Upon receiving a terminal lung cancer diagnosis, high school chemistry teacher Walter White spirals into a crisis of mortality. He soon finds that his treatments will not only not save him, but that the cost will leave his family bankrupt after he dies. The Whites are a lower-middle-class family living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His wife, Skyler is pregnant and their teenage son, Walt Jr., has cerebral palsy. After going on a ride-along with his DEA agent brother-in-law to take down a meth lab, Walt discovers two life-changing facts. He realizes that he has the chemistry skill and know-how to “cook” meth. He then clicks on the fact that selling brings in a lot of money.
And so, in a jangled and sometimes hilariously inept way, Walt embarks on a criminal career, using his chemical skill to create the most potent and pure methamphetamine that the southwest drug culture has ever known. With the help of a hapless former student, Jesse Pinkman, Walt is confident they can make enough money to pay for his treatments and care for his family after he is gone. To cover his duplicity, though, Walt devises an alternate persona which he aptly names Heisenberg, after the German theoretical physicist, Werner Heisenberg who developed the “uncertainty principle”. In this brilliant bit of logic, the real Heisenberg suggested that the more we know about one property of the physical world (say momentum) the less we can know about another property. The sobriquet is appropriate because as one side of Walt’s life becomes more chaotic, the man he was before he learned that he had terminal lung cancer becomes less known.
Things go from bad to worse, though, as careless dealers, underworld kingpins, addiction to power, family troubles and his DEA agent brother-in-law hamper and hassle Walt's plans from the outset. This goes on for almost three seasons before Walter White finds himself in the employ of a notoriously dangerous and yet unassuming drug lord who brilliantly uses his fast-food fried chicken franchises as fronts for an illicit meth empire. Suddenly the Everyman chemistry teacher and the ne’er-do-well Pinkman are faced with the brutal and heartless realities of cartel assassins, drug deals gone wrong and their deeply messed up personal lives.
Breaking Bad premiered on AMC in 2008 and ran for five fraught seasons (representing only one year of Walt's life), gaining a cult following and enjoying incredible success. I missed all of it. Even when we did have cable and access to AMC, I didn't watch the show. It had zero appeal for me and I only knew about it peripherally for much of its five-year run. The basic premise was understood; a high school chemistry teacher gets cancer and sells meth to pay his bills. I didn't understand how this premise kept people locked in, but it did.
Fast-forward to 2024. I spent much of the first half of this year re-watching the True Detective series on Mondays when everyone was at work and I had the den to myself. This batch of amazingly well-written and well-performed crime dramas captured and kept my attention, so that, as spring warmed to summer, I developed a slight taste for the genre. But again, I was behind the times. The latest True Detective season aired on Sundays while I played catch-up. By the time it was over and I was up-to-date on the drama series, I needed a break from crime TV shows. Having watched other shows like Dexter and The Sopranos, I understood that, in order to truly appreciate the style, one has to see oneself in some of the characters. The gritty, dark atmosphere, the tough personal consequences of being a hard-bitten criminal trying to balance a life of crime with the challenges of protecting and nurturing a family that is one of the motifs of these shows is wearing.
Then, in the early Autumn, Breaking Bad arrived on Netflix. For years, I had said that I would eventually watch the show that had become such a cultural phenomenon and at about that time, my hankering for more crime drama was getting stronger, so I dug in.
All I can say is that I truly have mixed feelings for it. The premise, the writing, the acting, the set design and the breadth of the storyline are all top-tier. The show is a deeply layered masterpiece of American criminality. Walt’s swing out into the crime underbelly is often shocking and regularly depressing. The other characters, too, all seem to have the same inability to get things right. At every step, their relationships, their intentions and plans all go awry, often in ways that are heartwrenching and abhorrent.
There is also the sense of the power and ubiquity of crime combined with the ever-present threat of the law. Everywhere Walt turns, he finds those who have their hands out for his ill-gotten gains or his talent for cooking meth. Every step of the way, too, is his brother-in-law, Hank, the DEA agent who is always one step behind, always almost figuring out who Heisenberg really is. The tension for viewers is sometimes unbearable.
