Gigantic, Superfluous, Inevitable Coda About Breaking Bad

lets go to th mailbag

Wow, after that gigantic Breaking Bad piece, you must be plumb out of words, Alex! Heh. Is there a Santa Claus?
virginia, virginia

Yes, Virginia, you might think that. But you'd be wrong: That's not how statistics work, generally speaking; conditionally, the more words I have already written today, the more words I will write today, unless there's some systematic reason for a limit. And, I'll just stop you right there, time and effort are not limiting factors right now. Oh, and you might reason like, hey, he's already written enough, he must have exhausted all his thoughts for that day, so why is he still writing? The problem is that the impulse to write is almost statistically independent of the impulse to think things through enough to write well. People with nothing to say go on and on; people with brilliant thoughts stifle their words because they value privacy and may not believe their words are worth hearing.

If you want to write things that you've clearly thought through, you have to make sure both cylinders are firing. You can't have anxiety to a crippling extent about what you're writing, and you can't have, well, the impatience not to think through your piece so that it's worth writing and worth hearing. So yeah, when I start writing, I'll keep on writing, because it's very hard to stop. The hard part right now is thinking through whatever it is I say so that it's valid and worth presenting. As the old metaphor goes: it's cruise control, but you still have to steer.

P.S. There is no God, Virginia. Santa Claus is the Devil.

Alex, I was just thinking about that Breaking Bad piece you wrote, and how the stasis of the show is more about personnel and an stably unforgiving universe than any fixed style or even character traits, how characters are allowed to proceed logically and the only plot armor is against death, and even that may be subject to change as the series ends. ...

Yes, that is the piece I just wrote...

And, I was thinking, like: You know that Ivan Karamazov line of reasoning where, like, if God didn't exist everything would be permitted? 

 Sure.

Well, what do you think of that Breaking Bad universe, anyway, Alex? It's a universe where God - in the sense of moral arbiter - exists and punishes transgressions in terms of our families, our relationships, our self-image, and our honor as individuals, our... soul, if you will? Is the fact that the show seems to have a central morality its central distinguishing feature? What would it even be without that morality?

Well, first of all, I think the central distinguishing feature of Breaking Bad is its potent quality in all manner of production: from breaking the story to the minutest music cue to the cleverest bit of camera work. But here's the thing about "quality" (and this applies to just about everything): It's a mix of process and talent and personnel and circumstances. We like to think that quality is sort of a magical sphere of money and prosperity that will rub off anyone that gets near enough. But the truth is unless you have that core of process and talent and personnel and circumstances, you'll have to replicate the talent of what you're imitating with your own. And so dumb imitation is more than likely to lead to mediocrity - all of those things that cause real quality ultimately develop (organically and artificially) out of deep thought for the product being made. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, how far can you get with flattery alone?

So that's a long answer to a short question, but here's a shorter version (that, because I'm me, will end up longer): Breaking Bad is good precisely because it has a lot of good people, a good central vision, and a lot of good time, thought, and attention paid to where it's going and where it's been. And part of that has to do with the morality of its universe. Like I said, if Breaking Bad (or The Wire, while we're at it) were a standard police serial without any ideology or morality? I doubt either would be the show it became. Oh, sure, each might be of a similar quality to its real form superficially... but the seeds for a less organic decay than the show-runners had intended would be planted, and the quality would decline substantially or the series simply wouldn't last long enough to get that far. We wouldn't hate what we'd be getting, but suddenly Walt keeping his secret from Skyler forever and Jesse goofing off while cooking the next big score (still not enough to retire on, damn! Oh, well, these Nuggets songs are great for cooking, Jesse!) would be fun but less fresh after five years, and we'd love the characters but would kind of yearn for more. Look at House, M.D. Fine show, but remarkably episodic, formulaic, and pulpy: For all of Hugh Laurie's brilliance, you almost can't talk about what the show was without saying, "But look what it wasn't." Not quite a masterpiece reduced to pulp (like those words mean anything anymore in the age of Twitter), but House was certainly for me a potential all-time favorite show reduced to place-in-my-heart status. The newspaper arc in Season 5 of The Wire, just to mention, wasn't that bad; it just felt like a barren 90% of The Wire. And that's what I'd come to expect from a non-ideological Breaking Bad... 90%, then drifting down to 80%, something like latter-period Simpsons, where, alright, I might watch it if it's on, but at best it's harmless, at worst it's a concentrated assault on the show I remember most fondly from childhood. 80% of excellence isn't really 80%... it's a zombie masquerading as your best friend. So sure, I think the show still could have been good and still could have made sense without such a moral universe. But it would have left us all with regrets, or, even worse, would not have given us enough of its potential from which to feel such regrets. No wonder Walt is so damn obsessed with purity.

And I don't think Breaking Bad's greatest trick that it distinguishes itself with uniquely dynamic, serialized characters, or that it pushes the morality buttons so damn well. I think the greatest trick is that it uses its vast experience with TV to cast off all impurifying impediments to storytelling - economic, artificial, or traditional - that have been made obsolete or clumsy by the new reality created instantly upon the confluence of its people, with what freedom they've been given, in what era they'd found themselves (in the magical, far-off year of 2007). There is no place for a universe with Walter White that doesn't also include God to send him to unimaginable depths for his transgressions. And so, without hesitation, the writers removed the impurifying impediment - that is, the standard moral world without consequences. And so it goes that we can talk about a literary universe, and mean it, and we can talk about a literary character, and mean it, without worrying that we're just watching Walter White because Bryan Cranston's contract ran longer than Giancarlo Esposito's or because Walt tested better than Jesse in a focus group. Breaking Bad has a literary quality that allows its writers to treat it like literature - if it were a more economic problem that they had to solve (we have to kill off <X>, <Y> has to be attractive role model to our 18-35 y.o. male demographic), their writing would scan a little bit more rhetorically and falsely, and suddenly those acting jobs by Walter White might seem instead like Bryan Cranston is maybe introducing the new super-cool cast members a little bit too eagerly. But it never feels that way. Breaking Bad is popular in part because it never has to try to be popular, and carries its sincerity like a trump card, with humor to spare.

P.S. I say literature like it's some special, patrician pleasure - no, it's your mom reading you that story, it's going to the movies and having a beginning, middle, and end. It's that trashy weird-fiction written by a racist everyone is always telling you is ruining your writing. It's Chekhov by actors that get him; it's Chekhov by actors that don't. It's those kids' shows that you still just can't get enough of at 24 because the writing holds up.