Creators:
Vince GilliganComposer:
Dave PorterCast:
Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, Anna Gunn, Dean Norris, Betsy Brandt, RJ Mitte, Bob Odenkirk, Jonathan Banks, Giancarlo Esposito, Jesse Plemons (more)VOD (3)
Seasons(5) / Episodes(62)
Plots(1)
To "break bad," as says the old colloquialism from the American South, is to go so wrong it's almost impossible to do what's right. Walter White is breaking bad. Recently diagnosed with Type III lung cancer, raising a son with cerebral palsy, and in need of a way to support his family, Walter uses his skills to transform himself from nebbishy high-school chemistry teacher to neophyte crystal-meth cook in the blink of an eye. Things become problematic when, not long after Walter and his former student Jesse put together a lucrative cooking operation, the two of them of are assaulted by a pair of drug dealers who accuse Walter of being affiliated with the DEA. But that’s just the beginning of his problems: he soon has a dead body on his hands and has yet to even reveal his cancer to his loving wife. (official distributor synopsis)
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Reviews (9)
Season one:An excellent story and absolutely great transformation of the main protagonist. That great swine, life is the main villain here throwing not just sticks, but reinforced concrete joists in our way to trip us up. Superb. Season two: To cut a long story short, this is the real take off. The creators set to work and drive Walt towards his unexpected future. + Perfect cameo by Danny Trejo.Season three: The slightly weaker take off makes fertile land for the final harvest. You can’t just end a season like that, can you? It’s cruelty. Season four: An unbelievably full-on season that sets the bar so high that I don’t know if anybody will be able to jump over it in the future. And adrenaline finale, the final revelation and masterful acting performances make this season a milestone in this series. "I won." Season five: Some darn good meth is going around Prague these days... Walt’s rise to the top and definitive transformation into a drug kingpin shows us that the end is nigh. And it’s going to end spectacularly... A year later. The second half of the season really floors the gas pedal and the last five or so episodes sets a new, higher standard for TV production. Faultlessly written, ingenious tension build-up with a very satisfying ending. Anna Gunn delivered one of the best female acting performances (well-deserved Emmy). And the whole thing stands on Bryan Cranston’s shoulders. The final episode is hosted exclusively by him and the farewell is classy. I enjoyed the final moments of the series with a satisfied smile on my lips and a chill down my spine all at once.
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Experienced viewers and television fans have long known that the most interesting offerings in recent years are usually not movies, but American TV series that defy typical commercial templates and set the bar of television productions very high. Even with the most famous and discussed shows, however, I felt a sense of manipulation and the presence of various tricks or cheap motifs. To increase viewership, they rely on various "cool" characters and unrealistic plots or moments. Breaking Bad is a series that works without these tricks, firmly staying grounded while remaining visually attractive. The story of an aging middle-class man worn down by family stereotypes with lots of debts and problems, who suddenly realizes that instead of a pension plan, he should have taken out a proper life insurance policy, and whose lifespan is suddenly not calculated in decades or years, fascinated me from the very first moment with its exceptional craftsmanship, from the outstanding performances, direction, and editing to the story itself and its ability to show real life and real problems of present-day America alongside the main storyline. Have you ever wondered how little it took for the fates of famous historical figures to take a completely different direction? Walter White was once an exceptional student and promising scientist with a great career ahead of him. In the end, he became a deeply indebted chemistry teacher at a meaningless high school and, at the same time, a man under the thumb of his dominant wife. Sudden illness and a medical examination bring him closer to the end of his life journey. Suddenly, he has nothing to lose, and the prospect of imminent death mobilizes his will, energy, and willingness to take risks. He witnesses a police raid on a drug lab and realizes that his creativity, intelligence, and determination could succeed and provide for his family in a world of uneducated criminals. He gradually loses his inhibitions and discovers previously unknown talents as a manipulator and a liar, climbing step by step in the hierarchy of the criminal underworld. He learns to navigate a world that was previously foreign to him, removing obstacles and being on the best path to becoming a legend in the eyes of both the underworld and the police. The old Walter remains only a shell, giving birth to Heisenberg, a cook of the highest-quality methamphetamine that drug addicts have ever had the chance to taste, and at the same time, a man who experiences the taste of power and what ambitions really mean. At the last moment, he tries to fulfill his dream of greatness without looking back at his surroundings. Breaking Bad is a great story of a person's moral downfall, an impressive and brilliantly written drama in which I fail to find any significant flaws in more than 60 episodes. It is an incredibly well-crafted ride where the quality of the script not only does not decline but tends to increase and culminates in a finale that is truly unforgettable. The scene where he tells his terrified wife with burning eyes, "I am not in danger, I am the danger," quickly became iconic within the realm of television production. Breaking Bad combines high artistic demands that satisfy the critical community with excellent entertainment for viewers. The series can be thrilling, darkly humorous, and always surprising. Furthermore, its strength lies in the fact that, unlike other works, it does not use relativizing morality, and it never trivializes the actions of its antiheroes or seeks excuses for them. It calls things by their proper names. Overall impression: 100%.
