“Breaking Bad” was a TV series on AMC created by Vince Gilligan
and first aired in 2008. The series ran for 5 seasons and ended in 2013. It was
a show about a middle aged chemistry teacher named Walter White who found out
he had terminal lung cancer and turned to cooking and selling methamphetamine
in order to provide for his family before he passed away. He sought the help of
his former student Jesse Pinkman, who was already in the business, and together,
they dealt with the pros and cons of the drug world. In addition to dealing
with his pregnant wife Skyler and his teenage son Walter Jr who had cerebral
palsy, he also had to deal with his wife’s sister Marie and her DEA husband
Hank. Oh! And not forgetting his alter ego ‘Heisenberg’.
It was very hard to find a bad review of “Breaking bad” so I
had to settle for a mixed review. Linda Stasi of the New York Post wrote a
mixed review of the show and began by comparing it to that of “Mad Men” which she
said was arguably the best series of its own season. She said both shows “hinge
on what even most normal of family men are actually capable of”, referring to
the fact that in both shows, the men were forced to step out of their normal ‘lifestyles’
in order to provide better for their families. In Walter White’s case, going
from a high school chemistry teacher who worked a second job at a car wash, to
becoming a drug lord who ended up buying the car wash.
Stasi applauds White’s
union with Jesse Pinkman, which she refers to as “ill-fitting drug purveyors”
and she believes that their clashed personalities was what aggravated the
situations that brought the viewers to the edge of their seats. In the same
breath however she referred to the show as “really bizarre” and “gory” when she
described the atrocities that the drug world revealed. Unfortunately, what
Stasi showed contempt for is one of the reasons why I loved the show. I appreciated
the fact that the consequences of being in the drug world were not sugar-coated
and I enjoyed every expression of it. If you depended on the show to make a decision
on entering the business, the answers were all there for you, the good, the bad
and the ugly. Stasi also admired that Walt and Jesse created a rolling meth lab
on an RV and one day came up with New Mexico’s best meth ever. To me that
seemed a bit common but, I agree it was a cool way to start the show in order
to keep our hearts pumping for the unfolding of all the other clever and
unprecedented created labs.
It wasn’t a shock to me that I could not find one bad review
of “Breaking Bad”. It was a great show and I loved it because it argued reasons
why an everyday normal working person may go ‘bad’.
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