Breaking Bad: Perfect Reception
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
This is an entry in our Perfect Reception series. Submit your favourite television series for review here!
A young whipper-snapper of a writer was working on the (possibly) extraterrestrial peculiarities of an incredibly popular science fiction drama, right in the middle of its zeitgeist. The X-Files is well known in pop culture for its blending of police procedurals and the unknown, but there’s something else that really caused the show to have staying power with all walks of life. I don’t think its unveiling of the underbellies of American suburbia gets recognized enough, because these moments are the ones that connect these stories with us (or people we know or have heard of through word of mouth). The aspiring screenwriter who was there in the crux of The X-Files’ golden years went from a consultant to one of the main producers throughout the run of the show. That visionary is Vince Gilligan, and he would soon find out that he was destined to tell stories on television (although not in quite the ways he already accomplished thus far).
2001 saw the X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen’s lone season, but it was a series he actually created (showing he could extend the universe that Chris Carter previously created). The conspiracy theories that worked as the foundation of this series (slightly different from what you’d find Fox Mulder pining after) were similarly events that felt like they could have come from our world; the main thing is that this show and The X-Files were obviously strange enough that they felt possible, but not like they could be happening right here and right now. Still, the idea that unspeakable activities could be happening around us is something that Gilligan seems to have been obsessed with, but maybe the unknown wasn’t his absolute calling. After The Lone Gunmen’s cancelled season came A.M.P.E.D.: a pilot that never even took off the ground. This series was meant to concern an epidemic, so I’ll keep the description of this show brief for obvious reasons in this day and age. I will say that, once again, Gilligan was fixated on the abnormalities that affect normal lives in all parts of America.
An idea percolated in Gilligan’s head over the years, and it was one of his and Thomas Schnauz’s possible termination during or after The X-Files (Schnauz also wrote for the show): they would likely have to go out into the desert, cook meth in an RV, and tour around and sell to anyone and everyone to get back on their feet. Gilligan was clearly aware of the imbalances within the American economy: people have to do the worst possible things to be able to stick around and live longer. At any point, one’s job could be compromised. Someone could be stricken with illness. A disaster could take it all away. Whatever of these issues occur, the result was always the same: you’d have to start back at square one, now with more responsibilities, bills, and necessities than when you were a child who was taken care of. To stay alive, one might have to commit the unthinkable. It’s something that Gilligan was aware of when he was working on stories of poor families imagining they saw flying objects in the middle of cornfields in The X-Files. He would continue to marinate on this reality.
Furthermore, Gilligan was on a show that tried to break conventions on television. The X-Files was an obvious offshoot of works like Twin Peaks or The Twilight Zone, that shattered what could be shown on the tiny communal box in a family’s living room. Sure, Gilligan worked with aliens (or the possibility of aliens, anyway) for a number of years, but he was still hooked on the American society elements of these stories. Yet, he still was granted this portal: a vision of rules that were still meant to be broken on television. During his years of trial-and-error, Tony Soprano was the most humanized antihero, The Wire was all about the many grey areas of corruption and society, and The Shield placed an unlikeable cop with power issues right in the middle of network television. We had seen bad people try to become good, or stay as is. Gilligan dreamed of seeing something else: a good person become bad through the crossing of many thresholds. We’ve seen the births of antiheroes in films before: Michael Corleone is maybe the greatest cinematic example. Television was right in the middle of its Golden Age, however. Now was the time to push the medium to its limits. It took Corleone one film to become evil, another to become the devil, and one more to try and humanize his worst self. What could be done with an entire series?
AMC was wanting to be the next big name in television once HBO became the juggernaut that it was. Mad Men (which I will be covering in Perfect Reception at some point) was one such project that it was wanting to push: the evolution of a Madison Avenue advertising agency throughout the ‘60s. Mad Men was big from the start, but only continued to grow in acclaim and its following. Then there was the underdog project, which was Gilligan’s next shot at making something successful. This was Breaking Bad, and it didn’t have quite the same support or push at first. Its leading star was similarly undervalued: Bryan Cranston was known for his comedic works (Malcolm in the Middle, his brief work as dentist Tim Whatley on Seinfeld, and more), and AMC didn’t follow when he was suggested to be a candidate for character Walter White. Gilligan had worked with Cranston on an X-Files episode (“Drive”), and knew what he was capable of, and insisted that he was Walter White. So, AMC — wanting to be amongst the big dogs — took a risk like FX or HBO would.
