Review of Breaking Bad S1
Jan. 1st, 2011 02:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatJust finished watching S1 of Breaking Bad - a television series produced and airing on AMC (American Movie Classics) channel, which approximately three people on my flist fell madly in love with: ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cjlasky (who raved about it in 2008-2009), flake_sake, and frenchani. I tried it once in 2008 - just the first two episodes, but couldn't get into it.
Decided to try it again, afterflake_sake and frenchani's rave reviews, and well the fact that tv is a bit slow at the moment, and AMC is reairing the series in it's entirety - with two back to back episodes every Wed night. They just finished airing S1.
The series reminds me a lot of Terriers actually, even though it was advertised as the male version of Weeds, it has more in common tone, acting, and writing wise with Terriers and Justified. So if you liked Terriers for its writing, direction and acting? I'm guessing you will most likely love this.
The story is about Walter, a forty-something high school chemistry teacher in New Mexico who has been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, stage 3A. His forty year old wife, Skyler, is 6 months pregnant with a surprise pregnancy. And they have a disabled son who either has MS or MD. Not sure which, except he's on crutches and struggles with speech and coordination. Desperate for cash, because the HMO plan won't pay for cancer treatment, and he's not sure he'll be able to provide for his wife and kids futures, he hooks up with a former student who's in the business of selling meth. Using his chemistry skills - he starts what amounts to a meth lab with the former student, Jess (Adrian is apparently the actors name - I truly suck at remembering the names of people, regardless of who they are.). And well, things don't quite go according to plan.
Other characters in the story include Anne Marie, Skylar's physician sister, who is also a kleptomaniac, and Hank, Anne Marie's husband who is a DEA agent.
Like Terriers, Damages, and Justified - this story is character driven not plot driven, but it's not in any way shape or form a soap opera like Buffy, Grey's, or Vampire Diaries. What I mean by that - is the plot is tight, planned out ahead of time, and not based on sexual chemistry between actors or characters. It's also quite dark.
Walt, a modern anti-hero everyman, struggles with issues relevant to today's world - health insurance, lack of funds, and the inability to get ahead. In one episode - prior to his decision to resurrect the meth lab, that he initially abandons after chaotic horror of the first two episodes,
he is faced with his former classmates' success. Or rather bludgeoned to death with it. Elliot - the head honcho of Gray Matter, a company that Walt White had helped create ages ago...offers to either give Walt a "pity" job or pay for his treatment. Walt can't take Elliot's money. He states during an intervention staged by his wife, desperate for him to accept the money and the treatment, that all his life he feels as if choices were made for him. That he had not role in the decision making. That he wasn't making the choices. That he doesn't have any. To take Elliot's guilt money would in effect be selling himself out...so, he chooses to go back to cooking meth with his former student Adrian. But he thinks he can stay out of the business, just cook the meth whileAdrian Jesse sells it, until it becomes obvious that Jesse has to help him cook the meth, and he has to help Jesse sell it - in order to make money. To give the writer's credit - Walt's decision is examined in depth from every ethical and moral angle imaginable, along with his justifications, which at times become hard to support. He figures out that he needs precisely $750,000 to support his family and finish his treatment and pay the mortgage on his house. That's all. But getting that amount...isn't easy. And he tells his wife at one point - "some people make difficult decisions to support their families, aren't those decisions justified?" His wife disagrees.
While it's not necessary to be a chemist to enjoy this show, if you are one - you probably will fall irrevocably in love with it. The bits on chemistry are fascinating. And according to a chemist on my flist or someone who knows a lot about chemistry, astonishingly accurate. This is new. Normally tv shows get the science bits completely wrong. I've gotten used to ignoring them. (Yes, I'm looking at you - CSI, Lost, House, Dollhouse, Farscape, Doctor Who, Firefly, Fringe and Caprica.) But this one apparently gets it right - which means someone associated with the creation of Breaking Bad knows quite a bit about chemistry. My favorite bit on the chemistry is the creation of a poison with beans.
The attention to detail from a production and art set design perspective is as exact as it is in Mad Men. Each episode has a reference to death. Meth=death. The skeleton logo on a mug, the death's head on a key-chain, or the skull with his tongue hanging out on a t-shirt that Adrian wears. Subtle and somewhat ironic references.
