TV reviewers are a conflicted bunch. Forced to critique an episode of 'House of Cards' in the same column as 'Come Dine with Me', they are never entirely at ease with the medium or themselves. Book reviewers, by contrast, are rarely obliged to review Nigel Slater's new cookbook in the same article as Hillary Mantel's latest offering. 'The AA Easy Read Atlas 2013' and Will Self's new novel, 'Umbrella' are both books but that is a odd basis of comparison.
Yet when it comes to TV, reviewers and viewers remain confused. Fearful of sounding too high-brow or elitist, reviewers generally avoid in depth debate, taking refuge in facile lists of shows. Which is the greatest TV series of all:'The Wire', 'Mad Men' or 'The Departed'? It is the High Fidelity syndrome, where a music buff spends more time ranking and re-ranking albums than he does appreciating their own merits. List-making is how we shop for food successfully, zero use when it comes to culture.
Of course you may have no interest in TV as a cultural activity and prefer trash, go right ahead. One of my guilty pleasures is '999 What's My Emergency?'. Incidentally, my conclusion after watching many episodes is that the principle emergency is many callers have is their IQ resembles that of a donkey - a dead, stupid donkey. I digress.
'Breaking Bad' is worth watching, worth re-watching and worth discussing as a unique character study. Many dramas have given us flawed heroes, indeed the standard trope for police procedurals is a hard-drinking, confrontational maverick who gets the job done where others fail, 'Cracker' being a perfect example. 'The Sopranos' broke new ground by showing us an anti-hero, Tony, that we liked in spite of ourselves. Yes, he might have killed a man; true he has had serial affairs and casual sex. But we do feel a pang of sympathy for the big guy when he shuffles into his kitchen only to receive one complaint after another from his ungrateful, demanding family. Yet flawed heroes and anti-heroes always stay true to their archetype. A maverick cop does not become a serial killer; a mobster remains a criminal no matter how many therapy sessions he attends.
Walter White, the main character of 'Breaking Bad', is another creation entirely. Across five series, he mutates from a humble, high school teacher to a ruthless drug king pin, ordering the murder of ten informants. Hanging over Walt is the delayed death sentence he receives in episode one, a lung cancer diagnosis. This triggers his decision to start cooking meth for quick cash; it does not explain the mayhem that follows. What is fascinating about Walt is the presentation of an ordinary man, living an average suburban existence who becomes capable of the most appalling violence, delivered with calculation and malice. He becomes a monster. When his old friend Hank confronts him in the most recent episode, he says 'I don't even know who you are any more' and intriguingly neither do we are the viewers.
I think if we want to know about evil, we are more likely to find answers in fiction such as 'Breaking Bad' than we will in news stories or documentaries. There is a tendency because the modern world is so safe and so protected to fool ourselves into believing evil is to identify and neutralise. Endless Nazi documentaries and comic-book films reinforce our natural tendency to assume bad people look and dress differently. They wear skull and crossbones on their black uniforms, have dark, pitiless eyes and sometimes they display a different body shape and skin tone - the devil in other words.
Make no mistake, Walt is evil. Unlike other screen villains he doesn't have horns poking out of his head. He walks, talks and acts the same as you and I... because he is the same. Maybe you or I would not make the choices Walt does, maybe we would have more compassion, more sense of consequence. Maybe. Walt would not have believed himself capable of murder when he first started cooking meth but he discovers doing wrong brings its own emotional rewards: it is fun. That for me is the mark of great art, it tells us a truth we do not want to hear but should. Vince Gilligan, the show's creator and principle writer should be proud of his achievement: proving there's a little bit of Walt in all of us, some more than others.
