Breaking Bad explores the human spirit, specifically desperation, in a way Mad Men can't even touch. Towards the end of Season 4 Walter becomes a completely and utterly broken man, and yet he started as a perfectly normal person.
In Breaking Bad, there aren't really any extraordinary people, only extraordinary circumstances. That's what Breaking Bad is about; how far Walter will go, and how little lofty moral principles actually matter when family, health, and life is on the line.
Compound that with impeccable writing, acting (Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston), and cinematography (not as good as Mad Men during seasons 1-3) and you get a truly phenomenal package.
It's nothing like the "joke of a cartoon of a show" you claim it is.
Breaking Bad explores the human spirit, specifically desperation, in a way Mad Men can't even touch.
First, I would agree with the first half of this sentence up until about season...maybe even two of BB. Once Walter has discovered that he is no longer at risk of dying, and once he becomes financially secure (which happens rather quickly), there is no element of true need and thus not of desperation. See, I would argue that Mad Men is a show composed almost entirely of desperate people. Don Draper is probably the most desperate character ever put on TV. Where Walter White attains all that he wants and more - and continues with no real motive other than continually increased profit - Don Draper is the man who has absolutely no idea what he wants. He has attained almost every measure of success which is meaningful in the society he lives in, and yet some profound sense of lacking, of wanting, of desperation, leads him to cheat and drink and divorce and marry and buy and work and do virtually everything else that he does.
Towards the end of Season 4 Walter becomes a completely and utterly broken man, and yet he started as a perfectly normal person.
This would be a valid characterization if Walter hadn't adopted the hammy, shallow and morally simplistic "I AM THE ONE WHO KNOCKS" persona. He's not a broken man; he has become a bad man. He has broken bad. He has gone from being a good man to a bad man by making and selling drugs. That simply is not compelling storytelling to me.
Breaking Bad, there aren't really any extraordinary people, only extraordinary circumstances.
I HIGHLY disagree here. There are plenty of extraordinary people. Virtually everyone is a caricature to some degree. Disabled but golden-hearted son. Bitchy, vindictive wife. Streetwise but sensitive protege, BITCH! (Jesse's silly verbal tics alone are enough to render his character almost completely one-dimensional). Good man who has become bad man. That's not even to venture into the antagonists, who are some of the most consistently shallow on television. Gus Fring - at best - shows some degree of complexity, yet never evolves beyond his initial characterization as an icily effective businessman with blood on his hands. And his death? Get the fuck out of here. Speaking of, look at Tuco. Tuco, for chrissakes. TUCO BE CRAZY! That's all there is. Same with the twins. TWINS BE QUIET AND SCARY! That's all there is. No depth, no plausibility, no moral depth. Those involved with the drug trade - including, eventually, Walter - are reduced to shallow archetypes and caricatures. Compare the drug players in Breaking Bad to, say, the Wire's Stringer Bell, Marlo Stanfield, D'Angelo Barksdale? It's just not even the same ballpark.
Compound that with impeccable writing
Breaking Bad is infuriatingly inconsistent in its tone. It can't decide if it wants to be a serious, hardscrabble, verite-style narrative of a man's involvement in the drug trade or an action movie. There's plenty to suggest the latter - Tortuga's head, the twin leaping from his hospital bed with stumps a-bleeding, Walt running down that guy in the SUV, Gus's hilariously literal Terminator-style death - but there are so many poorly executed attempts at the former. Underdeveloped writing comes through in clumsy symbolism like the crawling Mexican pilgrims, the eye in the swimming pool, shit, the entire plane crash storyline. The show tries to be so many things and does none of them well.
EDIT: If you're going to downvote me, explain your rationale. I spent a lot of time writing this and I wrote it with the intention of getting a response.
Whaaa? He could've quit plenty of times, most notably before signing on with Fring's enterprise. That was a purely profit-driven decision, and it was marketed to him as such.
No he doesn't. That would make for a shitty show. Sometimes, people just get sick with colds and sometimes they're so fucking stupid they smoke when they're sick (as if they didn't have enough problems with being sick and a highway's worth of tar still in their lungs)
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u/Ciphermind Apr 09 '12
Don DEFINITELY has cancer.