Ten years ago, Breaking Bad made its TV debut. A comic drama starring the dad from Malcolm in the Middle, it answered the question middle-aged men had asked of themselves for generations: what would happen if I quit my boring job and became an outlaw? The answer, it appeared, involved drugs, mobile homes and being stranded in the desert in your pants.
First impressions of Vince Gilligan’s now seminal drama may have been misleading, however. By the end of the pilot episode the protagonist, Walter White, had murdered a man. His initial adventures may have had a slapstick air to them, but it soon became difficult to laugh.
That tonal trick, to make you think you were watching something less challenging than you actually were, was just the first of many Gilligan pulled. He would play with perspective, style and structure over the course of Breaking Bad’s five seasons. Most of all, he would play with the way he presented his characters, persistently challenging the viewer’s preconceptions. By the time the show came to its end in 2013, the klutzy Walter White had become the ruthless Heisenberg. But even in his denouement – as he bled out on the floor of a neo-Nazi meth lab – many viewers still found themselves rooting for him.
The whole thing was about transformation. But Breaking Bad was also emblematic of significant changes in TV and culture as a whole. When White and Jesse Pinkman first appeared in 2008, the Sopranos had just ended, Mad Men had just begun and we were in the throes of what soon became known as the ‘golden age of TV’. Breaking Bad is now rightfully placed at the top of this category, but it would likely never have existed had US cable networks not been seeking to imitate the success that edgy, creative driven dramas had enjoyed on premium channels such as HBO. (For a sense of how fraught the pitching process was before AMC finally agreed to make the show, watch this interview with Gilligan).
Breaking Bad was born in a boomtime for cable TV. In the UK, where the broadcasting landscape is very different, it only found an audience with the rise of Netflix. The first two seasons of the drama were shown in Britain on FX and Five USA, but struggled to find a large audience. By the time it reached its final season, however, word of mouth was so great that Netflix could use Breaking Bad as a lever into the UK market.
In 2018, the TV landscape is very different. What was an abundance of TV a decade ago is now a deluge, with the landscape now dominated by Netflix (at least, it seems that way – we don’t really know because the digital broadcaster does not release viewing figures). Cable TV, meanwhile, is struggling to keep up. This has had effects on the way we watch, with appointment-to-view being replaced by viewing on demand, and box set binging a common and encouraged practice. Binging would have been the way many UK viewers got to know Breaking Bad, after Netflix acquired the rights to the previously unseen seasons, and put them online before streaming the final eight episodes in weekly chunks.
We are also surrounded by difficult men. This was the name given by author Brett Martin to antihero such as White and Tony Soprano, but also their creators Vince Gilligan and David Chase. No longer unconventional, however, the antihero is 10 a penny, from The Blacklist to Preacher to Narcos. Gilligan, meanwhile, has chosen to go another way. Better Call Saul, his ongoing drama that serves as a prequel to Breaking Bad and centres on its amoral lawyer Saul Goodman, is a study not of the will to power, but of managed disappointment. It tells the story of people who wish they could become something else, but can’t. (One thing it has in keeping with its predecessor/sequel, however, is a keen eye for the strengths and tensions of personal relationships.)
Despite all the Heisenberg T-shirts and mugs, Walter White didn’t endure because of his villainy. If you were still on his side as he died, it was because of the humanity that poked out despite itself. In other words, it wasn’t gunning down a load of white supremacists that made him cool, but being unwilling to shoot his long-suffering accomplice Jesse in the aftermath.
Breaking Bad became a classic drama for many reasons: some to do with craft, some to do with creativity. But above all else it stood out because, however surreal the surroundings, in its conflicted, complicated characters it was true to reality.
