I watched Breaking Bad

Never Done: I watched Breaking Bad

I recently read an interview in which Tony Kushner said he thinks that some of the best dramatic writing being done now is for cable TV dramas, and The Wire and Breaking Bad were his primary examples. Apparently, when Tony Kushner tells me to watch something, I put it on my Netflix queue and get around to it a few months later. The problem is, I am a monogamous TV viewer, and I am currently seeing Battlestar Gallactica. (And I am quite happy in our relationship. We usually see each other late at night, in bed.)

But after friend after friend told me how good Breaking Bad is, I finally gave it a look. I like that there's a character with cerebral palsy, and I like that it gets underneath a mundane working/middle class life and shows us a world of seedy underbelly possibilities. In case you don't know, it's about a meek high school chemistry teacher who is struggling financially -- so much so that he has a second job at a car wash -- and is diagnosed in the Season One Premiere with inoperable lung cancer. Hoping he can secure his family's financial future, he teams up with a former student turned fuck-up, and cooks the kind of pure methamphetamine that only a meek high school chemistry teacher can cook. It turns out, he's a crystal meth artist.

At its essence, Breaking Bad is about a middle-aged man reinventing himself. A meek man who at the start of the episode can't get a hard-on (granted, his wife was paying more attention to her laptop than she was to the hand job) rediscovers his virility after he creates a mobile meth lab, knocks off a couple drug dealers, wields a hand gun, and flees from the authorities in his skivvies. Also, after he kicks and humiliates a trio of immature high school thugs who are mocking his son (the one with cerebral palsy.) In essence, cancer gives him a new lease on life.

I wonder if Breaking Bad will follow in the tradition of misdiagnosis literature (the loftiest that I can think of being Soul Mountain) -- in which the main character thinks their life is nearing its end, and so they change everything, only to find that there was a mistake, and that, as the saying goes, life goes on. But now that bridges are burned, priorities clarified, old patterns shed, and hard-ons regained, they get a brand new life. I can't say for sure, but it's my guess. (I was right when after the Battlestar pilot I guessed that BSG is an Earth creation myth.) I'll have to watch to find out. But first, I have a hot date with another two seasons of Battlestar.