Breaking Bad’s growth, followed by some VERY WELL-MARKED speculative SPOILERS
Actually, I take it back: BROAD THEMATIC SPOILERS AHEAD. No plot points, however.
Breaking Bad has become one of my favorite shows ever. Yours too, probably. But it didn’t start that way for me.
The first season was driven by itspremise: what would happen if a kindly chemistry teacher had to cook meth to cover his medical bills? (Ok, so that spoiled the first episode for you. Really?) That season was a series of set pieces, the sort of things you’d imagine if you took that as your premise.
The next two seasons were driven (it seemed to me) by the escalatingplotand by letting Walter grow into arole, as if the writers said, “What would happen if Walt became a Tony Montana, or a Tony Soprano, except really really smart?”
But in the last two seasons, the show became a living thing, driven not by premise, role, or plot. It has become emergent. And this is enabling it to explore themes — e.g., What is the nature of evil? Is there justice? Can we know ourselves? — without severing those themes from the people who are living through them.
