You should be watching Breaking Bad. You will thank me.

Cafe Society
#1

This post inspired me to make a thread.

So here I am telling you, all of you.

Breaking Bad is, in my opinion, the best thing that has ever been put on television. I know a lot of people feel the same. It is essentially flawless. It is intricately plotted, highly serialized, yet without any major plot holes. The characters change in interesting ways. The acting is superb - Bryan Cranston will win Best Actor for all 5 seasons of the show, but the supporting cast is also great. The cinematography is movie-like. Every detail in the show is thought out and executed with great care.

The premise is that a high school chemistry teacher - who is employed below his skill level - learns that he has inoperable cancer. He worries that he’ll leave nothing behind for his family, and decides to use his chemistry skills to become a player in the meth market to build up a stash for his family.

And from there we have various whacky hijinks when it turns out that the meth industry isn’t terribly safe or pleasant. I don’t want to give away too much.

One of the great things is that unlike a lot of serialized shows, it doesn’t revolve around a mystery. The writers don’t have to try to shoehorn crappy explanations or just drop entire story threads because they were just stringing us along and had no idea what they were doing. The writers know what they’re doing, and the series doesn’t require weirdness or unexplained things to drive the plot. It’s the opposite of Lost in this way.

What I will do is to recommend you watch the pilot. If you aren’t hooked after that, you are a bad person. You can catch the first 3 seasons on netflix instant watch, you can buy the pilot episode for $2 on amazon instant watch or $3 on iTunes (that’s the HD version - amazon also has HD for $3). Buy the DVD of season 1 if you can get a good deal on it, rent it if they do that sort of thing, or find any way you can to watch it.

No spoilers, please, but feel free to gush about the show if you’ve seen it to back me up here.

#2

If it ends as well as it has been going, it will be my favorite show in the history of TV, surpassing The Wire (which surpassed The Shield).

I must say though that I am shocked that any Doper would not already be aware of its greatness.

#3

I have not seen every TV show ever made, but it is the best tv show I have ever seen, including The Wire.

#4

I agree with the OP. Breaking Bad is a great television series that more people should know about if they somehow don’t.

#5

I love Breaking Bad! A lot of my friends think it’s depressing, but then they are all One Tree Hill enthusiasts!

#6

I began watching last season, and it made me very sorry I didn’t watch from the beginning.

The show is RIVETING.

#7

Awesom show. I literally do not know how they will top S4 w/o jumping a shark.

#8

Hmmm…count me as a bad person. I thought the wife’s character was an implausible caricature in the first episode, and later episodes didn’t do much to change my mind. A scene in a later episode involving the judicious use of explosives triggered my Television Bullshit meter pretty badly. And several other sequences on the show seemed overwrought and gratuitously shocking in a way that just doesn’t appeal to me. There are plenty of shows I’d much rather watch: for example, Justified, on the same network (I believe), is a far more nuanced show that I’d much prefer to see.

Edit: I apologize if that’s a threadshit. Mostly I wanted to post in case folks are reading the thread for a recommendation–it’s worth knowing the show isn’t for everyone, even for folks who like the genre. And the show did have some good features. Certainly I’d take it over a lot of alternative, worse shows.

#9

I’m going to suggest that anyone that watches Breaking Bad downloads/listens to the Breaking Bad Podcast (from AMC, with actors and crew (including Vince) from the show). There’s one podcast for each episode and IMO it makes the show twice as good. You’ll hear them talk about little plot points you may have missed, hear about all the work they put into the cinematography and set, the time they devoted to actually acting out each scene etc. I really liked hearing them sit there and discuss some minor plot point that might weave through a few episodes that would go totally unnoticed by most casual viewers or sit with Vince while he discusses how him and the writers agonized about how to close up a plot hole.
Breaking Bad is very much up there with Six Feet Under and Twin Peaks for me.

#10

I should’ve mentioned this in the OP, but you absolutely don’t want to start in the middle of the show - start from the beginning.

#11

It’s a good show, but I wouldn’t go that far.

#12

That’s actually a discussion I’d be interested in, in its own thread. Would you happen to want to make another thread discussing the plot holes of the show? I’ve watched most episodes 3-4 times and nothing comes to mind as a significant plot hole.

#13

The cold opens of season… 3? I think it was season 3… certainly revolved around a mystery.

#14

As someone who has never seen even 5 seconds of Breaking Bad (but who taught high school for several years) how does an average teacher find a customer base for wholesale amounts of methamphetamine?

#15

That’s a big part of the story in the first couple seasons - he knows the chemistry, of course, but he has no way to break into the market. The pilot does a good job of demonstrating how he gets his start. I hate to spoil anything - I’d rather suggest you watch it.

#16

Dude,

Thats half of the story for the first few seasons.

And another vote for this show being one of the best of the best.

Like Senor Beef said.

#17

I only discovered the show this year. I was forced to stay in bed for a week due to a bad back.

I watched the entire series in a week. It was an intense injection of great tv and I was left with some withdrawl after watching the last episode.

I think the Sopranos was slightly better, but not much.

#18

It’s not a spoiler (IMO) but since someone else mentioned that it might be…

one of his students was a meth head so he teamed up with him. Meth heads have meth head friends that would by meth from them if they had it to sell.

But as SenorBeef said, it’s explained pretty clearly in the first episode (and season).

#19

I’ve been watching it since season 1 and it is one of my favorite shows ever. It nearly ranks beside Twin Peaks.

With a lot of shows, you can figure out where the plot is going halfway through an episode. Not with BB.

It’s interesting how the mood of the show has changed along with the changes in the characters. It started out almost lighthearted, with Walt and Jessie almost a comedy team. Over the seasons it’s gotten much more serious (although I think Saul can still be considered comedy relief) and the relationship between Walt and Jessie has changed considerably.

#20

Love 'em both, but *Justified *is on FX and Breaking Bad is on AMC.