Breaking Bad: The Greatest Television Show Ever Made

Breaking Bad premiered 15 years ago this year and concluded 10 years ago next month. It remains, at scale, the greatest television show ever produced, by a considerable margin. No others have measured up in both their vision and successful execution, except perhaps for the Breaking Bad prequel Better Call Saul. Maybe only the first few seasons of The X-Files come close to either one. All three shows, of course, were produced by Vince Gilligan, who apparently has figured something out that the rest of us haven’t.

At its heart, Breaking Bad’s success is due to its supremely basic, almost New Critical-level simplicity: It’s a morality play that shows us what happens when people choose to destroy things of precious value. That’s it. Everybody in Breaking Bad destroys something, many of them many things: Communities, lives, health, trust, love, relationships, each other, themselves. Destruction is the primary motif at play here. Everything—really everything—is left in a smoking heap of rubble at the end of this show. There are no happy endings; even the climactic, triumphalist massacre of a bunch of psychopathic neo-Nazis is grim and joyless, almost Sophoclean in its unredemptive brutality. There’s no silver lining in this show, only death and misery; even Walt’s lone, brief redeeming exploit in the series, briefly muttered in the show’s final 30 minutes, is little more than an admittance of profound and nearly unforgivable guilt.

Most television shows and movies try and take pains to tie themselves up in nice little bows. Viewers don’t normally like to invest years of their lives in a program only to have it end on the sourest, bitterest note imaginable. But Breaking Bad is nothing if not realistic; it is arguably one of the chief works of realism-naturalism of the past 100 years in that it eschews even the pretense of romantic sentiment at every level. Here is a major spoiler for you: Walter White, the show’s protagonist, spends five seasons ruining his own life and the lives of pretty much everyone he comes into any contact with. Then he dies and the show immediately ends. That’s it.

The show at its outset was billed as a kind of gripping high-stakes drama propelled by Walt’s desperation in the face of his terminal cancer diagnosis. Upon its debut, NPR described the series as one in which Walter is “diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer … and begins producing a singularly pure grade of crystal meth to help secure his family's financial future.” This, of course, is the great lie of Breaking Bad. It was never about “securing his family’s future,” ever! We learn at the end of the series that Walt really only undertook his life of meth-fueled crime in order to satisfy his own ego and his ambitions for a repulsive sort of legatine greatness, using the provide-for-my-family excuse only as a pathetic sort of cover.

But in fact we really find this out very early in the series: In the sixth episode Walt is offered a princely job by an old colleague, one that ensures a huge salary, “excellent” medical benefits that will help beat back his lung cancer, professional glory, doubtlessly several generous layers of life insurance policy in the event of his death…and yet he immediately and unreservedly turns that offer down in favor of life as a drug dealer. Everything he claimed to want—financial security and professional glory—was handed to him on a silver platter and he opted for the meth instead. There was never any doubt about what Walt was up to, never any confusion as to what his true motives were.

Breaking Bad’s base motif is not so much about drugs, or cancer, or law, or violence, or even more abstract concepts like desperation and loyalty and determination. It is rather about how easily and comprehensively we can tear down and demolish good things if we decide to do so. That is what Walt does over the course of the series. He begins the show with pretty much the total package: A beautiful wife who loves him, a son who adores and admires him, a precious new baby on the way, a fine job, a really nice house in a nice city, a loving extended family. His life wasn’t perfect, it had stressors and frustrations and embarrassments, but of course every life has those. On paper and more or less in fact Walt had it all, a life ideal enough to be almost archetypal. By the end none of it is left standing; by the end Walt himself is prostrate, on his back, bled out and dead in a white supremacist meth lab, and the only likely reaction of his former loved ones to his death is probably a sigh of relief that he has finally been killed.

Breaking Bad’s genius is not merely that it doesn’t sugarcoat these brutal and unrelenting lessons but that it tells them in the first place, and unabashedly so. Choices have consequences: It’s a bold motif, certainly now more than ever in a world where consequences are seen as superlative at best, where divorce and abortion are almost as common as marriage, where legally contracted debt is arbitrarily forgiven, where physicians insist that there is no risk to lopping off the reproductive organs of young children. The working ethic of modern life often seems to be that—unless you say something offensive to progressives on the Internet—nothing you do should be really held against you, and you to account for nothing you do.

The epic of Walter White disabuses us of that lousy sentiment. Walt loses everything, up to and including his life, in service to his own ego; many of the people alongside him suffer the same fate. In the end he can’t even give his meth-stained drug money to his family as he sort of vaguely planned to do at the outset of the show; his family would throw it away if he did. Walt is reduced to threatening to murder two of his former friends—one of them a former girlfriend—in order to force them to give his family the money. At essentially no point in the series does he even remotely recognize the scale of his depravity and the breathtaking breadth of his losses; the only time he vaguely comes close, he allows himself to be talked out of it by the laziest and most surface-level of pop-psychobabble manipulations.

Walt himself finally admits in the show’s waning minutes: “I want this.” That is true of each of us when we made terrible choices of our own volition: We want this. These are not idle decisions; they mean something. “Each day,” C.S. Lewis wrote, “we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.” Breaking Bad is a story about unthinkable horror; it forces you to think about it, and in doing so it hopefully compels your life a better one than it presently is, and certainly better than that which Walter White makes of his own.