Breaking Bad is about mortality and how we decide to live our lives when faced with death. And yet, Walt’s story poses a more painful question about morality, the answer of which, takes us on a wild ride of absurdism and low-level horror. Almost from the moment he decides to sell methamphetamine, Walt begins a metamorphosis that is more comically tragic than gritty or seedy. Although the show is most assuredly a crime drama, there is an element of black comedy to it that brings appeal, if not pure amusement. Walt's bumbling misadventures eventually set him on a path of evil, where he finds himself experiencing the gamut of drug crime, from overdose to murder. The explicit philosophical argument is that a man who sells his morality for illegal monetary gain eventually becomes irredeemably corrupt, regardless of how noble his motivations were in the beginning.
Implicitly, though, the show is about downfall. The downfall of the American family unit, the powerlessness of the law, the disintegration of loyalty, and, sadly, the illusion of financial stability. Almost everyone in the show is deeply irredeemable, each spiraling out of the orbit of an ideal life. Walt’s downfall is the most poignant and prominent, but each of the characters (except one) devolves into something else, bringing into sharp contrast the cost of protecting one’s family. But even this seemingly noble motivation breaks down, as Walt in the last season admits to his estranged wife that he did all this because he liked it and was good at it.
As he plummets, Walt's relationships are eviscerated. The conflict with his wife, Skyler, sets the viewer's teeth on edge with unending marital anxiety. Eventually, even Skyler is corrupted as she learns of her husband's lurch into manufacturing drugs for a cartel. She has her own problems and experiences a series of mishaps and moral quandaries that change her, too. None of the other characters, no matter how sympathetic we find them, ever become more than a tragic figure, doomed by Walt’s original sin.
Breaking Bad is, if you can handle it, a Shakespearian tragedy writ large upon the modern consciousness. In Elizabethan times, the best way to convey tragedy (based on ancient Greek traditions) was to have everyone die at the end. In the modern era, though, the best way to convey tragedy is to have people face inescapable consequences without being rescued by heroes or finding sudden redemption. Though there are serious differences, Walt’s struggle is similar to that of Macbeth. At each stage of his story arc, he looks to a point where he can have the money and be done with the crime. Each life taken, each relationship ruined, each loss of humanity or morality is ostensibly the last hurdle before Walt can get back to the brief final months of his life with his family. This is the case with Walt. Although, to an extent, he is redeemed at least for his role in Jesse Pinkman's own traumas, his actions throughout the show condemn almost everyone else around him to catastrophe and death, too.
I say “almost” because there is one incorruptible character in the show. He is an anti-hero, a man motivated to do what he does for his family, but he is unconflicted about it. I’m referring, of course to Mike Ehrmantraut, the ‘heavy’ for Gus Fring. Mike manages to be the most morally complex character, despite his strong code. He balances Walt’s bumbling and halting attempts to become masterful by being true to himself and his goals and being good at being a bad guy. The reason that Mike is so liked by fans of the show (and why his character resurfaced in the spin-off of Breaking Bad called “Better Call Saul”) is that he provides a durable moral island in a chaotic sea of decline, moral relativism and self-loathing. That is perhaps why I find Mike to be the one character who, although destroyed by Walt, is nevertheless, untainted by Walt's moral descent.
While I would certainly recommend Breaking Bad to veterans of crime drama, I would also warn that the show has a strong gravity, pulling viewers into the gloom of its mythos and I felt this personally. The show is grim at times and I found myself feeling grim (more than usual) as a result. Unlike other crime drama subgenres, Breaking Bad managed to capture distinctly American criminality, blending corruption and greed with the metastasis of cancerous morality. The Sopranos is about a mob boss. Dexter is about a serial killer who kills serial killers. Breaking Bad is about regular people caught in the crushing gravity of regular life and looking desperately for a way out and hoping that money, however obtained, will solve their problems, no matter the cost to their humanity.
If you’ve never watched it I recommend it, but I do so with a caveat: be prepared to be depressed.
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