So after finishing Schitt’s Creek I took a glancing swipe at Arrested Development and checked out. I turned to Breaking Bad, which even I had heard of and which I assume any non-Luddite (like me) has viewed. Consensus one of the greatest series in the history of television. I am on season two episode four, ten and one-half out of sixty-two.
The cinematography is extraordinary, the screenwriting very, very good overall and the acting first rate if unvariegated. However. But. Very early on I caught on that there was a deep flaw, which I hoped would not be fatal, and which flaw had been baked in at creation. For several episodes of season one Walter White's reason for keeping his terminal cancer diagnosis from his family and beginning on a years-long crime spree and blood bath is to provide for his family after he is gone, which is in seven months. That is the patently absurd premise to the entire series; it reminds me of the patently absurd origins of the American Revolution. It was unfortunate for my appreciation of the series early on that I faced a kinda sorta similar dilemma fifteen years ago, a cancer diagnosis that I chose, after extreme cogitation, to keep from my children until they were older and could better understand that a prostate cancer diagnosis is almost never terminal and mine was not terminal. So there is that not insignificant difference in the prognoses that Walter White and I received. However, I can say with complete certainty that if my prostate cancer had been terminal I would not have gone a crystal methamphetamine cooking binge and enlisted a 19 or so year-old former student to be my partner and seller and murdered, to this point, three people. Okay? Beyond a reasonable doubt. So say we all. Screenwriters, put down your meth pipes and start over. And I was afraid that any great river that had its source in such fetid pool would be irrevocably polluted. Walter, for example, turns down a manna from heaven offer of a full-time higher-paying job with full medical coverage with his former grad school classmate's company, which Walter co-founded and then was forced out by Elliott, because Elliott forced him out. Better to sell ice and whack people. I didn't give up on the series but I was disgusted and tempted to.
The screenwriters apparently had the same glimpse of the Beast that they had birthed and in the second half of season one the premise subtly morphed. Walter “breaks bad” because he finds illegality thrilling. He literally gets off on being the bad boy, and a very bad boy he becomes. His wife Skylar: “Why was that (sex in back of the car ouside their son's high school) so good?” “Because it’s illegal,” by Walt. Okay! Excellent work screenwriters! The money-for-family motivation was always preposterous but the thrill seeking crime spree, that is plausible!
The screenwriters also took a few commendable stabs at moral questions. There are all of these line-drawing tests: meth used to be legal, pot is not; alcohol used to be illegal, now it’s legal. Marie, Walter's sister-in-law, early on shoplifts a pair of high heels. And then, the expensive tiara she gave Skyler at the baby shower, she swiped that too. And Marie's husband, the DEA agent, blithely tells Skyler "we have to support Marie" and "She is seeing a counselor." Skyler is so outraged she is speechless. In the second half of season one the series became more like the themes of To Catch a Thief, The Thomas Crowne Affair, Crimes and Misdemeanors, you could go on and on, where lines of morality and legality are blurred, as is truth the Pragmatist philosophers tells us, rather than what I initially thought, a film version of some goddamed Cormac McCarthy novel. It was much more real now and I liked it much more.
In one luminous episode, the best so far, by far, there is even some slapstick HUMOUR. Those stupid ski masks with the balls on top that bounce when Walter and Jesse run when they are breaking into the chemical warehouse is perfect lolol
The screenwriting is intelligent, it doesn’t insult you or spoon feed you as Ron Howard's narration of Arrested Development and the over-acting did. Walter’s pseudonym in dealings with Tuco is “Heisenberg.” The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. We can never fix with precision the position of any mass in space. Just like we can never fix moral truths. Legal now, illegal then, and vice versa, and where do morality and legal intersect, where do they diverge? Hank, the DEA agent, kills Tuco, indubitably in self-defense, and is given an award. Walter also acted on the spur of the moment in self-defense when he noticed, just as he was to turn the key and release Crazy 8, that the latter had broken plate shards secreted and was going to kill Walter if Walter released him. But, the first person to reason by analogy was the devil the Prohpet Mohammad taught, and legally, if his truths be known, Walter would have been indicted for first degree felony murder for the killings of Crazy 8 and Emilio.
