Spoiler alert: Season 1 Spoilers ahead.
How to say something non-trivial about Breaking Bad? It seems the finest minds of our generation have set before themselves the task of deconstructing this massive cultural achievement - why it works, why it's different, why it's so popular, the nature of the protagonist, the roles of the various foils, the morality, the allusions, the influences the show drew upon, the influences the show has, the setting, the plot, the conflicts, and on and on and on... A couple weeks ago I even took on the subtle dance of mystery and drama in the fourth season finale.
And I've eaten it all up, truth be told. A lot of filler, but quite a lot of surprisingly good critique out there. (I only wish we as a culture would work on solving some of our problems from time to time instead of documenting them and complaining about them incredibly eloquently, myself included.) Still, out of all the brilliant thoughts that have passed from others into my ears, the subtle analysis from viewers unseasoned and well-seasoned with the tropes of television, and the dumb 4chan comments that turn out to be eerily smart in one sense, out of all of it, maybe I can still say something new.
First of all, if you haven't heard the Breaking Bad folks' podcast in all its sprawling, detail-oriented glory, you should; it's quite fascinating. It's right there, it's primary source material, and it will make you respect the people that make the show on every level as connoisseurs, team players, and great, down-to-earth thinkers alike. I just thought I'd get that out of the way. See, a recent episode ended on a cliffhanger and a well-known "this is what a character says before he probably dies" moment. And all across the Internet, knowing connoisseurs of the medium of television were giggling: "LOL he bought the Live-4-Ever boat just like McBain's partner before he dies" (The Simpsons did it). When the death happens in the next episode? Gilligan himself makes the same joke on that podcast about the cliffhanger, though it was recorded weeks before either episode was aired (and hence before those savvy Internet commenters knew what'd hit them!). It was a conscious decision by the writers, made with conscious implications for the plot, with full awareness of the cliches trodden upon. The next episode was almost inevitably a masterpiece, with the resolution of the cliffhanger being but one part of a 45-minute tour de force, and the cliffhanger justified itself many times over.
Whatever the case, I'll just go over the basics of the plot in case you haven't seen it: "Mr. Chips to Scarface" is the oft-repeated pitch of the show. Walter White, a milquetoast chemistry teacher with a family, discovers he has lung cancer and decides he has had enough of a world chosen for him by others, and chooses instead to leverage his Nobel-winning chemistry expertise into cooking meth, ostensibly in order to pay his medical bills, but really to leave a legacy behind. White finds out that a former student of his, Jesse Pinkman (played wonderfully by Aaron Paul) is a petty meth cook. White forcefully recruits Jesse, and they quickly work to make some of the purest methamphetamine in the Southwest. The rest of the series is a slow, often-meditative tale of White's decline into super-villain and meth kingpin over 6 seasons.
But while "Mr. Chips to Scarface" is a great tagline, I'd argue that the Simpsons allusion is far more revealing to me in one specific sense - Gilligan and his team of writers have hamfistedly taken every trope and method from the long history of television and applied what they have liked and rejected categorically what they have not. And while this is how creativity has oft-proceeded in the history of television, for once, their medium wouldn't hold their premise back.
See, the most pernicious and convenient of all television tropes is stasis. Since, uh, well, since stories were told in a structured way, storytelling has long been the study of "growth, decay, change, and transformation". Fables, plays, novels, short stories... it's rare that nothing changes in a dramatic work. After all, if nothing fundamentally changes by the end, then you can argue from an almost mathematical viewpoint that nothing has fundamentally happened.
