Is Breaking Bad really the best show ever?

[Robert163]

@Jragon

I’m not sure I’d put TZ in with those (except the revivals). Twilight Zone was an important show. It was often heavy handed in its moralizing, but it did a hell of a lot to bury metaphors in fantastical concepts so it could talk about things that would have been taboo to directly address in its day. It launched a lot of careers, and furthered others, and a lot of it is, even today, legitimately good.

I think a lot of people look past it due to being an anthology series, and thus it can’t give individual characters as much depth as a heavily serialized show, but the tradeoff is that it can talk about a greater breadth of things. It also has to be more economical with its themes, messages, metaphors, and settings. Breaking Bad can slowly ease you into a mythology (even if that mythology is close to real life), but Twilight Zone has to ease you into even more unreal worlds in much less time, and it often manages to succeed.

I’d put Buffy in there too. There’s no doubt in my mind that strictly as crafted entertainment Buffy is less well crafted, less consistent, and overall worse than Breaking Bad, let alone the other shows, but it also played with the medium of television and tried to say thing about our culture a lot more; I think it says something that academics are still getting a lot of essays out of it analyzing episodes from different angles.

In a way, I’m not sure “greatest show” is that well defined, because to me there are “important shows” and “well-crafted shows” and they’re not always the same thing. I suppose you could say the “best show” has to be both, but I think it’s too fuzzy to define properly.

is buffy actually a good show?

to me it seemed to be a long drawn out teen romance drama (with vampires and demons) that slowly dragged out all the plot points with not much resolution… maybe the final season resolved the issues, idk. i’ve only seen like 10 or so random episodes but that was the impression i got. was i wrong?

[Tamerlane]

@Robert163

is buffy actually a good show?

It was a groundbreaking show, however it doesn’t hold up quite as well these days. A good show? Yes. Great show? In it’s time, but probably not by the ‘Golden Age’ standards of today. At least IMHO.

Though that said it can still boast a handful of really masterful episodes.

[TCMF-2L]

Comparing Buffy and Breaking Bad is, in my opinion, like comparing apples and oranges.

Buffy was simple ‘Entertainment’ aimed at a younger audience (officially 18 to 30 but also younger) and even when the story arcs finally kicked in it still aimed itself at those with a short attention span looking for an immediate ‘hit’ and - if you are in doubt - none of that is meant as a particular criticism and although I preferred the spin off Angel I also liked Buffy.

Breaking Bad positioned itself as ‘Drama’ and aimed at an older audience. The story arc was there from episode one. Did plenty of populist thrills with humorous inserts (I felt some of the early slapstick was clumsy), gratuitous gore (get the Walking Dead SFX crew in for Gus’s death why don’t you?) but overall it wanted it’s viewers to invest in the long game. You are supposed to watch every episode and watch them in order.

Both are good. Both are influential. But they are not in the same market.

TCMF-2L

[jsquire]

Television has radically changed in the last few years due to widely available on-demand viewing options. That makes it possible to have shows like BB, which are essentially one long story. Watching the episodes in order is essential but easily done. Up until ten or fewer years ago, most episodes in a TV show had to more or less stand on their own since it was easy to miss one and hard to catch up. So something like BB simply could not have existed until recently.

Anyway, I think it’s hard to compare shows that attempted radically different things. BB attempted to be one thing, Seinfeld tried to be something else, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus was something completely different. I think they all succeeded exceedingly well and contributed different things to television. I think there might be more agreement on MPFC as the greatest sketch comedy show of all time than on BB as the greatest drama of all time.

[zombywoof]

I don’t think BB can be directly compared to shows so different from it as The Twilight Zone, The Simpsons, etc…for shows more directly comparable, I’d put it behind The Sopranos and The Wire.