The series, like Terriers and Justified, has a tongue firmly in cheek absurdest sense of humor. Black humor - much like MASH. It's not over the top. Subtle. Such as a shot of a perky real-estate agent, with her blond hair, and blonder dress, sunnily putting up an Open House sign, while Walt and Jesse unbeknowest to her are cooking meth in the basement. Another similarly amusing bit is Anne Marie driving over a child's remote control car - which he is racing around their cule-du-sac driveway. Deft touches like these make the series chewy and crunchy food for the eyes and the brain.
So, if you are a fan of gritty character dramas with quasi anti-heroes, such as Terriers, The Good Wife, Sons of Anarchy (the darkest and most violent of all the series mentioned and the only one besides the Shield that I couldn't get into for some reason), Damages, Justified, The Shield, and even Mad Men, you might want to check out Breaking Bad. Or for that matter, are a fan of shows that are scientifically accurate, which admittedly are rare. I highly recommend this show but with the express caveat that the first three episodes aren't that great, somewhat slow in fact, but the fourth episode, Cancer Man is amazing and the series really takes off at a gallop after that point.
Overall rating? A
cjlasky (who raved about it in 2008-2009), flake_sake, and frenchani. I tried it once in 2008 - just the first two episodes, but couldn't get into it.Decided to try it again, after
flake_sake and frenchani's rave reviews, and well the fact that tv is a bit slow at the moment, and AMC is reairing the series in it's entirety - with two back to back episodes every Wed night. They just finished airing S1.The series reminds me a lot of Terriers actually, even though it was advertised as the male version of Weeds, it has more in common tone, acting, and writing wise with Terriers and Justified. So if you liked Terriers for its writing, direction and acting? I'm guessing you will most likely love this.
The story is about Walter, a forty-something high school chemistry teacher in New Mexico who has been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, stage 3A. His forty year old wife, Skyler, is 6 months pregnant with a surprise pregnancy. And they have a disabled son who either has MS or MD. Not sure which, except he's on crutches and struggles with speech and coordination. Desperate for cash, because the HMO plan won't pay for cancer treatment, and he's not sure he'll be able to provide for his wife and kids futures, he hooks up with a former student who's in the business of selling meth. Using his chemistry skills - he starts what amounts to a meth lab with the former student, Jess (Adrian is apparently the actors name - I truly suck at remembering the names of people, regardless of who they are.). And well, things don't quite go according to plan.
Other characters in the story include Anne Marie, Skylar's physician sister, who is also a kleptomaniac, and Hank, Anne Marie's husband who is a DEA agent.
Like Terriers, Damages, and Justified - this story is character driven not plot driven, but it's not in any way shape or form a soap opera like Buffy, Grey's, or Vampire Diaries. What I mean by that - is the plot is tight, planned out ahead of time, and not based on sexual chemistry between actors or characters. It's also quite dark.
Walt, a modern anti-hero everyman, struggles with issues relevant to today's world - health insurance, lack of funds, and the inability to get ahead. In one episode - prior to his decision to resurrect the meth lab, that he initially abandons after chaotic horror of the first two episodes,
he is faced with his former classmates' success. Or rather bludgeoned to death with it. Elliot - the head honcho of Gray Matter, a company that Walt White had helped create ages ago...offers to either give Walt a "pity" job or pay for his treatment. Walt can't take Elliot's money. He states during an intervention staged by his wife, desperate for him to accept the money and the treatment, that all his life he feels as if choices were made for him. That he had not role in the decision making. That he wasn't making the choices. That he doesn't have any. To take Elliot's guilt money would in effect be selling himself out...so, he chooses to go back to cooking meth with his former student Adrian. But he thinks he can stay out of the business, just cook the meth while
While it's not necessary to be a chemist to enjoy this show, if you are one - you probably will fall irrevocably in love with it. The bits on chemistry are fascinating. And according to a chemist on my flist or someone who knows a lot about chemistry, astonishingly accurate. This is new. Normally tv shows get the science bits completely wrong. I've gotten used to ignoring them. (Yes, I'm looking at you - CSI, Lost, House, Dollhouse, Farscape, Doctor Who, Firefly, Fringe and Caprica.) But this one apparently gets it right - which means someone associated with the creation of Breaking Bad knows quite a bit about chemistry. My favorite bit on the chemistry is the creation of a poison with beans.