And yet in television - and I'm the latest of millions to say this - traditionally everything is wrapped up in the space of an episode. And some shows are even big enough to have season-long arcs! Some shows - if you're very lucky - don't even throw out all the character development from season to season. But ultimately, in the vast majority of cases, stasis is restored. Now, granted, stuff happens in these shows, people go places and do things, and have conflicts, fall in and out of love, discover truth and navigate their emotions, and sometimes at the end of a season, beloved cast members die. And new cast members come in to take their place. And it's all quite entertaining and even aspires to art from time to time. For decades this has been the reality of fiction on television, excepting the occasional sketch comedy and anthology. A good show is one that is broad enough to have a lot happen, that gives the writers and actors a lot of latitude, and in the end can bring them back to restart the formula. More cynically, a good show in economic terms is one that is durable enough to survive a lot of turnover, one that is easy to build a workable 22 or 45-minute formula around, and one that attracts talent but that can afford the talent it attracts and can pay for itself many times over with its viewership. Whatever the case, stasis is at the core of it all. If too much changes from episode to episode, then suddenly the business major in the room perks up and says "But we're offering a service! If you can't give the American public 22 consistent minutes for them to feel a consistent way, then they're not going to make time for you consistently. And neither will our advertisers." Much like any other corporation, shows exist and change in ways that reflect a large self-perpetuating impulse right down to their artistic core. Television shows are traditionally seen as consistent ways to unwind, almost rhythmically and hypnotically, and stasis is at the core of the consistency.
I'm not saying anything new here, and even when you add in Breaking Bad, I'm hardly but echoing critical consensus so far. The next part is, yada yada, how Breaking Bad breaks out of this mold of stasis, hence the "Mr. Chips to Scarface"....etc.
Okay, but here's where I veer off a bit... "Breaking Bad" does embody stasis, to quite an incredible extent. The top directors three years ago are still the top directors now. The producers are much the same. The vast majority of the lead actors have stayed around; the ones that didn't typically went away because a) they were villains in Walt's way, b) it was part of the plot and c) they'd already established themselves and their form indelibly upon the series.
So the main characters generally stuck around unless they were antagonists that had to die, and this does have to do with a traditional sense of narrative convenience and an economic drive - you create chemistry between characters, and you don't screw it up by killing them off willy-nilly. Combine that with a respectful work atmosphere and a circle of trust, and the show has maintained continuity and stasis through maintaining large portions of its best cast, crew, and team of writers that otherwise might have eluded another well-intentioned show with a similar premise.
But can we go back to the villains that die part? Because it's important. See, the villains do die and stasis is restored in the traditional television sense. But that process is not so simple. There's a concept near the end of all television seasons known as plot armor: If a character is up for a renewal of their contract, they survive (they have armor; get it?); if not, they die or leave. Breaking Bad - for all it does differently - certainly does have all of this plot armor stuff, both in cynical economic terms and in narrative terms. But there's a wrinkle that causes a healthy stasis cell to mutate into something more sinister: Because, in Breaking Bad, the plot armor is not centered around static characters so much as the plot armor is centered around the continued existence of human beings that those characters represent in the universe. And those human beings are true dramatic characters, that grow and change and decay and transform. In other words, stasis isn't so simple, isn't suddenly so much about making sure that Homer Simpson still has a job and a family at the end, but simply making sure that Homer Simpson is alive. In Breaking Bad, if Walt destroys his family, he has to move into an apartment across town. If Walt destroys his partnership, he has to risk exposure. If Walt kills an antagonist, but that antagonist was helping him in his business? He has to live with the difficult work of rebuilding whatever safety or purpose that antagonist was providing. There's no plot armor that insulates Walt from his choices: just from death. And, with the lung cancer and a certain end date for the show just 10 days from airing as of this writing? Maybe Walt is not even insulated from death.
And the stakes aren't simply in what Walt cares about... it's the very soul of every character potentially at stake. The show makes a great argument that we're in part a product of our circumstances, that evil can be a hubristic path, but it can also be a path set out for us by inevitabilities, and - without being too relativistic - the show at least presents "evil" as being a web of casuality and luck and circumstances that come together with you, like, say, killing a gangbanger to protect your family and your growing empire.
Very early in the first season, there's an amazing episode where Walt has Crazy-8 dead to rights in Jesse's basement. Chained with a bike lock to a pole in Jesse's basement, Crazy-8's leverage consists of two things: His ability to speak and Walt's conscience. Walt has the terrible choice between letting Crazy-8 live, risking Walt's whole family from a retaliation in the process, or having a human being's premeditated death on his conscience forever. Walt is given plenty of opportunities to let Crazy-8 live or kill him, with Walt even begging Crazy-8 first to defend his life's worth over some beers and then not to come after his family. Walt desperately wants to let Crazy-8 live. And yet the choice is no choice at all. When "he will murder your entire family" is on the Cons list, you scribble out the Pros. And Walt kills Crazy-8, because he has to. And it disturbs him to his core. It changes Walt. He immediately changes the core of the series by telling Skyler about his cancer. Fade to black. The show marches on, differently.
