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.
Unlike the weaker The Big C, whose lead suffers from
a largely asymptomatic condition, Cranston’s
visceral portrayal of lung cancer ran the risk of making those early seasons almost
too painful to watch. But Breaking Bad avoided both the sentimentality
and voyeurism inherent in the Lifetime network’s ‘illness of the week’
programming by weaving the physical, financial, and emotional costs of Walt’s
cancer treatment into a rich, ongoing narrative. Even as the cancer storyline
has dropped into the background in recent seasons, the fragility of human lives
and human bodies remains firmly in the foreground, most dramatically in last
season’s unflinching depiction of Walt’s DEA agent
brother-in-law Hank (Dean Norris) and his recovery following his
shocking injury during the third season.
If Breaking Bad has earned its reputation as
one of the most violent shows on television, it’s because its brutality is of
the most devastatingly human sort. Rarely has a television series or film done
a better job of de-sensationalizing the very violence it portrays. Unlike the
inescapable sensationalism of a series like Law & Order: Special Victims
Unit, whose procedural nature makes both victims and perpetrators passing
objects in our line of sight, shows like Breaking Bad – and HBO’s
The Wire – operate on a different level altogether.
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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.
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| Laura Linney in The Big C on Showtime |
Breaking Bad vigilantly followed the effects of
Hank’s vicious beating of Jesse in the third season from both sides of that
violence. Even before his badge is taken away officially, Hank breaks down.
“I'm supposed to be better than that…,” Hank tells his wife, “I'm just not the
man I thought I was." No two-hour
feature can make the dark effects of violence and criminality felt as deeply as
Breaking Bad does. The gold standard of on-screen violence – Michael
Madsen’s macabre dance routine in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir
Dogs – can’t compete when the effects of violence suffered and perpetrated
are followed across multiple seasons on the small screen.
What makes Feel-Bad TV so good is that commitment to the
long story, and its respect for the audience and for the characters themselves.
We don’t watch to have someone to sympathize with or root for, we watch because
those characters have become alive, and their choices and their pain and the
pain they cause have become real.
Despite the success
of shows like Breaking Bad, much of TV remains delightfully
escapist – NBC’s brilliant but unabashedly good-natured Parks and Recreation
remains one of my favourite current shows, and the giddy consequence-free
quality of TNT’s lawyer series Franklin & Bash is terribly good summertime fun – and I wouldn’t want it any
other way. But every so often,
television delivers a show which pushes against all of our expectations, and
we’re all the better for it.