Beside him was Anna Gunn, who was previously on Deadwood as Martha Bullock (and she also had smaller parts on shows like Seinfeld, Six Feet Under, and more), but mostly everyone else from the start were people who were waiting on their big break. Aaron Paul almost won everything on The Price is Right (but he was in commercials otherwise). Dean Norris was tossed here, there, and everywhere. RJ Mitte was uncredited in two brief appearances on Hannah Montana and Everybody Hates Chris. We could keep going. The point is that Gilligan wanted to tell a tale that could happen to just about anyone in America, and for that we needed everyday people.
And so it began. Mr. White — an Albuquerque chemistry teacher, car washer, and former Gray Matter partner — discovers he has cancer. His son, Walter White, Jr., has cerebral palsy. His wife Skyler is pregnant with their next child. He clearly is struggling to be the breadwinner for this family, even with two jobs (a career and a side hustle). With this illness, that means everything is done. No more providing for his family. No more support of his son. No more preparedness for a child on the way. No more life. Period. Again, Gilligan is blatantly referring to the ride-or-die nature of the American economy (which is relatable in other countries, as I can confirm up here in Canada), where anyone who doesn’t keep up is left to perish. He examined these families on The X-Files. He feared he’d become one of these cases himself. Now, he was able to share his deepest fears with television junkies.
On the topic of junkies, Gilligan also shed light on the struggling classes of the world that develop addictions during their darkest hours. Walter White would have to do something drastic to keep him and his family going. Naturally, he turned to the cooking of crystal meth. In this realization of what he could do to survive, he stumbles across a former student of his: Jesse Pinkman (Paul), who White’s brother-in-law, DEA Agent Hank Schrader (Norris) almost nabs; as blackmail, White makes Pinkman help him cook. All of these moves are done in pure desperation to stay afloat, but it’s interesting what makes up Walter White. He has a career as a teacher. That wasn’t enough. He has a part time job washing cars (which he loses quickly at the start of the series). That also wasn’t enough. If part time work can’t sustain minimal living conditions, and full time careers can’t, then what can? White’s involvement with Gray Matter could have, but that didn’t last, and it can’t help him or his family now. Gilligan’s precise selections of which jobs are sustainable on this show aren’t to be ignored.
The show progresses, and things get hairy (even immediately). Walter White’s meth is too good and is garnering traction. Skyler is suspecting something is off with Walter, and is beginning to dig deeper. Hank is catching onto his next big case: the hunt for Heisenberg (Walt’s alias). Walt and Jesse are now encroaching on the territories of other drug king pins and cartels, like the Salamancas, and eventually Gus Fring. There are countless other goings-on that only add to the cluster of the show. Every episode, things only got more and more screwy. Even from episode two, “Cat’s in the Bag…”, when a corpse is dissolved through a bathtub and the flooring of a house (Jesse really should have paid attention in chemistry class), you know that Breaking Bad is only going to get more and more intense. Its dark tone of comedy was another factor; it’s the je ne sais quoi that began to draw initial viewers in (who even made this show?).
Breaking Bad wasn’t an overnight success like its sister show Mad Men, and season one was loved but not on a massive scale. It was season two when the ball really began to roll, and the pop culture phenomenon we now know only began to truly form around season three. By this time, the show was an Emmys darling, the craziness of the show was water cooler talk worthy, and people were hooked. Maybe the devoted followers that were there from the start saw that there really was no dip in quality in the show, and that it really does get more and more hectic. It was around this point that streaming service Netflix picked up the series for its final two seasons, and the rest is history. It goes without saying that Breaking Bad is the biggest show of our time, only contested by Game of Thrones (which may have lost that honour after its lacklustre final season), and audiences are being developed to this day.
That’s the scope of the show, but how was the quality? In my humble opinion, Breaking Bad only got better and better. What may have seemed monumental in “The Cat’s in the Bag…” would only be trumped quickly by future episodes, storylines, and events. Jesse would become a vital part of the show after season two’s “Peekaboo”, and his protection of kids would be evident throughout the rest of the series (he would experience additional trauma in “ABQ” of the same season, and it sadly only got worse for him from there on out).
“Crawl Space” in season four felt like the zenith of on-television hysteria, as Walter White finds his much-needed escape money has been spent on the loser his wife had an affair with (to be fair, Skyler was saving the family from fraud related issues); Walt’s screams turn into psychotic guffaws, and the opening to the titular place frames his scowl like the ultimate portrait of the patriarch of an American dysfunctional family. His family is going to be killed, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. Even “Fly” — the most polarizing episode — is arguably one of the finest examples of a bottle episode in television; for a minute, we see Walt and Jesse just being people, and dealing with the ludicrous task of trying to kill an ever-evasive fly; another fly returns in its place, representing Walter’s conquering of cancer, only for his cancer to sadly return.
