Comparing Breaking Bad and The Wire is like comparing Michael Jackson and Prince. Both effeminate black men with kick-ass songs. But very different people who should be evaluated individually, not compared.
Of course it makes sense, that’s exactly why the two show up in the same sentences all the time: they are widely viewed as the two top contenders for Greatest Televsion Series Of All Time, both formally (see Guinness Book of World Records, virtually every television critic in the English-Speaking world) and informally (visit the water cooler). The naysayers to either as top contenders are so few that it is fair to say that a consensus has been reached about both. Sorta like the Beatles vs. Stones of television.
It doesn’t mean that they are everybody’s personal favorites, of course. They are not to everyone’s taste. But just as with the Beatles, you cannot deny the excellence, even if it is not your personal cup of tea.
And that is why I said what I said in my OP; I believe that Breaking Bad IS the number one because it is as close to flawless as it gets: every other great show has noticeable, identifiable, widely-agreed-upon flaws and missteps in one form or another.
While there are a few lone contrary voices claiming to find Breaking Bad entirely unworthy of the ranking, and a few quibbles here and there about very small matters which are usually offered apologetically as mere personal preferences and quickly brushed aside, the one thing I have not found is any noticeable agreement about any particular flaw in an otherwise amazing show.
The same cannot be said of the Wire, or the Sopranos, or Deadwood, or Seinfeld or All in The Family or I Love Lucy or Mad Men or Six Feet Under or any other television series ever.
While writing this post, I did a Google search to find some shows that are considered the greatest of all time and my search was simply “greatest television show of all time” and clearly it’s between the wire and’s breaking bad. And if you do the search yourself read the Hollywood reporter peace that comes up in the first 10 results… The writer makes basically exactly the points I am making although he comes down on on the side of the wire, he wrote it before the final seven episodes of breaking bad. I’ll have to see if he’s written anything since then…
What keeps BB from being flawless (for me) are the contrivances, all those nick of time scenes. There was never a time watching The Wire when I had to suspend disbelief.
Flaws and missteps in The Wire? The main complaint I’ve heard about The Wire was what Freamon and McNulty did in S5, but if you watch without gaps, from the beginning, you see that what they did was in their nature. They were both renegades.
So based on that, I put The Wire as #1 for realism, depth of character, cultural insight, and BB #1 for the story of one man’s descent and near-redemption.
I understand the argument, on both sides. Again…Beatles/Stones. As far as the specifics, what I have always felt about Breaking Bad is that the writers do, or did, an astonishing job of making inherently unbelievable plots extremely believable. All fiction, if it’s watchable at all, requires some suspension of disbelief, because it requires some leaps of logic, some time compression (if Legal shows worked in real time none of them would be on the air for longer than a month), but in my opinion Vince and Company did an unusually excellent job of plugging holes that other writers would’ve left gaping. (Recently I’ve been hearing people complain a little bit about the contrivance of Walt seeing Elliot and Gretchen on television while he was at the bar… But I thought that was handled well because the bar wasn’t watching Charlie Rose they were just flipping channels… A far worse contrivance in my estimation, one of the “stumbles” on my personal list, was the contrivance of Walt stopping for a drink when he was supposed to be getting diapers and had already wasted tons of time going to Jessie’s house, all so he could run into Jane’s father.)
On the other hand, while I think the wire was brilliant through season four, I think that season five fell apart almost completely. McNultys actions weren’t renegade they were insane.
But to each his own…
Hmm. Maybe I should look into watching this “Breaking Bad” show after all…
We will agree to disagree. I will also not compare Huck Finn with Ulysses, though they are also top contenders for best English language novel ever they have so little in common as to make them almost totally different art forms. The Wire and Breaking Bad are the same. One is epic in scope the other is narrowly focused on a single character. One deals with a hyper realistic world the other in a fantastical world where a person can go from joe shmoe to the worlds greatest drug kingpin in about nine months, less if you assume he was a legend by the time the cartel was trying to get him.(and if I have to pick a flaw in BB it’s the totally implausible timeline.)
