University of Cape Town – FAM2013S

Television Narrative Essay

‘Every Frame an Epic’:

The Quality TV Logic of Weekly Synecdoche in AMC’s Breaking Bad

“We get a lot of credit for playing a very deep game and we try to play as deep a game as possible as far as figuring out well in advance where things are going, but I think the thing my writers and I did best was mine our history. In other words: go back and say ‘what can we make use of’; what i’s can we dot, what t’s can we cross, what loose ends can we tie up and make it look like we had this thing planned out all along, make it look like we’re really good at this when in fact we’re just good keepers of our own history.”
– Creator Vince Gilligan on PBS’s Charlie Rose (1991-), just before Breaking Bad’sfinale broadcast.

The defining critical interest of AMC’s Breaking Bad (2008-13) is that, in just so many ways, it succeeds at being ‘both’. In the terms of the traditions of television, it most manages to have its cake and eat it as a ‘Quality’ Show erected on cliffhangers, as a high Moral Drama masquerading as a Reader’s Digest neo-noir and, most pertinently to our discussion, as an incremental yet ‘closed’, almost cinematic, extended narrative. For anyone who has traversed the entirety of the program’s 62 episodes it would almost seem trite to hear that its immanent brilliance is sited in its simply being a very good Story. But the point must be made that Breaking Bad, far more than it is a particular environment or situation, is the delineation of an individual’s journey and as such is a surprisingly unique entry in Television’s tenuous current canon. Gilligan’s original Network pitch bears repeating here as the clearest signal of this singularity: if Breaking Bad, in the final judgement, really is a show that ‘takes Mr. Chips and turns him into Scarface,’ then – unlike almost all other ‘Modern TV Drama’ – it has an expiry date built in to its construction. Walter White’s pre-set character arc is the show’s vital foundation, and thus when we as the audience can say he has finally, incontrovertibly ‘broken bad’, the show is effectively obliged to end. What Jason Mittell calls the “shifting balance” of episodic and serial narrative, a propos this particular Golden Age of Television, is therefore especially applicable to Breaking Bad. How does it, as perhaps the signature champion of binge-watchable contemporary Television, reconcile the pre-given totality of its grand scheme with the commercial necessity of maintaining a ceaseless flux of suspense and closure from episode to episode? This essay will attempt to offer a possible illumination of just this increasingly pervasive narrative paradox through a rambling analysis of the show’s first trio of episodes – here serving as a demonstrative microcosm of its inherent process of progression – all the while of course constantly referring back to its enduring achievement as a concerted whole. Need I say at this point, “Let’s Cook”?

