a DEA visit even when his vehicle has obvious "bullet wounds," and he stops a murderous plot by connecting many, many dots, in his head, at just the right moment. At the same time, Walter can be almost incredibly obtuse, especially with his spouse, who is just as sharp as he is. And when Walter advises teenagers not to have sad thoughts about a recent plane explosion, you really can't believe this guy could be such a big idiot. 

In other words, Walter is complicated, and human.

What I really love in this show is the attention to "purity." At one point, Gus discusses a rival drug; it's sort of pure, but not pure enough. (Clearly, Gus is making a statement about the world: Nothing, no one, is pure.) Vince Gilligan shows us Jesse's mother -- and she seems like an angel. She is the long-suffering Oscar nominee Tess Harper. Tess wants to lecture her son about drugs -- but, at the same time, she wants profits from the sale of her house (profits that mean she needs to cover up her own role in managing a drug lab, down in the basement). Tess righteously ejects Jesse from the house when she discovers weed, but in fact the weed belongs to Jesse's little brother, a cherub who plays the oboe. ("Thanks for lying for me," the seventh-grader says, when he sees his brother. "Hey, can I get my weed back?") Purity is also a theme within the world of Mrs. White; we see Skyler slowly altering her own moral code, to permit a dalliance, then a break-in, then an effort to launder some money. Skyler will even enlist her infant daughter in her schemes; one funny scene has Skyler thrusting her sobbing baby at a locksmith, so that she can then feign a politically advantageous panic attack.

I love these characters, and I find they're better and deeper the second time I visit them.

I just wish there were an obvious, new, talented heir-to-Vince-Gilligan -- somewhere on the horizon.
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