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BREAKING BADLY
by Daren Foster

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BREAKING BADLY
by Daren Foster

***A second helping of Breaking Bad doesn't go down as well as the first.***

Few demand more from television than I do. It is my prime source of entertainment and keeps me from investing precious personal resources flipping joylessly through pages of books or comprehending indecipherable scrawls on canvas hung up on gallery walls. It is a babysitter to my children that allows me to play uninterrupted online Sudoku and doesn’t require I keep the kitchen pantry stocked with rice cakes and trail mix. My expectations are nothing short of 24 hours a day of quality programming that I can switch on anytime I like.

Not surprisingly, disappointment is a natural state of being for me. Sure, I could reduce my standards and learn to live with less. Become more choosy with what I watch and when. Or.. or TV could just be better. It should work harder at keeping me happy and content allowing my mind to be pleasantly diverted. Television needs to raise its bar. I shouldn’t have to lower mine.

Common sense, however, does occasionally make its presence felt despite my best efforts to keep it at bay. Bolts of insight cut through the fog of critical judgment, causing me to stop bitching and reflect on the notion that creating good television is not as easy as all that. It isn’t the cinch that, say, pontificating mindlessly on any old thing that gets stuck in a very sticky craw. It takes work on several different and oftentimes competing levels. Good TV emerges from a carefully orchestrated collaboration on a major scale with a big, heapin’ helpin’ of luck on the side.

In those few rational moments that alight unto my consciousness, I realize the question shouldn’t be “why isn’t there more good stuff on TV” but rather “why is there anything good at all?” Those times that something does appear to engage us, catch our fancy or simply make us sit up and take notice should be treated as nothing short of a divine miracle, manna from heaven that the benevolent and magnanimous gods above have deigned to anoint our lives. Thanks and supplication should be offered up on high when such wondrous marvels are bestowed upon us.

Such as it was earlier this year when I finally caught up on AMC’s Breaking Bad. After a scorching opening to begin the series, season one unfolded slowly but sure footedly, exploding wide open in the final two episodes with the appearance of meth-addicted dealer, Tuco. His hepped-up, incendiary presence spilled over into season two, ratcheting up matters to unsustainable levels that threatened to derail the entire series. When the logical conclusion played out by the end of episode two, Breaking Bad emitted a large exhalation of relief and geared down to a more leisurely pace.

And then it continued to meander, stopping briefly during subsequent episodes to explore various grisly aspects of the drug trade; each one delivering more of a numbing than shocking affect. The lies that Walt, the cancer stricken high school chemistry teacher turned meth maker/dealer, continued to spin weighed heavily upon the relationships with various family members, souring all of them to the point of utter toxicity. Dealing in drugs, it turns out, plays havoc on the lives of those involved. Who knew?

By the time the action kicked back in late in the second season, it’d become hard to get overly excited by it. It’d taken too long to get there and the terrain the show was covering already felt overly well trodden. Breaking Bad repeated the same notes only at a higher pitch the second time around. As the season drew to a spectacular if dubiously forced close, I found myself thinking that as hard as it is to create good television programming, it’s that much more difficult to maintain it.

Maybe this stumble was inevitable given the high wire conceit of the series. Mild-mannered family man given a terminal diagnosis resorts to breaking the law in order to leave his family enough money to survive his death. There are only so many directions that storyline can go and none of them are particularly conducive to a series’ longer term viability. Still, it was only the second season. Stalling this early seemed unusually quick although not uncommon if one looks at the likes of Lost or 24. An inverse ratio of high concept TV and its creative longevity frequently applies.

Those shows, however, had a full season’s order to fill for big networks. That’s 20+ episodes to falter. Airing on a basic cable channel, Breaking Bad’s first season of only 7 episodes was bumped up to 13 for season two. It’s not like the show’s creator and executive producer, Vince Gilligan, is a stranger to long hauls having helped oversee the The X-Files for nearly 130 episodes.

So how to explain Breaking Bad’s sophomore jinx?

I put the blame squarely on the show’s subject matter and our inability to deal with it in a rational, straightforward, honest manner. That is to say, drugs and our decades long war on them. Certainly Breaking Bad has taken on a particularly nasty drug methamphetamine, which has very few proponents on either side of the issue. It is an illicit substance that seems to lay waste to nearly everyone who has even a short term exposure to it. So the tone running through the first two seasons has varied little from simplistic sloganeering. Drugs Are Bad. Drugs Will Do Bad Things To People.

That’s fine if you’re lecturing impressionable children but what kind of narrative arc does it give everyone else? An escalating series of misadventures leading to death, destruction and personal loss. No one gets out alive or, at least, brutally unscathed. Each gruesome act of violence must top the previous one. That makes for a design that gets old mighty quickly.

It also wreaks havoc on the actors. After last year’s magnificent, Emmy winning performance by Bryan Cranston as Walt, this season left him with very little other than scowling and yelling. Even when his prognosis turned less dire, the taint of drug dealing had made his future look nothing but bleak. What’s an actor to do with that? Walt was only made to look less unlikable by the rigid, hyper-judgmental turn by his wife, Skyler. When she uncovers a partial truth of what her husband’s been up to and wants him out of the house, I just shouted out: get out while you can, Walt. If the cancer doesn’t get you, she will!

Breaking Bad’s only breath of fresh air this year was Bob Odenkirk’s turn as crooked lawyer, Saul Goodman. Hopefully he will be returning for season three as the series needs a whole lot more of his skewed, funny amorality to fend off the Old Testament retributive darkness that has enveloped it. When the sky literally rained down wreckage on Walt’s life at season’s end, the point had been more than proven. Drugs kill. I get it. Now what?

All is not lost, though. Breaking Bad has not jumped the shark. Yet. Other shows have suffered similar wobbly second seasons and come back strong. The Sopranos immediately springs to mind. More daring choices are going to have to be made for Breaking Bad to right itself. Walt’s secret identity popped its head out of the bag and there’s no stuffing it back in. Lives have been irretrievably ruined but adding to the body count -- no matter how outrageously done -- will not make for more interesting viewing. Season three of Breaking Bad will have to push past simple notions of right and wrong, law and order if it’s to once more rise above the monotonous drone of regular, uninspired television.