The series builds up and up to “Ozymandias”: one of the strongest episodes in television history. Walt has gotten too big; despite his dismantling of two major drug kingdoms, he has now officially bitten off more than he can chew (he’s now involved with neo-Nazi scumbags that have zero consciences). Hank has also finally put two and two together, and realized that his own brother in law Walt has been the cause of his temporary paralysis, the murders of countless people, the danger of his family (and Walt’s own), and other many major tortures in his life (just being related to a drug king pin is bad enough, I’d say). Hank is ready to catch Walt, but his white supremacist back up has just arrived. Hank — now painted as the late-game actual protagonist of this story (the gruff cop figure that may be a jerk, but will do anything to actually protect his loved ones) — gets slain, and a dolly zoom shot of Walter White’s reaction drills itself into your brain. His silent agony is as painful as anything else, and his collapse onto the orange sand of the endless desert is the climax of the entire series; or so we think.
Walt tries to force his family out of the house for their safety, but now the cat’s actually out of the bag: Walt, Jr. is naive no more about his father’s drug business, Skyler is able to deduce that Hank is dead (although she assumes Walt has killed him like he killed Gus, Hector and other hurdles in his way), and the White family, which Walt once tried to maintain, is now completely destroyed; Hank’s wife Marie is due for the worst news of her life as well. This very house that we’ve seen for five seasons is now being torn apart. A large knife is dragged across the wall in an effort to stab the flesh of a loved one that is loved no more. With Walt, Jr.’s calling of the police, Walt, Sr. is out (well, with baby Holly, as well). He calls Skylar one last time, in a disguised means of separating her help of his operations so she never has to face any legal penalties. He tells her by eviscerating her as a wife, crying after each and every threat and insult; he never actually wanted to destroy his family, but now he has to ruin his connection to his family in order to save them. The final bandaid on the open wound of the White family is baby Holly, who Walt leaves with firefighters, with a note on her, directing her home.
Let’s not forget Walt’s complete betrayal of Jesse, who was hiding during the initial shootout at the start of the episode. Walt decides to sell him out, and the neo-Nazis take Jesse (not without stealing most of the money Walt had buried in the desert). Jesse is turned into a meth slave: a blatant metaphor for how he started out in the show (when Walt forced him into this story), but now he’s literally there against his will. He is tortured, barely taken care of, and is at the lowest point of his life (until the love of his life Andrea would be murdered the next episode: the second time Walt’s cowardice has resulted in Jesse’s partner dying (Jane overdosing at the end of season two, and Walt’s refusal to help her).
I’ve had the absolute fortune of being able to interview the writer of this golden episode of television. When I met Moira Walley-Beckett, it almost felt like a dream. At the time, she was promoting her latest project Anne with an E: a new take on Anne of Green Gables. It was here that I really got a sense of where Breaking Bad came from to get to this point. Even by season 3, Walley-Beckett and company were working in small spaces, slim budgets, and crazy schedules. However, it was a loving work family with many connections; Schnauz from The X-Files worked with Gilligan on this show as well, and a number of writers and crew members stuck around for the entire haul (or whenever they came on board). The mammoth fame of the show came so late into the series. This was a story built upon tough work, and it was always going to be that way (if three fifths of the series were done this way already). Walley-Beckett would win an Emmy for “Ozymandias” (named after the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem about the crumbling of empires, which is extremely fitting here), but the permanence of the episode’s perfection is the real success story here.
To get to this destroyed American family in “Ozymandias”, we have to remember how we got there. Walter White is that hero of this twisted, insane odyssey (“hero” being the operative word). Gilligan’s quest to have a protagonist (or at least a likeable person) turn into a monster was a great success. White is written as a slowly corroding person; a former tabula rasa of the American people who becomes one of the nation’s greatest horror stories. Cranston pulls off this meticulous transformation with ease. White whimpers at the sight of a gun in season one. By the second half of season five, he smirks with encouragement (a dare he knows won’t be fulfilled). White plays the game so he can provide for his family as morally sound as one can be in the drug circus. By the end, he isn’t satisfied if he hasn’t obliterated another competitor. He seeps into the mold of the devil himself, but he started off just like any one of us: an everyday man who was down on his luck, and couldn’t bear to see his family suffer. In the end, they suffered anyway.
