NOTE: This piece was originally published on Critics at Large on July 26, 2012. If you wish to comment, please do so on that page.
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Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston star in Breaking Bad on AMC |
Television has a well-earned reputation for producing
escapist fare. But the continuing popularity of shows like Grey's Anatomy,
America’s Got Talent, and The Bachelorette doesn’t
tell the whole story. Many of the best TV series in the past ten years – a
decade of worldwide terror, multiple (and seemingly unending) wars, mortgage
crises, and economic decline – are also the most challenging, darkest, and
let’s just say it, depressing shows in the history of television. While Hollywood is overrun with costumed heroes, romantic comedies, and vampire hunting U.S. Presidents, television (cable
TV in particular) is taking up the social slack, addressing issues like racism,
cancer, AIDS, drug addiction, mental illness, poverty, death, and dying. And
its confrontation with these issues has met with both popular and critical
success.
Rather than pander to a hypothetical population that wants
to leave reality behind, shows like Six Feet Under, The Wire,
and Dexter have found big audiences by telling difficult,
uncomfortable stories, calling into question old assumptions about why and how
people watch television. Notably, while there are few subjects as taboo as
cancer, cable TV currently offers two shows with a lead character suffering from the disease: The Big C
(Showtime’s comedy starring Laura Linney as a woman recently diagnosed with
late stage melanoma), and Breaking Bad, which recently began its fifth
and final season on AMC.
If you want to
understand the current appeal of Feel-Bad TV, Breaking Bad is perhaps
the ideal place to start. The show stars Bryan Cranston as Walter White,
a mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher who, after an unexpected
diagnosis with terminal lung cancer, joins forces with Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), his former student turned
drug dealer, and begins to cook crystal meth. The recipe for Breaking
Bad’s success lies in its unflinching realism and its refusal to pull any
punches: the very same ingredients which often make the show so difficult to
watch are also why it is such compelling viewing.