In plot terms, Crazy-8 had to die. In terms of plot armor and stasis and everything that television is about historically, Crazy-8 had to die. But on most passable shows where this is even an issue, by the next episode Crazy-8 is never even mentioned, or, maybe, on a shade-more-serialized show, even precipitates someone's scandal. On a typical cop show, Bryan Cranston's Walter White has a deep emotional reaction, calls his partner and says "I've done it. I had to." and his partner reassures him "I know." and the last shot is Officer White looking over the body, holding the phone, and his partner says, "Are you alright." and he says "Not really." and hangs up the phone. End episode. It might even win an Emmy and be considered a watershed of whatever series it's a part of. And, at the end, Walter White is still Walter White. He is a gritty, mild-mannered chemistry teacher with a beautiful family to protect and a meth business to manage on the side, filled with shady characters. And he has to hide the one from the other and the other from the one. Plot armor allows the show to end on that note and come back the next week, maybe a little bit edgier and, yes, lesson-learned, but only a part of a long life filled with many lessons that last 45 minutes, 24 times a year. I'd probably watch it if it were on.
But I wouldn't need to watch it really badly. And that's because instead of any of that, on Breaking Bad, Walt pleads and pleads for any other way out. And once the dead is done to Crazy-8? Walt no longer has to make that long series of calculations for anyone else; it would be too plodding for his future schemes to work. He has solved that problem of chemistry and knows how to respond the next time it happens. Walt is a changed man. His first act after Crazy-8 is dead is to tell his wife Skyler that he has cancer. Immediately. And there is no going back from that. And, given that Walt's schema of morality and action form the central core of the show? Breaking Bad becomes a fundamentally different show, and it creates a real dramatic, thematic, and visual history that it consistently draws upon. And so, little by little, the show prods away at its own stasis. Walt doesn't have a state to go back to because - as the show convincingly argues - none of us really do. And if we want to keep what we have tomorrow, we had first better learn to treasure what we have today and not disturb its causes. Walt makes decisions that chip away at the underlying moral fabric on which is family is built and suddenly, quite organically, the structure and power dynamics and relationships of the family begin to disintegrate. Walt is simply the clearest possible example for the quintessentially dynamic view of human nature presented in the show. Things change around us, and we change with them, even to our core. The long-standing narrative fiction of a static character as a representation of a human being is suddenly and starkly chipped away at with subtle, dynamic shifts in every character from event to event that befalls them. Instead of the quaint, commercialized rules of TV producers, Walt's (and consequently the show's) impetus instead comes from the unflinching rules of drama handed down from time immemorial. The series as a whole and most of its episodes come together for microcosmic and macrocosmic versions of the Hero's Journey. And every episode the sort of magic that he has to conjure to return to the start point? That magic - whether shaped like a gun, or a plant, or a phone call, or a basement - is evil itself, and Walt must become evil to possess it. Walt has to be more and more evil - has to decay and break something he's always believed in - in order to preserve whatever is left of his empire and his family at any given time. To avoid death, to avoid leaving nothing, to avoid his legacy becoming corrupt, to avoid irrelevance... Walt becomes a little bit more callous and casual towards the lives he takes. He becomes more cunning, more deceptive, more rational, and faces greater dangers each time. He becomes, in short, the drug dealer that you cannot allow to live when you have him dead to rights, because he'll kill your whole family if you let him live.
Characters seek traditional television stasis in the universe of Breaking Bad, in short, only through the goodness of their souls, or through the decay of their souls. But, if it's the latter path they seek, then attainment of stasis is impossible, because when, say, Walt looks into Skyler's eyes, he's looking into her eyes from a different viewpoint than on the day before. He has killed and he can never look at her with the eyes of relative innocence on which their relationship might once have proceeded and on which their family might have started. He's still looking into her eyes, but in the gaze a little bit of the glint is missing from both sides. That's the game: If you give up your soul, if you let yourself go and don't look back, then you might still be breathing in the healthiest of oxygen, but the air around you shall be poisoned forever with the scent of the dead even as you go on living.
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