There has been that one luminous episode. The rest have been good to very good. However, there are some unrealities that have bothered me from the beginning and the plot in season two is dragging. It’s actually a repeating plot, the screenwriters don’t seem to be able to have figured out where they want to go next and so they just repeat, like Groundhog Day, the endless close calls that somehow this weakening terminal cancer patient and his skinny young sidekick keep being able to dodge. I find it completely unreal that Jesse, who Tuco nearly beat to death once, did it again—with MUCH greater cause—and Jesse was able to grab Tuco’s sidearm and wound him and then stun him with a rock. I find it completely implausible that Hank is able to kill Tuco with his goddamned service weapon and escape WITHOUT A SCRAPE OR NICK against Tuco who has an automatic rifle. I didn’t expect network TV absurdities like that from these screenwriters.
The series is set in suburban Albuquerque. Decent sized city, Albuquerque. Yet, the show’s scenes remind me of the hospital scenes in the Halloween series where it always seemed that the only two fucking people in a huge hospital were Jamie Lee Curtis and Jason. Hallways always empty; a hospital scene in Breaking Bad too: Walt ESCAPES to retrieve the drug money and gun from the house crawlspace and then simply walks back into the hospital and hooks the IV lines up to his own arms. No one is the wiser. Lol. Here, with neighbors all around I’ve never seen a car besides one of the principals’ and only twice have I seen other people on the leafy, well-kept streets, and the same two twice, a pair of sixty-something women out power walking or something. The point is, in a prosperous suburb of a significantly sized city no one notices the neighborhood meth dealer or his local high school chem teacher senior partner or anything unusual to suggest all that is underground.
I can appreciate the difficulties in screenwriting a series. Charles Dickens serialized some of his novels in periodicals. He had no comprehensive plan and wrote the next chapter after completing the previous one. It makes for stilted and overlong novels. But in season two the screenplay is drawn back more to the original premise. Walt has seven months to live and I’ll be goddamned if I have a clue how these screenwriters are going to drag this out for 3 1/2 more seasons without reverting to some Hollywood deus ex machina again and Walt gets cured. As one episode is titled, there’s too much of a “crazy handful of nothin’.” Good night...morning.
The cinematography is extraordinary, the screenwriting very, very good overall and the acting first rate if unvariegated. However. But. Very early on I caught on that there was a deep flaw, which I hoped would not be fatal, and which flaw had been baked in at creation. For several episodes of season one Walter White's reason for keeping his terminal cancer diagnosis from his family and beginning on a years-long crime spree and blood bath is to provide for his family after he is gone, which is in seven months. That is the patently absurd premise to the entire series; it reminds me of the patently absurd origins of the American Revolution. It was unfortunate for my appreciation of the series early on that I faced a kinda sorta similar dilemma fifteen years ago, a cancer diagnosis that I chose, after extreme cogitation, to keep from my children until they were older and could better understand that a prostate cancer diagnosis is almost never terminal and mine was not terminal. So there is that not insignificant difference in the prognoses that Walter White and I received. However, I can say with complete certainty that if my prostate cancer had been terminal I would not have gone a crystal methamphetamine cooking binge and enlisted a 19 or so year-old former student to be my partner and seller and murdered, to this point, three people. Okay? Beyond a reasonable doubt. So say we all. Screenwriters, put down your meth pipes and start over. And I was afraid that any great river that had its source in such fetid pool would be irrevocably polluted. Walter, for example, turns down a manna from heaven offer of a full-time higher-paying job with full medical coverage with his former grad school classmate's company, which Walter co-founded and then was forced out by Elliott, because Elliott forced him out. Better to sell ice and whack people. I didn't give up on the series but I was disgusted and tempted to.
The screenwriters apparently had the same glimpse of the Beast that they had birthed and in the second half of season one the premise subtly morphed. Walter “breaks bad” because he finds illegality thrilling. He literally gets off on being the bad boy, and a very bad boy he becomes. His wife Skylar: “Why was that (sex in back of the car ouside their son's high school) so good?” “Because it’s illegal,” by Walt. Okay! Excellent work screenwriters! The money-for-family motivation was always preposterous but the thrill seeking crime spree, that is plausible!
