"Breaking Bad" Review: As Close to Perfection as Television Gets

I have never watched a show that stays this honest and this gripping for this long. Most great series peak and then decline. This one has five seasons and 62 episodes, and it is better at the end than it was at the start, which almost nothing manages.

Walt and Jesse

Vince Gilligan's pitch for the show was that the protagonist would become the antagonist, that he would take a decent man and turn him into Scarface over the course of the series. Networks found that hard to buy, and it is the single most important structural decision anyone made here, because it means the show is not about whether Walt gets caught. It is about what he is turning into, and you watch it happen a degree at a time.

Walter White and Jesse Pinkman are two of the best-written characters anyone has put on television. What makes them work is that they move in opposite directions through the same story. Walt starts sympathetic and ends monstrous. Jesse starts as a small-time dealer with no redeeming features on paper and ends as the moral centre of the whole thing.

Here is the part that will make you cold. Jesse was supposed to die at the end of season 1.

Gilligan had planned to kill off a main character to close the first season, on the logic that this is what a bold show does. Jesse was the first candidate, then Hank. He changed his mind on Jesse roughly two episodes in, because Aaron Paul was too good to throw away, and the character survived long enough to become the reason the show works. Gilligan has said outright that the version of the show where he followed through would have been shorter and far poorer.

The Acting

My praise here does not really have an end point. The performances are good enough that calling them performances feels wrong.

That is worth unpacking, because it is a specific kind of achievement. Bad acting announces itself. Competent acting is invisible until something breaks the spell. What this cast does is sustain that spell across six years and 62 episodes with no lapses, which is harder than any single great scene.

Bryan Cranston was best known for playing a sitcom dad before this, and the network had to be talked into him. Aaron Paul won three Emmys for a character that was originally scheduled for a body bag. Anna Gunn spent five seasons playing the person who has to react to Walt honestly, which made her the most unfairly treated actor in the show's fandom and one of the best things in it.

The Look

The other thing everyone notices, and it is not an accident.

The visual leap happens in season 2, when Michael Slovis came on as director of photography. He told Gilligan the show deserved a graphic look that television did not normally permit, and then delivered exactly that. Gilligan describes the result as extreme contrast between light and dark, which is precisely what you are seeing: a basement lit only from behind, smoke in the shafts, faces half in shadow.

Two details that explain a lot. It was shot on 35mm film, which by the early 2010s made it one of the last television series doing so, and it is a large part of why the desert looks the way it does. And Slovis kept putting the camera where a camera has no business being: the bottom of a pool, the blade of a shovel, a paper clip on a table. Season 3 opens in sepia, tuned to match the New Mexico ground.

Some of these shots are genuinely intricate pieces of work. They are also never decorative. Every one of them is telling you something about where Walt is.

About That Slow Start

My one real reservation is the beginning. The early episodes do not have many threads running at once, and the pace is deliberate to the point of being slow.

The reason is worth knowing, because it flips the complaint on its head. AMC ordered nine episodes for season 1. The 2007 writers' strike cut production to seven and pushed back the start of season 2. Gilligan later said the forced pause was what let his team fix the pacing, which in the original plan had been moving too quickly.

So the show you might find slow is the corrected version. The faster one, the one where more happened sooner and a main character died to end year one, is the version a labour dispute deleted. Gilligan has been openly grateful about it ever since.

If season 1 leaves you unsure, stay with it. It climbs from there, and it never stops.

The Verdict

Breaking Bad holds a level of engagement and technical control that most films never reach, let alone sustain across five seasons. Every big moment lands exactly the way it was designed to land.

If there has ever been a series you could call perfect, this might be the one.