I was never a big TV kid, for a lot of reasons. I was, however, a huge Entertainment Weekly kid. I would read those things cover to cover, with very little regard for what the actual stories were about. All of that has led to quite a bit of totally useless information gumming up the works of my brain: The other day I made a reference to NBC’s power-outage mystery show Revolution that fell on deaf ears, because for some reason Revolution has been off the air going on oh, six or seven years. An image from this time I remember incredibly vividly is the Weekly cover for Breaking Bad’s final season: A photo of Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul, blood-spattered and filthy, with their arms wrapped around each other in a twisted parody of a father-son portrait.
Looking at that cover now, the grotesque comedy of it feels at once representative of and totally out of wack with the show’s overpowering, grim cultural presence. The story within the magazine was about an epic conclusion to a seriously twisted drama; the people around me were selling the same. I remember my tenth-grade chemistry teacher preemptively informing us on the first day of class that no, he didn’t know how to cook meth, and no, he wouldn’t do it even if he did. Students would whisper about Breaking Bad in the back of the room during study hall. Have you seen this thing? Bryan Cranston is insane! It’s fucked up! This isn’t your dad’s acclaimed Emmy Award-winning drama!
When my girlfriend decided early in quarantine that we were going to make our way through Breaking Bad in its entirety, that was the show I was expecting and dreading. So color me surprised to find out that Breaking Bad is silly! It’s smart, and daring, and yes, by the end of it, pretty emotionally draining, but it’s also a thrilling combination of so many tired old genres: a fun little soap opera, a moving buddy comedy, a cop thriller. It’s not Macbeth — or, if it is, it’s the Macbeth your history teacher tried their best to keep you from laughing at, the goofy morality play about witches and men dressed up as trees.
I’m not really here to write about Breaking Bad beyond saying that, well, it’s great fun and I highly recommend giving it a watch if you somehow haven’t! But I do just find it fascinating whenever something as outwardly and aggressively absurd as this takes on a hallowed place in culture as a piece of Great Art™, something that must be looked upon with respect. Breaking Bad is a smart, well-acted show; it is also a pulpy, sinfully funny neo-western that touches on the difficulties of meth-cooking while running a fried chicken restaurant. Why does one of those things take such cultural precedent over the other, to the point of actively dissuading me from wanting to take a dive in? It reminds me of my years of avoiding Citizen Kane, expecting a solemn plate of cinematic vegetables, only to finally discover that all I’d ever been avoiding was having a grand old time with one of the more enjoyable movies ever made.
In trying to retroactively catch up on ten or so years of Breaking Bad discourse, I read some of the old writing on it, specifically Emily Nussbaum’s terrific piece on “Ozymandias,” the show’s unambiguous high point. In it, she touches on the conflict that existed at that time between the show’s “good fans,” the audience members who understood that Walter White was no hero, and the “bad fans,” those who wanted nothing more than him to murder the people in his way and maintain his place as drug kingpin of the American southwest. (That’s a simplistic way of putting things, but I think it’s probably about right. Plenty of people will tell you there is no ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ way to interpret a piece of art, but those people are wrong. There are usually thousands upon thousands of correct ways to interpret art and also one or two absolutely incorrect ways.)
To me, at least, it feels like the “bad fans” won the argument over Breaking Bad, and critics and historians accidentally enabled them by focusing on the wrong things. The cultural image of the show is “I am the one who knocks” and “Say my name,” not “Yeah, bitch! Magnets!” and “Did you know that you have rights?” That first image isn’t representative of the show on any level; it sells Breaking Bad’s central character as a titanic badass when in context he’s clearly a pathetic, groveling little man trying to hold onto a fragile sense of masculine power. The second image also isn’t quite representative. When you take them together, you have something that looks more like Breaking Bad.
So why aren’t they taken together? What are we so ashamed of when we admit something we like is silly? It’s an issue that comes up again and again, especially as the most popular things on the planet become progressively sillier. I see the same reflexive defensiveness in the bad Breaking Bad fans that I do in the reaction to Martin Scorsese’s comments about Marvel movies last year. How dare you imply that this thing I like shouldn’t be taken totally at face value! Where do I fit in if something I like is a little less high-stakes than I’m willing to admit?
In my book, it’s not a defect or an insult that Breaking Bad is as silly as it is powerful. It’s a relief. Thank God something so culturally omnipresent has the time and the wherewithal to make me laugh before it makes me cry! What’s wrong with that? Sure sounds more interesting to me. Anyway, I like Bob Odenkirk. He’s funny.
What’s worth watching this week: Miranda July’s delightful Kajillionaire is sweet, sad, and available to rent on VOD.