Could Walter White have actually pulled this all off? I’d argue yes, because it is his arrogance that triggered major turning points against him. Hank’s “realization” of Gus’s right hand man Heisenberg being chemist Gale Boetticher was met with Walt’s buzzed pat on his own back, disguised as a brother-in-law wanting to help a DEA agent realize that there’s more to this story. Walt just couldn’t accept that someone else got the credit for his work. It happened once with Gray Matter. It’s happened numerous times since (Walt demanding recognition for his Blue Sky meth counts). His pride stems from his defensive nature, generated by his constant uphill battle in capitalist America. Finally, he was getting the money he deserved. He wasn’t powerless. He could take control. Anything that could revert that couldn’t stand in his way. Naturally, his arrogance would balloon, but it also led to his carelessness. This all started with Walt trying to leave enough money for his family when he dies of cancer. Instead, they were under the eye of the DEA for an additional year after his disappearance.
So, we get to “Felina”. It’s been a year. Jesse’s storyline begins all too good to be true, because it is; he’s still a slave. Walt’s escape is still a success, but now he wishes to wrap up everything for good, after seeing his Gray Matter enemies try to write his own history. He returns to Albuquerque to finally make everything as right as he can. Walt, Jr. won’t talk to him, but Walt, Sr. sees his son keeping his head up from afar. Walt finally admits to Skyler that the drug operation was no longer about the family, but because it was the only thing he felt he was ever good at. It was a job that paid him well, and he was finally succeeding at something. He visits his Gray Matter “friends”, and makes sure that his money, intended for his family, is given through them (since any money he tries to personally give would be seized by the DEA, and his family wouldn’t want to communicate with him anyway). Walt creates an automatic firearm with the help of a garage door opener’s mechanism, installs it in the trunk of his car, and sets off to see the neo-Nazis, where Jesse is still housed.
There’s an absolute bloodbath. Most of the Nazis are killed. Jesse gets a chance to choke Todd (his owner) as a beautiful catharsis. He doesn’t thank or forgive Walt, but that’s expected. Walt has been hit by one of his own bullets, as he protected Jesse from the spray. Jesse speeds off in an El Camino, and Walt dies in the middle of a meth lab. Everything is in its right place. Jesse is free. The White family is no longer under the threat of the DEA (after Walt provided Skyler the coordinates of Hank’s burial). The White family has Walt’s money coming to protect and provide for them. Walt didn’t die of cancer after all. This was the story of an all American family doing whatever it took to get by. It went extremely haywire. That was Breaking Bad.
Vince Gilligan would co-create Battle Creek two years after the Breaking Bad finale, but that would barely survive. However, he would continue his Breaking Bad lore with a major contributor to said show (Peter Gould) with Better Call Saul: a prequel (and sometimes sequel) involving the “criminal” lawyer Saul Goodman that Walter would deal with frequently. It is a series of a different tone, but still very much worthy of watching. Otherwise, that’s the story of Walter White and Gilligan’s perception of America. The show started off quite small, but would eventually become an all time great. Its cast got bigger (Bob Oddenkirk as Goodman, Jonathan Banks as fixer and hitman Mike Ehrmantraut, Laura Fraser as that Stevia-obsessed businesswoman Lydia, and many more other characters I didn’t get to before). It would even get big names behind the camera; director Rian Johnson was the vision behind episodes like “Ozymandias”.
Viewers would get caught up on Mr. White. Was he meant to be rooted for? Was he to be despised? Gilligan presented us one small example of someone who was the result of a nation that spits middle and lower class people back out into the streets. White appropriately used to work for Gray Matter, because his moral compass would be within the grey area the entire time (is he actually helping, or is he only making things worse?). What I do know for sure is that Breaking Bad did exactly what AMC desired: it made the station one of the heavy hitters of television. It was also massive for Netflix (and vice versa). It was the bridge between cable and network days of TV and the streaming wonderland we’re all now used to. It helped pave the path for visual antiheroes. It was one of the defining pieces of the Golden Age of television. It is a modern day classic that will only continue to get stronger with time. Vince Gilligan wanted to keep working. He wanted to have a show that would succeed. He wanted to uncover how he felt about the nation that wasn’t kind to him, by highlighting what he both loves and hates about America (the unforgiving system, the one percent, and everything in between). He instead changed TV permanently (at least this break was for good).
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.