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Breaking Bad is a series that is beyond reproach. A perfect story with brilliant acting, completely unpredictable and, most importantly, perfectionist in every detail. Emotions were stirring in me after almost every episode. I didn't even know who to (shall we say) root for, because there are no good guys in the story, or there are, but the rate at which Walter White drags them down to darkness is unbelievable. There’s a very thin line between good and evil here, and it just blows your mind to see Walter White turn from an ordinary, humble guy into a complete monster, realizing that life can be too damn short, so he’d better enjoy his last months without taking any shit from anybody, and finally be the one in charge. The final episodes of each season are absolutely perfect, but I could watch the episode about the train heist every day. I don't know what else to add. No other show on TV comes even close to Breaking Bad in terms of story sophistication. S01: 9/10. S02: 9/10. S03: 10/10. S04: 10/10. S05: 10/10.
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A television series written and filmed with the same conscientiousness with which Walt cooks Blue Sky. The following selection from the SPOILER-packed observations that I have written over the course of all five seasons isn’t intended to be a comprehensive analysis, but a means of partially covering what makes up the extraordinary nature of Gilligan’s achievement by breaking down several constituent aspects of the series. ___ Throughout the series, the development of the narrative seems to be determined by Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty. Based on the anticipated direction of development (from victim of external events to manipulative monster), it’s impossible to guess when something will go south and who will undergo a change in personal character. Breaking Bad is not accommodating toward viewer expectations in that it rejects the usual narrative formula. It disconcerts us with its efforts to raise the plausibility of ongoing events, creating the impression that almost anything could happen. However, it does not discourage us from forming our own hypotheses. On the contrary, through the “forward looking” scenes in the prologue, it rather encourages us to actively insert what we see into the narrative as a whole. Suspense is created based not only on the viewer’s uncertainty with respect to what will happen, but also on the knowledge of what the character knows or doesn’t know. The series’ creators work with multiple narrative focal points and pit the characters conflicting interests against each other, so that the characters frequently have to face risks coming from different areas (immediate and extended family, institutions, the underworld). The transformation of our perception of the characters is tied to what we know of them, how much we respect them and how many moral transgressions we are willing to forgive them for. It is fascinating to watch the purposeful “dirtying” of the protagonists. In the final season, it will be hard for you to find a character who is without guilt. The increasing risks taken force the characters to think farther ahead, thus making them better players. The self-stylisation and pretence don’t do any good for Jesse in particular, who is perhaps the weakest personality, but he is also the one to whom the most powerful cathartic effect is bound in the final episode. ___ The real antagonist of most of the characters is their own potential, which they either fail to fulfil (through their own fault and that of the system, which repeatedly discourages them) or they fulfil it at a disproportionate cost. The protagonists are also united by their ambiguity. Each of them can step out of his role, whether he accepted it voluntarily or under duress. Because nothing is fixed and we are forced to assess the given choices of a given character in the context of his previous actions, it is possible to also doubt Walt’s admission in the final episode that taking care of his family was only a pretext for choosing a life of crime (on which he embarked for his own selfish reasons, not to provide for his wife and son). Was his motivation from the beginning really anything other than power and money? We are aided in the reassessment of our opinions on the characters by the use of parallels (Hank as a substitute father for Walt Junior, Walt as a substitute father for Jesse), which lead us to see similar situations in different contexts and point to some key themes of the series. ___ Through his career as a drug kingpin, Walt vents the aggression that he has built up from numerous sources. He failed as the breadwinner of his family, nor did he fulfil expectations as a father figure (his son gets advice on how to be a man from Hank). Through his other life, he also compensates for the breakdown of his own body. He makes money outside of the system also because he was excluded from it due to his illness. He is rejected by society because, as a person with cancer, he signifies death (the “other”). Cooking meth makes it possible for him to overcome the substitute father and husband figures and to put his exceptional intellect to use at least outside of the official structure. He holds on to his faith in the traditional, or rather obligatory model of the family for a long time. Only in the series finale, no longer bound by anything, all-powerful and capable of anything, he can give full expression to his potential and fully transform into the person he was perhaps destined to become from the beginning. ____ The extraordinary thematic scope of the seasons makes Breaking Bad rewarding material for a sociological study on the anxieties of contemporary America (drugs, money, terminal disease, an ineffective social-security system). Those who want to make