Breaking Bad is great. I would put it up there with the all time greats. It is totally in my top five. Somewhere up there also is the UK version of The Office, MASH, *The Wire *and very probably Louie. None of these are similar enough to the other for me to make a real comparison. The Office was as narrowly focused as BB, but it’s a comedy where the joke is the lack of change while BB is almost the opposite. Louis is playing with the idea of what TV sitcoms even are, MASH was the perfection of the Sitcom…saying one is better than the other is missing the point that TV can be more than just one thing.
Why can’t Breaking Bad be great without having to be THE BEST EVER? If it has to be THE BEST EVER, then it has to be compared to things that are similar and working within the same for with the same ends. So, the greatest character arch focused serial TV drama ever? Sure, I’ll give you that. But then your definition of what makes it great is also the definition of the genre, so you have to figure out a better reason why.
You really should.
Indeed.
In fact, I find it a bit strange that the OP’s argument for “X is the Greatest Ever instance of Genre Y” is that X is the most like Genre Z.
They have shows on TV like this…they’re called SITCOMS.
I think you could make an argument that The Shield was one long story arc. Vic Mackey sealed his fate in the first episode by committing an unforgivable act. The rest of the series was about how it led to his fall.
BB might have the most annoying family-we’re-supposed-to-care-about of all time. Though The Sopranos gives it a run for its money. I can see Tony and Walt getting together over drinks to complain about their useless wives and sons.
BB defenders would say The Shield isn’t as interesting because in BB we watch Walt deteriorate whereas Vic probably did his worst act right off the bat, everything else was just clean up and he’s just a giant irredeemable asshole the whole time.
I seem to be the opposite of 90% of people because I liked the Sopranos ending (or at least, didn’t hate it) and thought the Shield’s ending was an unbelievable copout. I know what they were going for, but just…really? Talk about taking the third way.
When I compare Breaking Bad to The Sopranos, which is certainly comparable in many ways, being a serialized story about an anti-hero, super-highly-regarded, etc., the big difference to me, and the reason I think BB comes out way ahead, is that BB has a single series-long arc. Walter White gets cancer, starts selling meth, how’s it going to turn out? Individual episodes and seasons certainly have their own plots, but BB as a series is clearly telling one single contained story from Walter’s life. I watched all of The Sopranos, albeit a while ago, and I remember it seeming much more like “well, here’s this interesting guy who lives an interesting life, and is having a midlife crisis. Well, we’ll spend some time watching him and see what happens”. And interesting things happened, and it was certainly extremely well written and acted. But it was missing the overarching story that gave Breaking Bad its momentum. I remember thinking back on The Sopranos fairly shortly after it ended and all of the seasons just running together. One of them had Steve Buscemi as a guest star, right?
I have lots of reasons, I just posted the one extra thing it had going for it that none of the other shows has ever had, something which gave it the momentum, as Max put it. And it’s about execution, not the details of the story. If “The Wire” hadn’t fallen on its face in Season 5, I’d almost call it a draw. But it did. It blew it. Breaking Bad never did.
Time Goodman in the Hollywood Reporter sums up exactly why BB is the best in this perfect bit of prose that nails it (even though he gives #1 to The Wire because he doesn’t penalize S5 as heavily and he scores points for the ambition of The Wire):
That’s why I give it to BB and have zero problem comparing it directly to the Wire or any other show… the execution was superb in every particular, from the first episode to the last, above and below the line.
I introduced my non-watching roommate to BB only six weeks ago, he loved it. Then I introduced him to Louie, and I told him it was kinda the BB of sitcoms. He agrees. I adore Louie…I don’t think of it as a sitcom at all, I think of it as a funny artist making his art.
'zackly. I barely remember anything outside Big Pussy getting it, and Carmela bringing a ricotta pie to the woman at the school, then throwing her Mob Wife weight around. (and pronouncing it “ricoat”, which was interesting…) Same goes for Six Feet Under. LOVED IT… but apart from a few particular scenes that really resonated with me, including of course the amazing last five minutes, I don’t remember it especially well.