A major, and surprisingly unacknowledged, quality that sets Breaking Bad apart in narrative terms – even from its more obvious Quality TV forebears (The Sopranos (HBO, 1999-2007), The Wire (HBO, 2002-8), The Shield (FX, 2002-8), among many others) – is its implicit dependence on an underlying state of entropy, or, as Walt would say, dissolution. Crime procedurals showcase detectives and lawyers ‘building’ cases in every episode, sitcom characters in their essential mania ‘create’ new rounds of hijinks on a weekly basis, and even as dysfunctional an environment as the Deadwood camp in HBO’s Deadwood (2004-6) is obliged to present itself as a ‘developing’ community holding up against both an external and an internal strain of chaos. With Breaking Bad it’s clear from even the very beginning of the Pilot episode that the predominant question it wants its audience to consistently return to is ‘How (the hell) have things come to this?’ Our introduction to “Walter Hartwell White” is surrealist and drastic: it’s certainly difficult to imagine without prior knowledge exactly why a square-seeming middle-aged white family man would be seen racing a tacky RV filled with swishing chemicals and drifting bodies through the New Mexican desert whilst wearing only a pair of tighty-whities and a respirator mask. And while his makeshift video-will gives us the first basic details of his merits as a protagonist, the fact that he states off the bat “[t]o all law-enforcement agencies, this is not a confession of guilt,” means we can’t help but recognize that his Denial transparently masks how such a ridiculous situation as his present one could simply not have come about within the usual domain of morality. Thus we never once encounter Walt as an unblemished character. From this starting position, suspensefully both post- and (given his arrested stand-off position against the approaching sirens in the middle of the road) potentially pre-violence, the pilot – and the whole rest of the show, really – is then an intrinsic unwinding of this potential for ‘accidental’ evil in his exceptionally well-intentioned soul. We’re almost oversold on Walt’s rationale for transgression. His is perhaps the worst-case contemporary scenario for a middle-class American Dad; presently dying, wife pregnant, ends barely being met as it is. But it’s clear too he seems to need the “easy money” of meth cooking just so far as he also requires something to take his mind off the added insult of his stripped and undignified genius1. He appears to us the kind of man who just doesn’t deserve as nightmarish a mid-life crisis as he’s clearly undergoing even before his cancer diagnosis. And likewise when Jesse confronts him on this point Walt only enigmatically answers that “[he is] awake.” As such, the show already sets out its three potential endings: Walt either makes enough money to support his family and then stops breaking the law, or he regains his creative and financial self-esteem, or he just gets caught, gets killed or dies (‘goes back to sleep’) before he can achieve either. The problem with the second way is that it confuses money, power and the unquestioned necessity of the law’s transgression, and so very easily becomes an exponential source of personal drive. Hence, the downward spiral of infinite immorality that structures the rest of the show continues in strict tandem with the amount of money Walt makes while still acting under the motivation of defending his family. What this means for the show’s narrative is that it essentially gambles its own continuation on our hypnotized attachment to Walt’s ever more dangerous playing of ethical limbo. As in, ‘Just how low can he go before Ending 3 becomes a certainty?’ Given that the Pilot sees Walt, having already potentially killed two people, rewarded with laundered money and the revival of his and Skyler’s sex life, one would have to say he’s already having to bend his knees pretty far…

What this formulation also allows for though is the ever-present possibility of an early cut-off to the show as a whole. To take just the first three episodes, the show is effectively over if any one of these events is not prevented in time: Crazy 8 shooting Walt and Jesse on suspicion alone; Walt shooting himself in despair before the ‘police’ arrive; the RV not starting after getting towed out of its crash site; Skyler discovering Jesse’s real connection to Walt; Crazy 8 being found by anyone else in

1. Whether it’s a systemic problem or the eventual result of a series of his own bad decisions, it’s clear that a man forced to glance with ennui each morning at a plaque he received decades previously for ‘contributing to research awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry’ should just never have to work at a car wash, period, let alone do so as a second job. Such a situation is exactly what Marx meant by Capitalism’s immanent tendency to alienate labour: to get by for your family’s sake, you essentially have to lose your working dignity and not enjoy your vocation.

Jesse’s neighbourhood while he’s stumbling along the road; Emilio’s body not being disposed properly; and, of course, Crazy 8 not being ‘dealt with’ and perhaps probably killing Walt with the broken piece of plate he’d been hiding… There is no other show that has ever existed at such a level of mortal peril in seeming perpetuity. In terms of the structuring of particular episodes, this translates into a kind of suspenseful undertow only previously observable in Hitchcockian Cinema. There is indeed never any complete closure before the ending of the show itself.2 The Pilot may seem to wrap itself up convincingly enough in the minds of inattentive viewers, but everyone else is inevitably left – like Jesse at the start of ‘The Cat’s in the Bag’- to bemoan the proliferation of “loose ends” forming an indivisible remainder that must needs be addressed in the following episode. Through the whole run of the show this latter quantity usually materializes as one of only two kinds of climax: namely, either a memorable concluding event is announced or enacted (with the next week’s hour set to concern its aftermath), or a piece of very dangerous information is made or left to stick in the minds of the audience. So, in the Pilot, the latter occurs when we realize the concluding sex scene has covered over the irreducible fact of there still being two bodies and a crashed RV for Walt and Jesse to deal with before their getting off the hook, as well as that Walt’s initial ‘success’ as a meth cook promises him a lucrative career provided he isn’t already too deterred by having had to kill drug-dealers as part of the job. In ‘The Cat’s in the Bag’ we are given both: first Emilio’s dissolved body falls through the ceiling, necessitating an urgent clean-up, and then we alone are shown the discovery of a respirator mask (and thus Walt and Jesse’s cook site) by a group of children, showing that ‘law enforcement agencies’ will soon be on their trail. Finally, ‘And the Bag’s in the River’ ends with the strict cliffhanger of Walt’s announcing an undisclosed confession to Skyler. Watching the episode closely, you realize this is far more likely to be his coming clean about his cancer diagnosis than his new vocation, but the latter possibility is left open mostly because it would be yet another potential way for the show to cut itself short. These are not just externally

