Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad

Vince Gilligan is the creator and producer of the American crime drama television series Breaking Bad, which airs on AMC. The show centers on Walter White (Bryan Cranston), an underpaid and despondent high school chemistry teacher dealing with a recent diagnosis of stage-three lung cancer. It is set and filmed in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In order to ensure his family’s financial future before he passes away, White turns to a life of crime and teams up with a former classmate, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), to manufacture and sell methamphetamine while dodging the perils of the criminal underworld.

Gener: Crime, Drama, Thriller
Creator: Vince Gilligan
Stars: Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, Anna Gunn
Duration: 45-50m
Seasons: 5
Episodes: 62
IMDb: 9.5/10 (2.5M)

Watch it on Netflix

Brief Description

AMC’s Breaking Bad debuted on January 20, 2008, and ran for five seasons, totaling sixty-two episodes, before ending on September 29, 2013.

Anna Gunn and RJ Mitte, who play Walter’s wife Skyler and son Walter Jr., and Betsy Brandt and Dean Norris, who play Marie Schrader, Skyler’s sister, and her husband Hank, a DEA agent, are among the co-stars of the show. Additional actors include Giancarlo Esposito as drug lord Gus Fring, Jonathan Banks as private investigator and fixer Mike Ehrmantraut, and Bob Odenkirk as Walter and Jesse’s attorney Saul Goodman. In the last season, Laura Fraser plays shrewd businesswoman Lydia Rodarte-Quayle, while Jesse Plemons plays the criminally ambitious Todd Alquist.

While reviews for Breaking Bad’s first season were largely positive, all of the subsequent seasons were praised by critics for their writing, storyline, characters, directing, performances, and cinematography. Critics have praised the show ever since it ended, calling it one of the best television shows ever. Additionally, it has grown a cult following. The show’s following for the first three seasons was average, but when it was made accessible on Netflix just before the fourth season premiered, the show’s audience increased significantly for the fourth and fifth seasons. When the second half of the fifth season debuted in 2013, viewership skyrocketed. The series finale was one of the most watched cable programs on American television when it aired.

Cast and Chareacters

Main Characters

Recurrning Characters

Guest Appearance

  • DJ Qualls as Getz – an Albuquerque police officer who takes Badger into custody, Walt turns to Saul Goodman after that.
  • Danny Trejo as Tortuga – DEA informant and member of the Mexican cartel Tortuga.
  • Jim Beaver as Lawson – An arms dealer from Albuquerque who gets Walt numerous firearms.
  • Steven Bauer as Don Eladio Vuente – the Juarez Cartel head who has a past with Gus.
  • Robert Forster as Ed Galbraith – a vacuum cleaner mechanic who works as a new identity specialist undercover.
  • Charlie Rose in the role of himself.

Production

Conception

Vince Gilligan, who had written the Fox series The X-Files for numerous years, was the creator of Breaking Bad. Gilligan’s goal was to write a series in which the main character turned into an antagonist. “Television is historically good at keeping its characters in a self-imposed stasis so that shows can go on for years or even decades”, he added. “When I realized this, the logical next step was to think, how can I do a show in which the fundamental drive is toward change?”

He continued by saying that he wanted to transform Walter White from Mr. Chips into Scarface. Gilligan thought it would be risky and hard to sell the idea of a television show that would portray a character’s whole, abrupt transition throughout the series without other compelling elements to back it up, including great acting and cinematography.

Gilligan used the title of the show, a Southern slang expression that means “raising hell” among other things, to depict Walter’s transformation. “To break bad” can mean to “go wild,” “defy authority,” and “break the law,” as well as to be verbally “aggressive, belligerent, or threatening,” or, when followed by the preposition “on,” “to dominate or humiliate.” Lily Rothman editor of Time entertainment claims that the term has a broader meaning and is an old expression that “connotes more violence than ‘raising hell’ does.”

The idea originated when Gilligan joked that they should set up a “meth lab in the back of an RV and [drive] around the country cooking meth and making money” in response to Thomas Schnauz, another writer on X-Files, about their current unemployment.