The screenwriters also took a few commendable stabs at moral questions. There are all of these line-drawing tests: meth used to be legal, pot is not; alcohol used to be illegal, now it’s legal. Marie, Walter's sister-in-law, early on shoplifts a pair of high heels. And then, the expensive tiara she gave Skyler at the baby shower, she swiped that too. And Marie's husband, the DEA agent, blithely tells Skyler "we have to support Marie" and "She is seeing a counselor." Skyler is so outraged she is speechless. In the second half of season one the series became more like the themes of To Catch a Thief, The Thomas Crowne Affair, Crimes and Misdemeanors, you could go on and on, where lines of morality and legality are blurred, as is truth the Pragmatist philosophers tells us, rather than what I initially thought, a film version of some goddamed Cormac McCarthy novel. It was much more real now and I liked it much more.
In one luminous episode, the best so far, by far, there is even some slapstick HUMOUR. Those stupid ski masks with the balls on top that bounce when Walter and Jesse run when they are breaking into the chemical warehouse is perfect lolol
The screenwriting is intelligent, it doesn’t insult you or spoon feed you as Ron Howard's narration of Arrested Development and the over-acting did. Walter’s pseudonym in dealings with Tuco is “Heisenberg.” The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. We can never fix with precision the position of any mass in space. Just like we can never fix moral truths. Legal now, illegal then, and vice versa, and where do morality and legal intersect, where do they diverge? Hank, the DEA agent, kills Tuco, indubitably in self-defense, and is given an award. Walter also acted on the spur of the moment in self-defense when he noticed, just as he was to turn the key and release Crazy 8, that the latter had broken plate shards secreted and was going to kill Walter if Walter released him. But, the first person to reason by analogy was the devil the Prohpet Mohammad taught, and legally, if his truths be known, Walter would have been indicted for first degree felony murder for the killings of Crazy 8 and Emilio.
There has been that one luminous episode. The rest have been good to very good. However, there are some unrealities that have bothered me from the beginning and the plot in season two is dragging. It’s actually a repeating plot, the screenwriters don’t seem to be able to have figured out where they want to go next and so they just repeat, like Groundhog Day, the endless close calls that somehow this weakening terminal cancer patient and his skinny young sidekick keep being able to dodge. I find it completely unreal that Jesse, who Tuco nearly beat to death once, did it again—with MUCH greater cause—and Jesse was able to grab Tuco’s sidearm and wound him and then stun him with a rock. I find it completely implausible that Hank is able to kill Tuco with his goddamned service weapon and escape WITHOUT A SCRAPE OR NICK against Tuco who has an automatic rifle. I didn’t expect network TV absurdities like that from these screenwriters.
The series is set in suburban Albuquerque. Decent sized city, Albuquerque. Yet, the show’s scenes remind me of the hospital scenes in the Halloween series where it always seemed that the only two fucking people in a huge hospital were Jamie Lee Curtis and Jason. Hallways always empty; a hospital scene in Breaking Bad too: Walt ESCAPES to retrieve the drug money and gun from the house crawlspace and then simply walks back into the hospital and hooks the IV lines up to his own arms. No one is the wiser. Lol. Here, with neighbors all around I’ve never seen a car besides one of the principals’ and only twice have I seen other people on the leafy, well-kept streets, and the same two twice, a pair of sixty-something women out power walking or something. The point is, in a prosperous suburb of a significantly sized city no one notices the neighborhood meth dealer or his local high school chem teacher senior partner or anything unusual to suggest all that is underground.
I can appreciate the difficulties in screenwriting a series. Charles Dickens serialized some of his novels in periodicals. He had no comprehensive plan and wrote the next chapter after completing the previous one. It makes for stilted and overlong novels. But in season two the screenplay is drawn back more to the original premise. Walt has seven months to live and I’ll be goddamned if I have a clue how these screenwriters are going to drag this out for 3 1/2 more seasons without reverting to some Hollywood deus ex machina again and Walt gets cured. As one episode is titled, there’s too much of a “crazy handful of nothin’.” Good night...morning.