By contrast, Walter White’s story is etched on my brain.
Even if this were true—and, as others have pointed out, the advent of Netflix and other options means that it’s not—why would that be a bad thing?
Someone asked David Simon about this issue in an interview he gave about The Wire, and his response was perfect. He said, “You know what? Fuck the casual viewer.”
I might if I ever get time to watch TV again. Maybe in a few years, when my son starts school.
I would go further with this thought.
I was discussing exactly this with my wife the other day, and she asked "what makes Breaking Bad different from a mini-series? "
That was a bit of a poser. What I thought was, in essence, a mini-series is like a long movie, only chopped up into TV-episode sized bits. Breaking Bad wasn’t like that.
I think what makes in different is that, in addition to having a tight and focussed “overall plot”, each episode had a plot with a clear beginning, middle and end. It wasn’t as if each episode was just “part 25” of a mini-series.
Further, each season had a beginning, middle and end!
So what you got was a set of nested stories - each episode, each season, and overall.
It is being able to juggle all of those, without losing focus or paining themselves in a corner, that makes it a truly great TV drama series.
Clearly you are unfamiliar with the Directors cut of Das Boot.
There’s a fair amount of exaggeration going on here in that Breaking Bad did take diversions from time to time. I think Fly is an awesome episode and I didn’t know until recently that some fans feel differently, but that’s the easy example. Until the last season Jesse always had his own side story going on. It also had a strong cast and some of the coolest moments didn’t have Walt in them: everybody seemed pretty captivated by Jesse’s detour to Mexico and Gus’ story, for example. Saul, especially early on, was hilarious almost every time he showed up.
But the show was strongly focused on Walt and his choices and their consequences, and a lot of the other characters mirrored what he was doing in different ways. When Skyler got involved with her boss and found out he was committing fraud it was a really crushing moment and it said something about a different kind of corruption. Jesse paid the price for a lot of Walt’s crimes and showed what Walt might’ve been experiencing if he hadn’t suppressed his conscience. Gus was like Walt but a smarter criminal, more calculating and efficient. Mike was similar to Walt except he was honest with himself about who he was and what he was doing. The Nazis were ruthless criminals like Walt but they lacked his sentimentality and the rules he made up to protect his family. I think that kind of stuff made everything about Walt even though we weren’t always seeing him. The characters and different stories all helped shed light on what he was doing.
The show did have a smaller cast and way less running time than the HBO dramas. I think that contributes to the tightness of the show, and the Sopranos did sometimes lose itself with diversions and dream sequences and things. (Every episode of Breaking Bad was about 25% shorter than an hourlong HBO drama.) And because of the premise of the show - Walt’s cancer diagnosis and his conversion to “bad guy” - it felt like things were building toward a defined conclusion even though the writers didn’t know the ending until they decided this season would be the last one and started figuring out the end.
That last part was great for the show but bad news for the network, by the way. Breaking Bad went out on a huge high note and now AMC doesn’t know what to do for a replacement.
I didn’t intend it to be understood as the show only being about Walter White being onscreen… but everything that happened only happened as a result of Walter White’s decision to cook meth. There was no Jesse story that existed apart from the influence of that, and certainly no Gus, Skylar, Mike, Gale, Saul, Hank, Marie… like I said earlier, if you were to remove Walt’s decision and following actions from the story, the only thing that would remain untouched would be Marie stealing the tiara for the shower gift, Walt. Jr. obsessing about breakfast and hot water, and Skylar ultimately giving birth while Hank made Schraderbrau. Even Jesse’s interactions with his family were drenched in Walt.
And Skyler’s job with Beneke. That was a big subplot for a while and Walt didn’t make it happen. We’re agreed that Walt set everything in motion, but there wasn’t only one story. One story dominated, but especially early on, other things happened.