The attention to detail from a production and art set design perspective is as exact as it is in Mad Men. Each episode has a reference to death. Meth=death. The skeleton logo on a mug, the death's head on a key-chain, or the skull with his tongue hanging out on a t-shirt that Adrian wears. Subtle and somewhat ironic references.
The series, like Terriers and Justified, has a tongue firmly in cheek absurdest sense of humor. Black humor - much like MASH. It's not over the top. Subtle. Such as a shot of a perky real-estate agent, with her blond hair, and blonder dress, sunnily putting up an Open House sign, while Walt and Jesse unbeknowest to her are cooking meth in the basement. Another similarly amusing bit is Anne Marie driving over a child's remote control car - which he is racing around their cule-du-sac driveway. Deft touches like these make the series chewy and crunchy food for the eyes and the brain.
So, if you are a fan of gritty character dramas with quasi anti-heroes, such as Terriers, The Good Wife, Sons of Anarchy (the darkest and most violent of all the series mentioned and the only one besides the Shield that I couldn't get into for some reason), Damages, Justified, The Shield, and even Mad Men, you might want to check out Breaking Bad. Or for that matter, are a fan of shows that are scientifically accurate, which admittedly are rare. I highly recommend this show but with the express caveat that the first three episodes aren't that great, somewhat slow in fact, but the fourth episode, Cancer Man is amazing and the series really takes off at a gallop after that point.
Overall rating? A
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no subject
Date: 2011-01-01 09:12 pm (UTC)Season 2 is even better and season 3 managed to top season 2!
no subject
Date: 2011-01-01 10:25 pm (UTC)The show indeed paints a very interesting picture of Walt's motives and imho of masculine roles. Walter is really caught up in that provider fantasy. If you think about it it's completely insane that his pride makes it easier for him to cook a deadly drug (and killing people in the process) than taking Elliot's guilt money. Yet he actually takes pride in what he does. It's what makes him feel alive again.
And then there are his two "sons". Walter Jr. who is handicapped and dependent on the help of others, thus able to take it much more graciously than Walt. And Jesse, who is defiant at first but then starts to emulate Walt in front of his friend.
I love the chemistry on the show. It's not totally perfect, but the basics are always correct. I loved the bit with the ricin from the castor beans too.
I'm currently rewatching to do ep by ep reviews and I'm contemplating to add a section detailing the chemistry of each episode.
When my cousin first told me about the show, it sounded like hardcore Weeds to me too, but ultimately it's very different, much less cartoonish, with more real consequences and heartbreak, also it works very differently relationshipwise. Because on BB it's Walter/Jesse that's the centre of it all. Their twisted teacher/student/father/son realtionship grows to extreme highs over the seasons.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-01 10:34 pm (UTC)It's nothing at all like Weeds, except for the basic plot. But Walt's reasons for doing the Meth are very different than Nancy.
And his skill-set is different. This is rawer than Weeds, less pretty and less polished, the people grittier and more real and oddly more sympathetic. Weeds is pure satire, and this isn't.
And while I like satire quite a bit, a little can go a long way and it does have a tendency to get cartoonish - this is a problem that Glee has...it's characters are rapidly becoming cartoonish, it's also to a degree what happened with Buffy comics - the more satirical the writer tried to get, the more cartoonish and allergorical the characters. I think satire works best in short format, not long. Like in films or short anthologized tales.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-01 10:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-01 10:52 pm (UTC)I very much agree about satire. While it can be lovely and brilliant it always lives on the ideas, it can't really do long term character development. It becomes to hard to sympathize with characters that are too far on the allegorical side. I love it that BB never looses it's humor but makes the characters more and more human instead of less.
It's like Buffy was in it's haydays, when characters like Spike that started out cartoonish suddenly developed personalities that went far deeper than the initial concept.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 10:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-04 12:04 am (UTC)I'm very glad they came within a reasonable time (with me posting them on the 24th and the snow storms and everything).