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I can't wait !
Jul. 5th, 2011 11:25 amBreaking Bad is coming back. very soon, on July 17, for its fourth season, and if you have never watched it, you're sooooo wrong because there's nothing better on tv! No, really. It isn't a show for everyone but it's truly the finest TV hour these days. Such a refreshing, brillantly acted and beautifully shot tv show.
There's an excellent (yet quite spoilerish) article from Newsweek where Andrew Romano talks with lead actor Bryan Cranston about "the larger themes of the show, which traces the moral decline of Cranston’s character, Walter White, a timid high-school chemistry teacher who discovers he has terminal lung cancer and decides to pay his family’s bills by cooking the finest crystal meth in New Mexico.. "
Here are enlightening but non spoilerish bits:
"It’s a show—an unpredictable, cinematic, potboiling, page-turner of a show—about how people become dangerous. The key word is “become.” Since The Sopranos debuted a dozen years ago, the best characters on TV, from Deadwood’s Al Swearengen to Dexter’s eponymous serial killer, have been antagonistic protagonists—men and women who are neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but morally mixed up, like real people, and captivating for their complexity. At first glance, Walter White would seem to fit the voguish antihero mold. But unlike his cable counterparts, Walt started out a deeply sympathetic figure and then gradually morphed, over three seasons of escalating immorality, into an almost unrecognizable creep. [...]
So far, the “experiment”—Gilligan’s term—has paid off: the darker Walt has gotten, the brighter the show’s prospects have become. “Our show is like our drug,” Cranston says as we walk through Walt’s dormant meth lab. “It’s addictive.” He’s right: Breaking Bad’s black wit and lavish cinematography—director of photography Michael Slovis loves to linger on New Mexico’s ochre deserts and streaking cirrus clouds—make it seem less like a cable drama than some lost Coen Brothers thriller. Which may help explain why the ratings for the season-two premiere exceeded the previous season’s average by more than 40 percent, and the season-three opener added another 40 percent to that number, putting it roughly on par with AMC’s flagship, Mad Men. Meanwhile, Cranston has won three consecutive outstanding lead-actor Emmys, and Aaron Paul, who plays Walt’s maladroit sidekick, Jesse Pinkman, added his own supporting-actor statuette in 2010. No less a narrative ace than Stephen King has called Breaking Bad “the best scripted show on television.” I’d go a step further and say that, right now, it’s the best program on TV, period. [...]
When Breaking Bad returns, it should have the sort of momentum that helped convert cult favorite The Wire into a canonical drama at the same stage in its run; years of “you have to watch this” buzz, both in the press and around the water cooler, seem poised to pay off. But the show’s structure poses a huge risk as well. Every time Gilligan and his team nudge Walt closer to the dark side, they make it harder for viewers to care about his fate. Which means each season is trickier to create than the last. “Breaking Bad hopefully gains new viewers with every episode,” Gilligan says. “But if I’m being honest, I have to think that we’re losing viewers as well. There are some people who shake loose and say, ‘This guy is too damn dark. I can’t root for him anymore.’ The secret is to make sure Walt’s always fascinating, even if people find it tougher and tougher to sympathize with him. [...]
Unlike most other television dramas, which tend to peak early, Breaking Bad has gained steam with each season. [...]
Throughout, the two male leads have been masterly, maintaining the credibility and comic spirit of their scientist-meets-street-punk relationship through some of the most wrenching plot twists ever attempted on television. Paul in particular has blossomed in recent years, transforming his character from a rather one-dimensional brat (who was originally scheduled to die early on) into what Gilligan calls the “moral center” of the show. [...]
But at heart, it’s Walter White’s ongoing transformation that hooks us. That’s the addiction: getting to know a person so well, through television, that when he goes bad, we can begin to comprehend something that real life simply doesn’t allow us to comprehend—how people become dangerous. ”
The article makes very good points but I would have added that the secret is that, although Walt has been becoming darker and darker, and quite unredeemable as a person, the relationship between Walt and Jesse has become so gripping, twisted and yet endearing, that you can't stop watching. No matter how unlikable and manipulative Walter White becomes and how toxic he is for people around him, there's love still, and humanity is there, through that bond he shares with others, especially with his "meth son", Jesse Pinkman. I can't think of another "tv couple" that touching and powerful!
