Woove staff writer Adrienne Rush reviews AMC's Breaking Bad, starring Bryan Cranston.

A common refrain among television critics and viewers alike over the past few years has been something along the lines of “TV is dead!” This is not entirely true. Premium cable (HBO, Showtime, etc.) has long been a haven for bold, inventive, and quality programming—shows that the big networks cannot afford to take a risk on for fear of losing revenue from advertisers who don’t want their viewers (consumers) potentially offended or challenged.  The so-called “death” of television presumably refers to the wasteland of network and basic cable TV, a barren landscape dotted with reality TV and carbon-copy procedurals almost wholly devoid of originality. Channel surfing on any given night might land you on CBS (America’s Most Watched Network!), where odds are you’ll find yourself watching a (what else?) procedural, most likely of the police or medical variety. Nothing wrong with, say, a good criminal drama, until you flip over to ABC and discover practically the same show—simply with different actors (just as blandly beautiful) and different lines (just as horribly hackneyed).

The storylines across network TV and basic cable are, for the most part, all the same: recycled, regurgitated, and shamelessly stolen. Sure there are exceptions, but these are usually shows that don’t exactly break the mold as much as hit all the right notes consistently—think How I Met Your Mother. How then, does AMC’s drama Breaking Bad even exist outside of premium cable, much less near a highly anticipated fourth season? In the words of Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator and head writer: “We shouldn’t even be on the air."1 And he’s right, in a sense. Breaking Bad is good—really, fucking good—too good, in fact, for basic cable. All I can say is, thank god The Powers That Be haven’t yet realized their mistake and laid a hand on the most original show currently on television.

The premise of Breaking Bad is, on the surface, the well-tread ground of a good man forced to do bad things. Bryan Cranston (the bumbling father and only saving grace of FOX’s Malcolm in the Middle) is Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque. Walt’s life isn’t the easiest: he’s got a teenage son with cerebral palsy, a baby on the way, and money troubles that force him to pick up a second job scrubbing hubcaps at a carwash for extra cash. Oh, and barely an episode into the show Walt gets diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. An upbeat black comedy, this ain’t. Dark is the name of the game here, right from the beginning. The first season’s arc follows Walt as he decides to use the one valuable skill he has—his brilliance as a chemist—to ensure that his family will never want for anything after his (presumed) death. His solution? Cooking crystal meth. He’s damn good at it, too, and pretty soon his quality product yields something that is lacking from all other areas of his life: pride.

Giving your protagonist a terminal disease would seem to give a show a short shelf life, and indeed, as Walt’s disease gets worse the show seems to head toward an inevitable fate. But with his ill-gotten gains paying for aggressive treatment, Walt’s cancer goes into remission and suddenly our good guy has no more need to be a bad man. Yet he does not stop. That right there—that moment when Walt, the good guy, supplies bad trades and bad people under no real moral obligation—is where the show becomes so much more than its premise, and it’s where Gilligan and the writers start to get their hands dirty.

How do you continue to root for a man who does bad things not because he is sick, and not to provide for his family, but because he likes it? We’re on unsteady footing now, for Walt is no longer our protagonist—but he’s not an antagonist either. He’s neither hero nor anti-hero, but simply a man struggling to hold on to his slipping moral compass in the face of a world that yields only to those who take what they’re owed. Even as Walt evolves from blundering criminal to reluctant (or is he?) kingpin, slipping more and more into shadowy moral terrain, we can’t help but justify his actions even as he justifies them to himself. But why? What makes us hope that Walt escapes a grim fate when he arguably deserves one?

That question has two answers, and the first is Bryan Cranston. Cranston in nothing short of astonishing as Walter White, as evidenced by his three consecutive Best Actor Emmys (not that those awards are always an indication of real talent, but just trust me—they got it right in this case). His performance at the beginning of the show throbs with a palpable hopelessness, an overwhelming ache to be something before an unfair illness takes his life. And when the cancer is put on the back burner, Cranston subverts expectations by imbuing the character with even more desperation. His Walt becomes a caged animal, terrified of being caught yet refusing to give up a life over which he—perhaps for the first time ever—can exert control. Cranston acts with a fearless physicality, creating in Walt a man who can never quite forget the line between good and bad, yet viscerally forces himself across that line again and again.

If the acting is the bloody heart of Breaking Bad (and it is top-notch across the board, with Cranston the lynchpin), then the writing is its brain—a cracked-out, manic-depressive genius of a mind. Because in addition to the distinctive feature of a decidedly un-label-able main character, the show is set apart from everything else on TV by thoroughly unpredictable pacing. The chronology is fragmented, often anything but linear. A minor plotline set up to fizzle in an episode or two will abruptly throw the central narrative whirling off course. A key conflict that has been simmering throughout a season will erupt—but three episodes before the season finale. Not a single character, no matter how minor, is static. The plotting is tight and deliberate, looping tiny details from one episode early in the show back into the narrative five episodes later. Let’s just say that this is a show that rewards the careful viewer.

And this is why Breaking Bad is so special. It knows how good it is, and expects you to keep up. Not just with the storylines, but with its daring approach to television—a refusal to simply be an action show, or a crime drama. Sure, the show is entertaining as hell and beautifully shot (this is a movie channel, after all), but it also draws an intersection between ethics and money, between family and self-identity, between real sacrifice and death—and it asks you stand in the middle.

There’s a moment in the pilot episode, when Walt is trying to convince Jesse Pinkman (a former student of his) to partner with him in the meth dealing business, and Jesse asks him why he’s even doing this—why he’s suddenly “breaking bad.” And Walt’s response, almost to himself, is: “I’m…awake.” Clearly Breaking Bad is a show about how money and power can change a person, transform him into the very thing he’s vowed never to become. But more than that, it’s about the jolts we get every now and then—a shock to the system that we can choose to either ignore or seize upon. Walter White’s disease wakes him up, and his desperate refusal to fall back asleep is what draws us to him—it’s what makes him most human. I have no doubt that the show will end in Walt’s death, for in the blunt dismantling of its central figure’s morality, Breaking Bad has set its own moral boundaries, and Walt has crossed these lines too many times to make it out alive. But while his body may suffer the consequences of his dark actions, I believe his soul will be up for grabs until the very end.  As long as Gilligan and Co. keep dangling the possibility that Walt might somehow salvage himself, I’ll keep watching, because even Walt deserves a chance at redemption. We all do.