Your Breaking Bad update is a day late because I was stuck in traffic near Stamford on Sunday night, thanks to a scary thunderstorm that nearly flooded the Merritt and left trees down along I-95. We were so focused on the road that we forgot all about our date with AMC, which was a blessing — knowing we were missing our show was the one thing that could have made that traffic jam worse.

Anyway, I watched “Fifty-One” last night, and I’m ready to discuss its chilling grimness. When I linked to this little discussion group at dotCommonweal I asked, half in jest, why no one ever seems to swim in the Whites’ pool, and now I want to remark in all seriousness on the bad vibes that surround any and all swimming pools on this show. From that episode where Walt Jr. tried to match his father, shot for shot, and ended up puking into the pool, to the season-two Floating Bear of Foreboding, to season four’s showdown at Don Eladio’s, only bad things ever seem to happen near the pool. (What am I forgetting?) And now we can add Skyler’s watery cry for help. Read the rest of this entry »

Since I’ve been posting so much about television lately, I want to say a word of appreciation for the New Yorker‘s new (well, fairly new) TV critic, Emily Nussbaum. (She’s already written a whole lot of copy, but I think it’s OK to call her “new” until the magazine gets around to including her in its online list of contributors.) I enjoyed the “On Television” columns by Nancy Franklin, but I got the distinct impression that no one at the New Yorker, including and perhaps especially Franklin, actually thought they mattered much. Franklin wrote not as a person who cared deeply about the medium and spent a lot of time thinking critically and intelligently about it, but rather as an intelligent person who could take or leave TV and thought about it only when a deadline loomed. Her approach to the beat was casual to a fault. Nussbaum, on the other hand, takes television seriously as an art form, and takes her job seriously enough that she watches pretty much everything. What is more, she seems to really enjoy a lot of what she watches (sometimes to an alarming degree), which is a good quality in a critic. I don’t watch that much television, but Nussbaum’s enthusiasm is almost enough to make me think I should, in the same way that Sasha Frere-Jones can make me briefly consider listening to more Rihanna. Also, Nussbaum’s writing is crisp and funny and insightful (though I often think her pieces are a little longer than they need to be). Since she started at the New Yorker I am more excited about the back of the magazine than I have been in a long while.

The July 30 issue has an extra-long article by Nussbaum, “Tune In Next Week,” a cultural history of the cliffhanger. Much thought and research went into this piece, which covers everything from Scheherazade to Dickens to Dallas and beyond. It’s full of interesting historical tidbits and smart critical commentary about the evolution of serialized storytelling and what separates (or only seems to separate) “trash” from art.

A cliffhanger, Nussbaum says, “makes visible the storyteller’s connection to his audience…. [Cliffhangers] reveal that a story is artificial, then dare you to keep believing.” This is fascinating to reflect on. But by the end of the essay I felt the notion of “cliffhanger” had been stretched well beyond its useful meaning. Nussbaum gives a quick and very interesting history of how television went from shows like “I Love Lucy,” whose episodes were self-contained stories “designed to run in any order,” to “long-arc” series that sustain a story over many episodes and require more committed viewing. But is telling an ongoing story, one that ends and then picks up again in another installment, enough to qualify as employing “cliffhangers”? In her third paragraph, Nussbaum offers two definitions of the term:

Narrowly defined, a cliffhanger is a climax cracked in half: the bomb ticks, the screen goes black…. Cliffhangers are the point when the audience decides to keep buying.

That narrow definition is a very good one. But if you broaden it too much, it seems to me, you end up saying that any serialized story is a succession of cliffhangers, and that waters down the definition of “cliffhanger” too much for it to be useful. If a show is telling a story, in a serial fashion, well enough that I am invested in the characters, I will want to “tune in next week” to know what happens next generally. That is just the nature of being an audience to a narrative that isn’t over yet. But a “cliffhanger” is something more specific — a break, however long, that leaves a particular question unanswered. So the “Who Shot J.R.?” season-ender on Dallas, which Nussbaum discusses in detail, is a cliffhanger for sure. But when Jim kissed Pam at the end of season 2 of The Office — to take another of her examples — was that a cliffhanger? A “climax cracked in half?” Or was it just…a climax? A cliffhanger, I think, would have stopped the action just before Jim declared his love. (“Pam, I have something I need to say…” black screen; “to be continued.”) As a devoted fan of The Office I spent the summer before season 3 in suspense, eager to find out where the characters and their story would go when the show started up again. But I don’t think that suspense was specific enough for the ending to qualify as a cliffhanger.