2. Just think about the titles in this regard: ‘Breaking Bad’ is a present-tense subjective process, while almost every other TV Drama eponym refers to the name of a metastatic person, object or institution; and ‘The Cat’s in the Bag’ (Episode #2) is necessarily only completed by the addition of ‘And the Bag’s in the River’ (Episode #3) in much the same way the two parts of the phrase itself complement each other in Alexander Mackendrick’s late-noir classic Sweet Smell of Success (1958)…

imposed twists and turns in the story. Such moments are the result of a continual existential strategy of crime drama that has its roots in the first great Gangster films of the 1930’s3, and work off a modernized version of the age-old narrative logic of their simply being no such thing as a clean getaway. Likewise there are never clear cuts between episodes. Every self-enclosed narrative carries within it its foundational Story’s messy continuation, and that most often through accelerated violence.

What we’re getting to here is a theoretical formulation of Breaking Bad’s unique narrative thrill that I call its ‘centripetal totality’. That is to say, the show does not add new knowledge or drama from episode to episode so much as it gradually reveals and deepens the defining antagonistic forces already latent in its premise. It loops around itself thematically as it constantly moves forward in narrative time. Thus, every fragment of the story (each season, episode, even scene) counts as its own microcosmic reflection of the whole, as it inevitably represents just a different level on the larger chart of Walt’s parallel processes of personal intensification and criminalization. Since, as I have shown, the eventual end of the show is immanent to its beginning, each episode has to have the paradoxical function of simultaneously being a separate jigsaw puzzle piece and a suspenseful checkpoint unto itself4. In this ambitious juggling of grand design and immersive content, Breaking Bad actually follows on directly from both The Sopranos and The Wire, whose respective creators, David Chase and David Simon, are both on record as having stated that they see their shows best watched as the equivalent of exceptionally long pieces of cinema. The point not to miss here is that all of these shows were thus what you could call ‘real- time movies’, which is to say that even though they may – like Breaking Bad – have had an inexorable endgame in mind from the pilot, how they were to pragmatically go about effecting this arc was down to long-term improvisation. As Emily Nussbaum,

3. The era of both Robert Donat’s Mr. Chips and Paul Muni’s Scarface, naturally.
4. In this way, the first three episodes each have their own primary individual plots, as well as two implicit plots connecting Episodes 1 & 2 and Episodes 2 & 3, and an overarching plot connecting all three, not to mention the grander underlying schemes of the First Season and the whole show. In order, these plots are: 1. Walt’s first successful meth cook. 2. The disposal of Emilio’s body. 3. Walt’s silencing of Crazy 8. 4. Skyler’s suspicion of ‘Who Walt is’ and ‘what’s got into him’. 5. The removal of ‘evidence’ from the first cook. And 6. The ultimate success of Walt’s start as a meth cook and his coming to terms with his cancer diagnosis.

