It comes out on DVD tomorrow in Australia. Or today, if you’re actually in Australia.
Watched season 1, not sure if I want to watch the rest. It’s really visceral and intense, possibly too much for me.
IIRC as is typical with some of these shows the violence is there to suck you in but it backs off as you move forward. At least to a point. At the very least there’s considerably less gore (not that there was that much to begin with). As you go into the following seasons the primary focus is the dynamic between Walt and Jesse with a secondary focus on Walt and his family life.
Yep, that’s the scene. My thoughts on the scene were this:
You mean to tell me you can create an explosion strong enough to blast the windows of the room out onto the street, but not suffer fatal injuries, or at least irreversible deafness? I don’t know a lot about explosives, and maybe this is plausible, but it sure doesn’t seem plausible to me, and it really took me out of the show.
And yes, the birthday-gift scene in the pilot was so over the top that it gave me a bad initial impression of the show.
But yeah, I can definitely see where others like it, and how my quibbles with the show wouldn’t matter to others.
Violence and gore are one thing. It’s just… I’m not sure if it’s the editing or what but the stress Walt goes through and the situations just hits a lot harder. And the cancer therapy scenes are very hard for me to watch because I recently lost an aunt to brain cancer.
I’m one of the show’s biggest fans, but I nearly stopped watching it in Season 2 because it was so relentlessly grim and miserable for awhile.
I’m not sure exactly how old it is, but it was definitely around before the show.
I remember, in the 1990s, the characters on NYPD Blue would often say things like, “You gonna break bad with a cop?”
Anyway, just adding my voice to the love for Breaking Bad. I love it because of, not despite its bleakness. I was a huge fan of The Wire for the same reason, and i also think the cop drama Southland, which just finished its fourth season on TNT, is another example of how a somewhat bleak (some would say realistic) outlook can produce good television.
I won’t comment on the cancer aspect but if the stress of the situations Walt finds himself in are too difficult for you to make it through the first season the you probably won’t survive the series. They only get more and more monumental. The hole he digs for himself is nothing compared to what happens in the following seasons. What’s amazing is that they manage to do it without you going ‘What a load of crap’. If people watched the show and said ‘this is bullshit’ then there wouldn’t be people like you that have a hard time watching it. People watch Psych and Fawlty Towers and Malcolm in the Middle to see what kind of hijinks they’ll get into this week. They watch Breaking Bad and Six Feet Under and Twin Peaks to go on an emotional roller coaster. Well, Twin Peaks probably falls somewhere in the middle now that I think about it. The funny thing is, if you take the jokes and physical comedy out of the sitcoms, there’s a fine line between the two. If Vince & Co. didn’t spend so much time working out the bugs and talking out every scene one wrong step would send them over the shark.
They’ve got one more season to tip toe through the mine field with, I’m excited to see how they do it. All we know so far as that they’re going to break it up into two mini-seasons.
ETA, have you watched Six Feet Under? I’m guessing you’d have the same reaction, I suppose it’s equally bleak, but it’s an extremely different show and just as good. Though I guess some would say there’s a lot more death in it.
Just one more person chiming in to echo the OP. Breaking Bad is one of the finest works of visual storytelling I’ve ever seen; calling it a “TV show” is almost an insult. The Wire is the only rival I can think of.
But whereas The Wire was sprawling and Dickensian, Breaking Bad is more like … I don’t know, maybe Dostoyevsky or Flaubert: a tightly focused character study, and a profound meditation on morality and the nature of sin and evil.
Yep. Snagged my copy this morning.
I finished watching season 2 last night, and I’m very interested to see where the show goes
In the wake of the plane crash - darn you, Q! - which really feels like it changes the scope of the show. It’s a large divergence from the real world and I was not expecting them to continue to follow that thread in season 3. (I saw the first 5 minutes of the first episode of that season.) I thought it would just stand as an example of the unintended consequences of Walt’s actions: he’s killed two people himself, allowed Jane to die, and that contributed to the plane crash that killed 167 people. It feels risky to me, but we’ll see how it plays out. When I stopped watching, they were identifying Q as the air traffic controller responsible for the crash, and I assume Walt will recognize him and realize how this relates to him. The show has an interesting habit of ending an episode or a season at a climatic moment and then unexpectedly picking up right afterward in the next episode or the next season. Season 1 ended in the junkyard after Tuco beat his associate to death for no specific reason, so I didn’t think season 2 would start with Walt and Jesse in the car just moments later. Season 3 just started a few hours after the end of season 2. Rather than letting you catch up and figure out what the characters have been doing while the show was off the air, they keep you right there in the action.
Regarding the end of season 1:
Not sure if this is really a spoiler, but anyway, the writer’s strike meant the show came to an unexpected end a few episodes early, hence the ending to season 1 wasn’t a planned season finale. Which is why the story basically just continued there at the beginning of season 2.
BTW, I would like to re-iterate, if you haven’t watched the show yet, DO NOT click on any spoiler boxes.
Right, I forgot about that. Still, they’ve done the same thing from episode to episode in at least a few cases and also at the end of season 2/beginning of season 3.
So, inspired by thread I went and watched the first season. Thanks, SenorBeef. 
Keep going. You won’t regret it.
To me the only question is whether, if BB really absolutely nails the 5th season, it will end up better than The Wire. It will be close…
One of my favorite quotes:
“This is a private domicile and I will not be harassed… bitch!”
So where do you folks who are new to the show usually get your TV recommendations?
I get mine here, and at Alan Sepinwall’s blog. If a show has a weekly thread – or even a season long thread – I figure it’s worth checking out. That’s how I got turned on to The Wire and The Walking Dead. (And now, thanks to mhendo’s comment about Southland, I’ll be checking that one out as well.)
So I’m a bit puzzled at all the folks who are just now getting around to watching a show that’s been on for four seasons and has won numerous awards (including Emmys for Bryan Cranston). We had threads on every episode starting with season one, and they usually stayed on the front page until the next episode aired. Where were you?
If you want your mind blown, I recommend you look at the episode titles for the season 2 episodes that have the images from the plane crash at the beginnings.
If you don’t want to figure it out yourself, it’s …1. 737
4. Down
10. Over
13. ABQ
I’ve had it on my list for a while - literally. I have an actual list of shows I want to watch someday sitting on my computer. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. My TV watching time is limited. And to be honest, I prefer to watch shows that are over and done with rather than still ongoing, because I know exactly how much of a commitment I’m getting into, and I can find out if it’s worth watching to the end before I start, rather than being disappointed, a la Lost.
Here’s a minor plot hole I discovered: [spoiler] Episode 8, season 2: When Jessie moves into his new place next door to the hot quasi-goth girl, he asks about cable TV and she tells him its “fully wired, all you need to do is call them to activate the service” or something similar. He brags to his homies about getting a big plasma TV, and when he finally does in Episode 8, he’s getting a “searching for satellite” message for a long time, even after he invites the girl over…they touch hands as they stare at the message for several minutes.
Searching for satellite? Where’s the goddamn cable TV? [/spoiler]