Breaking Bad > {Mad Men | Sopranos | THE WIRE} -- ORLY?

[Darren Dirt]

YRLY. (says this article --> http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6763000/bad-decisions )

This is where Breaking Bad diverges from the other three entities. Breaking Bad is not a situation in which the characters' morality is static or contradictory or colored by the time frame; instead, it suggests that morality is continually a personal choice. When the show began, that didn't seem to be the case: It seemed like this was going to be the story of a man (Walter White, portrayed by Bryan Cranston) forced to become a criminal because he was dying of cancer. That's the elevator pitch. But that's completely unrelated to what the show has become. The central question on Breaking Bad is this: What makes a man "bad" ? his actions, his motives, or his conscious decision to be a bad person? Judging from the trajectory of its first three seasons, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan believes the answer is option No. 3.

Walter White's on-going metamorphosis is what makes Breaking Bad great. But that doesn't go far enough. It's not just that watching White's transformation is interesting; what's interesting is that this transformation involves the fundamental core of who he supposedly is, and that this (wholly constructed) core is an extension of his own free will. The difference between White in the middle of Season 1 and White in the debut of Season 4 is not the product of his era or his upbringing or his social environment. It's a product of his own consciousness. He changed himself. At some point, he decided to become bad, and that's what matters.

There's a scene in Breaking Bad's first season in which Walter White's hoodrat lab assistant Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) tells Walter he just can't "break bad," and ? when you first hear this snippet of dialogue ? you assume what Jesse means is that you can't go from being a law-abiding chemistry teacher to an underground meth cooker. It seems like he's telling White that he can't start breaking the law after living a life in which laws were always obeyed, and that a criminal lifestyle is not something you can join like a club. His advice seems pragmatic, and it almost feels like an artless way to shoehorn the show's title into the script. But this, it turns out, was not Jesse's point at all. What he was arguing was that someone can't "decide" to morph from a good person into a bad person, because there's a firewall within our personalities that makes this impossible. He was arguing that Walter's nature would stop him from being bad, and that Walter would fail if tried to complete this conversion. But Jesse was wrong. He was wrong, because goodness and badness are simply complicated choices, no different than anything else.

Deep thoughts, well-articulated and not at all "@%&#-disturbing" controversial; acknowledges some things about the current (encouraging!) state of television drama (writing acting and production values) ... and likely to add a couple of titles to my "will buy when they go on sale at Future Shop" DVD list.

(lol)

[Thorin]

Jeez, took me about five times of reading the thread title before I noticed the "greater than" symbol and realized this post was about an article that claims Breaking Bad is better than three other shows on TV.