it cannot respect the law and must endlessly build up the façade of an upstanding citizen through hundreds of small lies. Many times, the series relativises the distinction between “big” lies with broad reach and small family lies. Hypocrisy is the essence of both. Instead of learning greater openness, the protagonists become ever more adept at constructing alternate worlds and coming up with reasonable stories (Walt as a gambler). As everyone gradually finds out, however, the real drama plays out behind these false fronts. It is fascinating to watch how the screenwriters lead the characters into a multi-level web of lies and how they deal with their various degrees of knowledge about the existence of particular worlds and their supposed inhabitants, family, the underworld; these worlds are at first more distinctly different also artistically, but all of them gradually “darken” into the same colour palette). ___ Breaking Bad is also extremely satisfying in terms of its style, which changes not only in the course of single episodes, but also in individual scenes (through recontextualization and/or the revealing of new information, we are prompted to see a given scene from a different perspective). With the graphic continuity of shots, action played out on multiple planes and creation of meanings through camera positioning and movement, the series’ creators succeeded in doing much more than many Hollywood productions with a hundred times the budget. I could endlessly watch the Scorsese-inspired edited collages, while the emblematic space of New Mexico hasn’t been used for such a thrilling dusting off of classic western motifs (the train robbery) for years, and in terms of directing, the final episode can boldly compete with any of Hitchcock’s better thrillers. There is much that could still be written, but the tone would remain just as praiseful. Breaking Bad contains so much that is positive that I consider it to be petty to mention its few minor flaws. It doesn’t often happen that a series allows you to be practically uncritical. And I give thanks for that! 100%
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Living the American Dream via the periodic table and Heisenberg’s principle of equivocality which is not black-and-white, but that doesn’t mean that it contains no black or white. When a middle-age crisis hits an over-qualified, kind chemistry teacher with a complex, whose prizes family above all else (his wife is an accountant against her will and also an unsuccessful writer with a few published stories, his son has polio and is going through a rough puberty and there’s even an unplanned kid on the way); this is already a powerful theme in itself. And when you add a trick of fate in the form of advanced cancer, this is doubly powerful. It is clear that here we will get a combination of satire and drama with a precisely dosed admixture of black humor. And what if, to provide for his family, this hen-pecked chemistry teacher decides to “kick off the hen and declare a vendetta on fate"; in other words once and for all (and for the last time) to take his life into his own hands... So he sets out on the slippery slope of crime as a “Meth Cook", with a former pupil who was one of the laziest and most useless in the class, Jesse; which forms the recipe of an uncompromising, raw, cynical crime series where you find yourself breathing in the rhythm dictated by the creators, not by your own body. The only respite (which is no criticism - it fits here) occurs at the beginning of season three when the creators give the characters the opportunity to get off the careering train and return to their original, “non-criminal" routine. But if this seems like a disparate mixture of genres and themes, the truth is in exact opposite. Unusually well written (both characters and story; just a shame about the exceptions proving the rule in the Lost-style intertwining of fates during the final of season two) and presented (nobody else has yet come near to the prologs to each episode) and also never losing its worrying, chilling tone and very movie-like guise (it is markedly Coen-McCarthy-esque); and not just in TV production terms. But there is one snag. It definitely isn’t for people who need to identify with one of the characters. Of course, you understand (but may not approve of) the characters and their behavior in all situations, but the more this pedantic teacher Walt who you would trust with your wallet “becomes" Heisenberg, who commands respect and fills you with pure fear (If that's true, if you don't know who I am, then maybe your best course would be to tread lightly.), the more clear it becomes that you can’t root for him because he starts not seeing the wood for the trees, which means he not only harms his surroundings, but also his nearest and dearest. And mainly he is never under any circumstances the victim of circumstances or screenwriters, but is always fully responsible for everything that happens to him. And so it is with everything. In any case, if you get into the vibe of the series, you have a good chance that you will find a hot favorite for your most favorite episode of all existing series (there are countless candidates for this in all seasons, but the clear winner is Ozymandias), for the award for best scene of all existing series (there are more candidates for this than for the episode prize, but the clear winner here is Crawl Space) and of course for the award for best series of all top series. PS: And like the very end held no disappointment at all, it seems like, in spite of all the horrors experienced by others, Walt got off lightly in comparison. The very end lacks a certain hidden uncompromising streak which for instance raises The Shield onto the highest pedestal for the best and most memorable finale ever.
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