Breaking Bad
This is a 50-year-old school teacher in New Mexico. To find out why people are calling Breaking Bad the best TV show since The Sopranos, read on…
When you watch the new series
Breaking Bad, you might recognise its leading man as the actor who played Hal, the endearingly incapable father in
Malcolm in the Middle. But you probably wouldn’t if you hadn’t been tipped off. The transformation Bryan Cranston has effected for the role of Walter White (above) – a downtrodden, middle-aged, New Mexico chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin – is extraordinary.
Breaking Bad, the latest in a seemingly endless line of excellent shows coming out of the US, is as dark and harsh as
Malcolm… was warm and sweet. When that show ended, Cranston was on the lookout for a change.
“I wanted to do a drama,” he says. “But frankly, I didn’t know if I was going to be lucky enough to find it. When you get scripts for pilot episodes of TV shows, a lot of them are not very good. But this one leapt off the page, was so compelling, so well written [by creator Vince Gilligan], that it was impossible not to start working on it from my standpoint. Vince was my champion to get the role. Without him beating that drum, I don’t know that I would have got it.”
The American dream in reverseGilligan’s instincts were to be proven right. Walter White has lived the American dream in reverse: he has been honest, hard-working, and law-abiding, and has been shabbily rewarded for it in every way. And Cranston has him down cold.
“I know people like this, people who seem meek and milktoast. But given the right set of circumstances, any human being is capable of becoming dangerous. Walter White has had this depression and regret weighing on him for decades. He’s capped his emotions and they’ve built like an underground volcano. Once he allows the cap off, he can’t replace it. In some ways he’s excited about it and some ways horrified by it.”
Unbelievably dangerous worldAs the song has it, if it wasn’t for bad luck, White would have no luck at all – until his tribulations leave him feeling he has nothing left to lose. Only when he “breaks bad” – at long last steps off the straight and narrow – does his luck change, bringing him strokes of fortune as amazingly good as their precursors were terrible. He marches unthinking into the criminal underworld, seemingly protected by the providence that guards the innocent.
“This character,” says Cranston, “is entering a world that he knows nothing about. A Tony Soprano may have his problems at home, but when he goes to work he knows his work – it’s underhanded and brutal, but he knows his environment. Walt White doesn’t. It’s an unbelievably dangerous world that he has no skills for. The set-up for that allows for some great drama and comedy.”
The blackest of humour It does, at that.
Breaking Bad is riddled with the blackest of humour. It’s the kind of show Cranston couldn’t have imagined getting made in America when he started out 25 years ago. “The good guys were always good, the bad guys were always bad, and it was cookie-cutter characters. I think this is another Golden Age of television right now. The bar has been raised.
“There has to be a complex, multi-layered storyline and characters to survive these days. Cable has revolutionised American television. They were able to go to the writer-creators of shows, and say, we want you to come here and do what you want to do – we love this idea, you make it. Without [cable channel AMC],
Breaking Bad couldn’t have been made.”
But it has, and it’s good stuff. So good, in fact, it was nominated for four Emmy Awards, including Cranston as Outstanding Lead Actor. (The other nods were for directing, cinematography and picture-editing in a drama series.) You’d better set aside yet another hour a week for a cracking US import.
Story by David BennunBreaking Bad
is distributed by Sony Pictures Television International and screens on FX on Sundays at 10pm from September 28