the Television critic for The New Yorker, points out, “TV is, in its way, a live performance that goes on for years, [and so] shows tend to absorb the responses of its viewers” (2013) and as Vince Gilligan makes clear in this essay’s epigraph, no viewers were more creatively responsive to Breaking Bad than its own creators. Even in its first three episodes we can sense this self-reflexivity in a few particular moments. Firstly, just remembering that – unless you’re creating for Netflix – a Pilot episode is always written and shot before a show is confirmed for its first season, it’s telling that the first task ‘The Cat’s in the Bag’ performs is a doubling back on the climax of the first episode. To continue with the show, the creators had to rewind the narrative twelve hours so as to clarify the repercussions of the drama they had already a little blithely set in motion. Likewise, in ‘And the Bag’s in the River’, it’s easy to miss the throwaway line – when Hank and Gomie are inspecting Crazy 8’s abandoned car – that reveals Jesse’s former partner Emilio as the snitch who initially ratted him out for the price of his own quick exoneration. The obverse strategy is also evident in this episode: Skyler’s sister Marie is first revealed to be a casual shoplifter and the bookended flashbacks to Walt’s metaphysical discussion on the chemical composition of a human being with a former girlfriend introduces the character of Gretchen Schwartz, who will, with her present-day husband, end up playing a key symbolic role in the show all the way to the finale. The point is that even Vince Gilligan didn’t entirely know where such early-embedded subplots were going during the show’s creation, but he was nonetheless confident in his writing team’s ability to round them out at a later date as potential resources of dramatic meaning. Yet as they are, these details can still ‘stand for themselves’: the ‘whole’ of the show’s narrative is thus inflated and enriched rather than adorned or stretched to breaking point. Performed on the full time-scale of the show’s run, this method has the brilliant effect of retroactively improving the totality of all the episodes preceding its use and making iconic all the objects and situations it most endows with connotative richness. Hence the almost mythical status of the Pilot episode as seen from the perspective of the finale, as well as the strange symbolic power acquired by such unlikely referents as an RV in the wilderness, a pair of shiny tightie-whities and, eventually, a tray of crystal blue meth-amphetamine and a black hat.

In theorizing so about Breaking Bad, we can perhaps now pull back and isolate in overview how its unique narrative structure allows it to be as entertaining as it is. Like any soap opera or melodrama-tinged Network show5, it’s a narrative that can be depended on not to relent in its instinctual predisposition for a certain personalized brand of Extreme, but unlike such shows it is patient and cunning, always keeping an eventual masterstroke in the back of its mind. It is so binge-worthy because every episode feels like a serialized installment in a grander apocalyptic novel. To paraphrase Mike Rugnetta, watching it as broadcast was like enjoying the perverted pleasure of ‘removing an emotional Band-Aid over a duration of five years’. (2013) But obviously aided by the increased popularity since the Millennium of DVD box sets, Hulu and Netflix, perhaps its most appreciative audience is the one it’s gained since going off the air. Keeping every ending in mind, Breaking Bad is only better for your foreknowledge in returning to it. And as I have shown throughout this essay, this effect can probably be put down to its own capacity for narratological self-revelation. It thinks itself and its own history so well that you’re obliged to at least try match its awareness of the basic stakes of the game. Succeeding is difficult, but ultimately more rewarding than almost all other engagements with what’s on right now or really ever has been.

Word Count: 2631

5. Looking at you, Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Gossip Girl etc.

Reference List:
AMC. 2008-13. Breaking Bad.

PBS. 1991-. ‘An Hour’s Conversation about Breaking Bad.’ Charlie Rose. Available:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jjzn0mOC1TE [August 25, 2015]

Nussbaum. Emily. 2013. ‘That Mind-Bending Phone Call on Last Night’s “Breaking Bad”’ for The New Yorker website (September 16, 2013). Available:www.thenewyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/that-mind-bending-phone-call-on-last- nights-breaking-bad [August 25, 2015]

Rugnetta, Mike. 2013. ‘Can You Actually Enjoy Breaking Bad?’. Video Essay made for PBS Idea Channel. Available:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9QIGAHQZqQ [August 25, 2015]