Gilligan offered the idea to Sony Pictures Television, who expressed a strong interest in sponsoring it, once he had written the pilot and show’s concept. Sony set up meetings with the different cable networks. Showtime decided against it since they were already airing Weeds, a television program that shares a lot of similarities with Breaking Bad. Gilligan later said that he would not have moved forward with the idea if he had known about Weeds earlier, even though his producers assured him that the show was different enough to still be successful.

The proposal was rejected by HBO and TNT as well, but finally FX expressed interest and started talking about making the pilot. In addition, FX had begun work on a female-focused criminal drama series called Dirt. Since the network already had three male-focused series, FX decided to forgo Breaking Bad in favor of Dirt.

AMC’s head of original programming, Jeremy Elice, was in search of more original series to complement their upcoming Mad Men series, and one of Gilligan’s agents got in touch with him. Intrigued, Elice quickly arranged a meeting with Gilligan and two executives in the programming industry. Gilligan was not looking forward to this meeting, thinking they would just turn him down. However, all three expressed a tremendous deal of interest, and the meeting ended up deciding how AMC would purchase the rights from FX and begin production on the pilot. After this meeting, it took around a year for Sony to negotiate the rights with AMC and begin production.

Development

The first season’s nine episodes, including the pilot, were ordered by the network; however, due to the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike, only seven episodes were produced, and the second season’s production was delayed. Gilligan had intended to murder either Jesse or Hank as a “ballsy” way to close the season in the original nine-episode narrative. Given the high caliber of acting that Paul and Norris contributed to their parts throughout the seasons, Gilligan felt that this death was minimized by the limited number of episodes.

The strike also made it possible for Gilligan and his writing team to rework the show’s tempo, which had been going too swiftly throughout the first arc, by slowing down production long enough. Gould claimed that the writer’s strike “saved the show,” arguing that they would have taken a different creative turn and ended up canceling the program by the time of its third season if they had produced the two extra episodes in the first season.

The original scripts of Breaking Bad were set in Riverside, California; but, at Sony’s recommendation, the production was moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, because of the state’s advantageous financial conditions. The fictional setting was shifted to the actual production area once Gilligan realized that this would mean “we’d always have to be avoiding the Sandia Mountains” in shots facing east. The majority of the filming was done on 35 mm film, although digital cameras were also used where necessary to capture time-lapse photography and other viewpoints and angles. The production cost of each episode of Breaking Bad was $3 million, which was more than the typical cost of a basic cable program.

The first season of the show was well received by viewers. “There is humor in the show, mostly in Walt’s efforts to impose scholarly logic on the business and on his idiot apprentice, a role Paul plays very well,” USA Today’s Robert Bianco exclaimed, praising both Cranston and Paul. However, even these moments have a hint of tension as the couple discovers that killing someone is unpleasant, messy labor, especially when done in self-defense.”

Recognition

The first season of Breaking Bad was well received by viewers. “There is humor in the show, mostly in Walt’s efforts to impose scholarly logic on the business and on his idiot apprentice, a role Paul plays very well,” USA Today’s Robert Bianco exclaimed, praising both Cranston and Paul. However, even these moments have a hint of tension as the couple discovers that killing someone is unpleasant, messy labor, especially when done in self-defense.”

The second season was well received by critics. Critic Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly said of Bad, “Bad is a superlatively new metaphor for a middle-aged crisis: Walt had to be shaken from his suburban coma by cancer and criminal activity before he could experience life once more—taking chances, running the risk of injury, and doing things he didn’t think he was capable of. Naturally, without Emmy winner Bryan Cranston’s fierce, hilarious, and unselfish acting, none of this could have succeeded. Despite its despair and sadness, this series exudes a radiant exhilaration: It’s an upbeat show about having terrible feelings.”

According to Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle, “AMC’s first three Season 2 episodes maintain that caliber of success with no obvious errors. Indeed, it appears like Gilligan’s audacious plan for Breaking Bad, which has finally been rightfully rewarded against all odds, has energized all those working on the show. Every episode reveals its growing maturity and ambition.” Stephen King, a horror novelist, praised the show and likened it to shows like Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks.

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