In 2008, television audiences met the world’s most pitiful man: an overqualified and underpaid high school chemistry teacher, 50 years old and the breadwinner for his pregnant wife and disabled son. And to complicate matters, he’s just been diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer. In his quest to secure enough money for his family to survive—about $700,000—Walter White pairs up with a junkie-cum-former student to cook crystal meth.
When it premiered, most thought Breaking Bad unsustainable, that its plot was too constraining to survive for more than a season or two. But in 2012, five seasons in and with one to go, the show is top-rated, award show-sweeping, critically worshipped, and, if I may be so bold, more compelling than anything on TV since season four of The Wire. It achieved this status largely by tricking its audience.
When we first tuned in, we thought we were watching a devoted father and his comically unlikely partner in a struggle to save an innocent family. What we witnessed was the birth of a monster.
That plot arc, which defies TV’s conventions, was the intent of creator Vince Gilligan from the beginning. He wanted a show based on change, whose characters grew and morphed the way those in movies and novels do.
Gilligan’s aspirations to go beyond the boundaries of the television genre, which is largely considered a low form of art, are obvious in every perfectly executed episode of Breaking Bad—numerous shots that are abstract and visually striking, upbeat music accompanying sinister action (this week’s finale featured a graphic montage of 10 men getting brutally murdered, set to a catchy, doo-wop-y tune), and symbolism at every turn render the show the quintessential “visual novel.” It attacks your moral center, throws off your sense of good and bad, and shows the human capacity for corruption like you’ve never seen on the small screen.
The challenge of creating a visual novel—and Breaking Bad’s impressive success at the task—is the number of components at play: not only writers and cinematographers, but also actors with the talent for manipulating a dedicated audience. Bryan Cranston portrays man’s slow consumption by power and greed in a way that’s on par with history’s best Macbeths. At first we rooted for Walt; we cheered when his cancer went into remission, his meek stance became a swagger, he outsmarted his über-macho brother-in-law, Drug Enforcement Agent Hank. Walt was our anti-hero, a family man cooking meth and finding himself along the way.
It is a testament to Gilligan’s and Cranston’s talent that we can’t pinpoint when exactly Walt switched from the show’s hero to its villain. He has become the same breed of ruthless, mega-rich drug lord that threatened him and his family in seasons past. Watching him play with his infant daughter is sickening, knowing how many murders those hands have orchestrated. He’s poisoned a child, he’s shot a coworker, he’s indirectly caused Hank to be near-fatally injured, and after all of this, he continues to produce massive quantities of a life-destroying drug for reasons completely beyond those that originally motivated him; his cancer is a non-issue, and he has more money than he could have dreamed of in season one. He admitted in season five that he’s not after survival, but an empire, and he’s willing to kill every Banquo who stands between him and kingship.
So our beloved hero has become an unforgivable tyrant. The audience is now faced with a choice: We can root for Hank, the veritable Macduff of this tragedy, whom we hated in the beginning for emasculating poor Walt. We can root for Skyler, Walt’s wife, even though we loathed her when she cheated a few seasons back. And almost all of us root for Jesse, the former addict who has been through so much hell since partnering up with Walt that he might have been better off dying in the pilot episode, like the writers had originally planned.
But as much as Walt and Breaking Bad’s incredibly talented cast and crew have played with our loyalties, and as much as we’ve watched our protagonist turn into a cold-hearted meth kingpin, many of us just can’t bring ourselves to root for the DEA. The takedown of Walt’s empire would destroy too many innocent or likable (read: Saul Goodman, the duo’s hilariously dirty lawyer) characters. If the foreshadowing and plot twist that we witnessed in the last few episodes are any indication, the final season will be a race for Walt’s demise by factors external and internal, including the one that set the whole story into motion in the first place.
And, in a final twist to the knife in our moral centers, Gilligan and company have many of us rooting for the cancer.
