Breaking Down Breaking Bad
One year. That’s all it took for a chemistry teacher with terminal lung cancer to become the biggest, baddest drug kingpin in all of America. Breaking Bad may be the high-water mark for 21st century television dramas, an endlessly engrossing series of perpetual bleakness. But its cold, harsh terrain has unfortunately helped to subvert Breaking Bad’s true tenor: absurdist black comedy.
That’s right. If you think about it, Walt’s character arc is one of the more outlandish evolutions in TV history. At the beginning of the series, he’s a sad, battered pushover who works a second job at a car wash to earn extra money to support his pregnant wife and teenage son. A cancer diagnosis follows soon after. There’s an attempted suicide and lots of crying. That’s where we were at one point. It seems like a century ago, looking at who Walt is now. However, we must not forget that he started out as a down-on-his-luck family man with no real clue as to how crime works.
Breaking Bad is also a black comedy for reasons that lie within us as viewers. Vince Gilligan frames Walt’s transition into an evil drug lord with brilliant subtlety, leaving many of us still convinced he’s the same man all along. Obviously this is incorrect. Walt’s moral compass has been broken for a long time. But we’re still rooting for him to survive his Season 5 fall from grace, a hilarious, near inconceivable idea given the array of naughty things he’s done over time: poisoning a child, raping his wife, the endless dishonesty. On paper, he may be an evil demigod. On screen, though, he’s still Gilligan’s protagonist, someone we apparently care about and have stuck with throughout the series. And the folly behind this truth is a massive joke.
Similar to Walt’s, Jesse Pinkman’s arc is also ludicrous. Beginning as a high school dropout with a penchant for sampling the meth he helps collect ingredients for — the dim-witted druggie child to Walt’s geeky dad — he becomes both a brilliant cook as well as the show’s emotional core, the sympathetic one with his heart in the right place. It’s an evolution that would make sense over a lifetime, but in one short year, it’s as ridiculous as Walt’s transformation.
After Breaking Bad ends Sunday, it might be an interesting exercise to go back and watch everything over again with this fresh perspective. The series’ existence as a black comedy doesn’t take anything away from what Vince Gilligan has been able to do in creating the grim, provocative underworld the show is set in. However, reveling in the sheer impossibility of its premise may make the old seem fresh again.
The plot might halt this Sunday night. But the mystery of what else is subverted beneath the series’ surface is just beginning.