This leads me to a quibble, and yes, it relates to Breaking Bad. Don’t read on if you haven’t gotten to the end of season 3 of that show (and you think you someday will). Go read Nussbaum’s article instead. Now, Breaking Bad viewers, I want to know what you think: Read the rest of this entry »

I set my DVR to catch last night’s prime-time Olympics excitement so I could watch Breaking Bad instead. Priorities! Before we get down to this week’s new answers, new questions, and wasn’t-it-awesome-whens, I want to share this interview with BB creator Vince Gilligan, by Salon’s Erik Nelson, sent to me by my brother and fellow fan. Nelson begins by remarking on one quality that makes the show stand apart from other television dramas (particularly of the suspense-filled sort):

“Breaking Bad” really deals with the consequences of violence. Bad things don’t just happen, and then, during the commercial break, get tidied up, with no consequences. You sweat the details; you sweat the consequences of your characters’ actions. It adds a dimension to “Breaking Bad” that is extraordinary.

Gilligan responds:

[F]rom the outset, “Breaking Bad” was very much intended as an experiment in change, and in fact the opposite of the marching order of most TV shows. I wanted the characters to change week in and week out, primarily the main character, Walter White…. If Walt kills somebody, it’s going to have an effect on him. It’s going to have an effect on everyone around him. He’s never going to forget it. He’s going to carry emotions like baggage, and the baggage will weigh him down more and more. And it will change who he is, and you as viewer will never forget those moments, because he won’t allow you to, because he himself will remember them.

I think this is a big part of what makes Breaking Bad an excellent example, perhaps the best example, of what Nelson describes as “the rise of the novel for television.” For me it has many of the same satisfactions of reading a very good novel. Imagine what Dickens could have done with a cable-television drama.

On to this week’s episode: Read the rest of this entry »

After last night’s episode, we have a good idea of what the shape of season 5 will be. Walt and Jesse are back in business, or at least back with a business proposal. We got a tantalizing glimpse of the Madrigal operation. And we have a new, presumably major character (not a vengeful baby Tio, but I am keeping my hopes up). Meanwhile, back at the White household, Skyler missed breakfast, which is a definite sign that all is not well. On the plus side, she has learned the difference between Raisin Bran and Raisin Bran Crunch. (Or maybe Walter Jr. is doing his own grocery shopping now.) And baby Holly continues to exist unobtrusively in the background, very much like Jesse’s Roomba.

Of course, all the new answers have brought more questions.  I have some more specific thoughts to share after the jump, and then I want to hear yours.

[Update 7/24: I was struggling to stay awake the first time this episode aired - what can I say, my kid is a lot more exhausting than Holly -- so I rewatched it last night because I was pretty sure I'd missed some important details. And I was right. Some additional thoughts are in brackets below.]

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I was late to the party when it comes to Breaking Bad, the exceptional series on AMC that begins its fifth season tonight (10 p.m. EST). I started watching only last year, when I had a newborn and a lot of television-watching time on my hands, and my husband and I tore through the first three seasons on DVD. After a long and painful wait for the DVD release of season four last month, we are all caught up and very excited for tonight’s premiere.

The only problem with watching season five as it airs is that I’ll have to wait a whole week between episodes. But I’m thinking there might be a few other Breaking Bad fans out there, and if so I’m thinking you all might like to discuss it here at Verdicts while we wait for next Sunday night to roll around. Let me know in the comments, and if there’s interest we’ll make this a regular thing. To whet your appetite, my prediction for season five is after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »

The AMC television series Breaking Bad has gotten lots of attention lately. (See, for instance, the long profile of the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, in the New York Times Magazine.) I only recently started watching the show, powering through the first two seasons in about a week and a half. Breaking Bad is a strange hybrid. On the one hand, it’s a pacing-around-the-room, can’t-sit-down thriller, creating suspense through all the usual means (plot twists, cliff hangers, creepy music). In this way, it’s a rather traditional show, and I wasn’t surprised to hear that Stephen King, whose novels brilliantly utilize the same tricks of the trade, was a fan.

At the same time, though, Breaking Bad is an absolute original, aesthetically daring and formally inventive. Despite its terrific plotting, it can be a challenging show to watch, asking patience of its viewers as it introduces inexplicable, disturbing images that it will then take an entire season to explain. The show has both beautiful cinematography—in particular, the striking landscape shots of Albuquerque, New Mexico reminded me of David Foster Wallace’s descriptions of the Arizona desert in Infinite Jest—and some of the most creatively gruesome images you will ever see, the kind that will make you marvel at the show’s genius and then later cause you nightmares. (At one point, for instance, a character tries to dissolve a body in acid in his porcelain tub, and things go terribly wrong.) Vince Gilligan has pulled off a difficult feat, creating a show that seems to be both pure entertainment and pure art. [I've tried not to give too much away, but be aware, some mild spoilers follow.]

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