Now should I watch the final season of Deadwood before BB returns or should I save it for later when I will suffer from BB withdrawal?
There's an excellent (yet quite spoilerish) article from Newsweek where Andrew Romano talks with lead actor Bryan Cranston about "the larger themes of the show, which traces the moral decline of Cranston’s character, Walter White, a timid high-school chemistry teacher who discovers he has terminal lung cancer and decides to pay his family’s bills by cooking the finest crystal meth in New Mexico.. "
Here are enlightening but non spoilerish bits:
"It’s a show—an unpredictable, cinematic, potboiling, page-turner of a show—about how people become dangerous. The key word is “become.” Since The Sopranos debuted a dozen years ago, the best characters on TV, from Deadwood’s Al Swearengen to Dexter’s eponymous serial killer, have been antagonistic protagonists—men and women who are neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but morally mixed up, like real people, and captivating for their complexity. At first glance, Walter White would seem to fit the voguish antihero mold. But unlike his cable counterparts, Walt started out a deeply sympathetic figure and then gradually morphed, over three seasons of escalating immorality, into an almost unrecognizable creep. [...]
So far, the “experiment”—Gilligan’s term—has paid off: the darker Walt has gotten, the brighter the show’s prospects have become. “Our show is like our drug,” Cranston says as we walk through Walt’s dormant meth lab. “It’s addictive.” He’s right: Breaking Bad’s black wit and lavish cinematography—director of photography Michael Slovis loves to linger on New Mexico’s ochre deserts and streaking cirrus clouds—make it seem less like a cable drama than some lost Coen Brothers thriller. Which may help explain why the ratings for the season-two premiere exceeded the previous season’s average by more than 40 percent, and the season-three opener added another 40 percent to that number, putting it roughly on par with AMC’s flagship, Mad Men. Meanwhile, Cranston has won three consecutive outstanding lead-actor Emmys, and Aaron Paul, who plays Walt’s maladroit sidekick, Jesse Pinkman, added his own supporting-actor statuette in 2010. No less a narrative ace than Stephen King has called Breaking Bad “the best scripted show on television.” I’d go a step further and say that, right now, it’s the best program on TV, period. [...]
When Breaking Bad returns, it should have the sort of momentum that helped convert cult favorite The Wire into a canonical drama at the same stage in its run; years of “you have to watch this” buzz, both in the press and around the water cooler, seem poised to pay off. But the show’s structure poses a huge risk as well. Every time Gilligan and his team nudge Walt closer to the dark side, they make it harder for viewers to care about his fate. Which means each season is trickier to create than the last. “Breaking Bad hopefully gains new viewers with every episode,” Gilligan says. “But if I’m being honest, I have to think that we’re losing viewers as well. There are some people who shake loose and say, ‘This guy is too damn dark. I can’t root for him anymore.’ The secret is to make sure Walt’s always fascinating, even if people find it tougher and tougher to sympathize with him. [...]
Unlike most other television dramas, which tend to peak early, Breaking Bad has gained steam with each season. [...]
Throughout, the two male leads have been masterly, maintaining the credibility and comic spirit of their scientist-meets-street-punk relationship through some of the most wrenching plot twists ever attempted on television. Paul in particular has blossomed in recent years, transforming his character from a rather one-dimensional brat (who was originally scheduled to die early on) into what Gilligan calls the “moral center” of the show. [...]
But at heart, it’s Walter White’s ongoing transformation that hooks us. That’s the addiction: getting to know a person so well, through television, that when he goes bad, we can begin to comprehend something that real life simply doesn’t allow us to comprehend—how people become dangerous. ”
The article makes very good points but I would have added that the secret is that, although Walt has been becoming darker and darker, and quite unredeemable as a person, the relationship between Walt and Jesse has become so gripping, twisted and yet endearing, that you can't stop watching. No matter how unlikable and manipulative Walter White becomes and how toxic he is for people around him, there's love still, and humanity is there, through that bond he shares with others, especially with his "meth son", Jesse Pinkman. I can't think of another "tv couple" that touching and powerful!
Now should I watch the final season of Deadwood before BB returns or should I save it for later when I will suffer from BB withdrawal?