Sepinwall On Mad Men and Breaking Bad by Alan Sepinwall

Author:Alan Sepinwall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

BREAKING BAD

I am the one who knocks!… Breaking Bad gives the recession the villain it deserves

The pictures come at you, first beautiful, then disorienting.

A cloud pushes over a Southwestern mesa. A pair of khaki pants floats through the breeze, so full of air that it looks like it has an invisible, topless man inside. Then an RV runs over the pants, tearing down a desert highway, a drab green shirt mysteriously dangling off the passenger-side mirror. We see inside the RV, driven by a middle-aged, slightly doughy white man wearing only a ventilator mask, shoes, socks, and tighty-whities. There’s a younger man slumped over the passenger seat, and two more sprawled along the floor in the back, sliding to and fro as the camper bumps along the road.

Our driver’s mask fogs up, and he veers off the highway and into a ditch. He runs outside, coughs and breathes and flings the mask away, panicking as he hears approaching sirens. He puts on the green shirt, then plunges back into the RV to grab a pistol from one of the men lying on the ground, plus his wallet and a camcorder, runs back outside. He starts recording and gives his name as Walter Hartwell White.

“To all law-enforcement entities, this is not an admission of guilt. I am speaking to my family now,” he says, barely keeping it together as he records messages of love to his wife Skyler and son Walter Jr., before concluding, “There are going to be some things that you’ll come to learn about me in the next few days. I just want you to know that no matter how it may look, I only had you in my heart. Goodbye.”

He turns the camera off and neatly lays it on the ground next to his wallet, hears approaching sirens, waddles into the middle of the road with his shirt tucked into the back of his underpants, and points the gun at whoever is coming around the bend.

As the show cuts to the twangy, menacing musical sting that accompanies the brief Breaking Bad title sequence, you are no doubt having the exact two responses the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, wants from you: “What the hell was that?” followed by “More, please. Now.”

That opening sequence hooks virtually everyone who sees it, and in script form, it’s what lured actor Bryan Cranston to keep reading and then go for the career-altering role of Walter White. As Breaking Bad would continue to do, year after Emmy-winning year, the start of the pilot plunges the viewer into a nightmare world—involving a high school chemistry teacher who begins cooking crystal meth to support his family in the wake of a lung-cancer diagnosis—full of dark choices, macabre violence, and gorgeous, surreal imagery.

Over its landmark run, Breaking Bad has told us the story of a man we should relate to—a smart man, a husband and father dealing with the pressures so many of us have faced through this recession (though the series was developed and debuted

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