Topic: Breaking Bad *please use spoiler tags*

[Canada Loves Anfield]

Nothing new in that trailer but it pumped me the fuck up. Great show - true, hidden gem

[binge]

 Anyone seen and know where to dload the 5 minisodes that were aired in march/april. It could be watched on the AMC website only for america though. Like most on here I need my crystal meth fix

[Frank.]

Can't wait, just can't wait.

[Ginamos]

Anyone seen and know where to dload the 5 minisodes that were aired in march/april. It could be watched on the AMC website only for america though. Like most on here I need my crystal meth fix

You could try a VPN like Hotspot Shield so the AMC website thinks you're in the US.

[MBL?]

Just noticed this recently I like it. I've just started on season 3, good stuff. Thank God for something a bit different.

[sattapaartridge]

definitely seriously good this.

thanks for the recommendation!

[Ultimate Bromance]

Second trailer for season 4, with a little bit of stuff from the new season. Sounds like it's going to be immense, jumped at the last bit.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/7iwnmisHL3w" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/7iwnmisHL3w</a>

[-Nay-]

Caught up with all my other series so im giving this ago

Series 1 Episode 1 downloading now

[Slave]

Walter White is the man. When does season 4 kick off?

[Canada Loves Anfield]

Next Sunday I think

[Macphisto80]

Yeah, it's next week that season 4 starts. What a cliffhanger the last episode ended with.

[Brentieke]

Second trailer for season 4, with a little bit of stuff from the new season. Sounds like it's going to be immense, jumped at the last bit.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/7iwnmisHL3w" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/7iwnmisHL3w</a>

Except Walt's wearing different clothes when he's sat down in front of Gus and when he pulls his gun out. It aint Gus hes killing.

[Chaztastic]

It truly is no wonder people resort to downloading when networks from outside the US can't/won't negotiate the requisite deal to broadcast shows like this.

No channel in the UK has acquired the rights to broadcast S3 yet S4 is just about to start in the US? Unforgivable, bordering on criminal.

[Timbo's Goals]

I loved the Sopranos. Every nuance. I thought it could never be eclipsed. But The Wire somehow did match it, possibly eclipsed it in some ways. Deadwood was amazing too and has to be a contender.

But Breaking Bad is just too much. Just too good. Just reached episode 10 of Third season. Terrified to watch any more as I simply don't want the intense pleasure I get from watching it to come to an end.


 

[Gili Gulu]

I really like Breaking Bad, but I think I'm starting to have a problem caring about what happens to some of the main characters.

Spoiler

For instance, when something happens between Walter and Skyler, I just feel a bit emotionally detached, because of what he does for a living. Are the writers including enough scenes showing the effects that drugs have on people?

I started having the same problem with Tony in The Sopranos when he was moaning about anxiety to his psychiatrist, or having some family drama, because in the scene before, and probably the scene after, he's going to be killing, beating and extorting money from people.

Yet the way that the narrative is set up in both shows, the writers seem to carry on focusing on the protagonist's personal trials and tribulations.

Sometimes a show will end with a big fight between the main character and his wife, she storms out, and the camera is left focusing on his face, as he realizes his life is going to shit. A similar scene is repeated five or six times a season, with different family members,  and I start feeling less and less sorry for him. Perhaps it's a little different with The Sopranos as Carmela knew full well what Tony was, while Skyler was kept in the dark. Dunno, perhaps that's what the writers intended.

[close]

[Timbo's Goals]

I really like Breaking Bad, but I think I'm starting to have a problem caring about what happens to some of the main characters.

Spoiler

For instance, when something happens between Walter and Skyler, I just feel a bit emotionally detached, because of what he does for a living. Are the writers including enough scenes showing the effects that drugs have on people?

I started having the same problem with Tony in The Sopranos when he was moaning about anxiety to his psychiatrist, or having some family drama, because in the scene before, and probably the scene after, he's going to be killing, beating and extorting money from people.

Yet the way that the narrative is set up in both shows, the writers seem to carry on focusing on the protagonist's personal trials and tribulations.

Sometimes a show will end with a big fight between the main character and his wife, she storms out, and the camera is left focusing on his face, as he realizes his life is going to shit. A similar scene is repeated five or six times a season, with different family members,  and I start feeling less and less sorry for him. Perhaps it's a little different with The Sopranos as Carmela knew full well what Tony was, while Skyler was kept in the dark. Dunno, perhaps that's what the writers intended.

[close]

Ah - there you are Leftie. Thought you were in the other thread. I'll repeat my reply.

 

That is a problem for you Leftie. In the sense that it must detract to some extent from your enjoyment of the show as empathy with the characters is one of the keystones to enjoying them.

Whilst I fully understand the point you make and I have discussed it with folk on various occasions - certainly with regards to the utter savagery of Tony Soprano and Paulie and so on though hardly at all with walt and jesse - I have to say my empathising with the characters and fondness for them has never been diminished in any overall sense. For the moment of any reflection of the savagery or the harmful effects of drugs sure but somehow the 'human' side of the characters however flawed enables me to virtually turn a blind eye to the harmful effects of what they're about.

Not sure why that is. It could have a lot to do with the incredibly rich underlying humour that stalks all of them which is such a tribute to both the writers and actors. Take Walt in that opening episode of Season 3. He's taken the shakespearian Lady macbeth mantle of "Oh what a wicked web we weave" to virtual Pol Pot levels yet the scene in the High school sports hall reflecting on the legacy of his drug manufacturing was just so excruciatingly funny that the wrongdoing became virtually irrelevant.

Weird but honestly I'm just glad I don't experience your guilt trips on this stuff.

[Gili Gulu]

Weird but honestly I'm just glad I don't experience your guilt trips on this stuff.

I still really enjoy the show, the writing is really great, and I do want to know what happens.

It's just become a bit like listening to a really great song, and then every now and then there's a note that is very slightly off key.

I still get caught up in the characters, but, usually at the end of the show you're feeling a particular emotion because of what has just happened, and then I think' "Damn writers, he's a drug dealer, why am I bothered".

I had much more of a problem with the Sopranos as well, I hope I don't start feeling as put off by Breaking Bad.

[Timbo's Goals]

I still really enjoy the show, the writing is really great, and I do want to know what happens.

It's just become a bit like listening to a really great song, and then every now and then there's a note that is very slightly off key.

I still get caught up in the characters, but, usually at the end of the show you're feeling a particular emotion because of what has just happened, and then I think' "Damn writers, he's a drug dealer, why am I bothered".

I had much more of a problem with the Sopranos as well, I hope I don't start feeling as put off by Breaking Bad.

By "weird" I meant my own lack of any real 'turn off' towards the flawed characters. I think your own 'confused' feelings are more logical. I'm just glad for once about my 'weirdness'.

 
 

[new-red]

this show is very wierd to me.

My dad looks very similar to the main character and my dad is the same exact type of chemist as the dude in the show.

if i get too high I get way too emotionally involved.

Amazing show though. Probably the best on tv at the moment.

[hope_valley_parker]

I've had the first season sat on my PC for over a year, and have just started watching. What a cracking show.

Seeing as there's two more seasons, assuming he doesn't die of cancer then? Or are the seasons just really packed together, timeframe-wise?

Actually don't tell me. Forget you ever read this

[Timbo's Goals]

I've had the first season sat on my PC for over a year, and have just started watching. What a cracking show.

Seeing as there's two more seasons, assuming he doesn't die of cancer then? Or are the seasons just really packed together, timeframe-wise?

Actually don't tell me. Forget you ever read this

 

[Gili Gulu]

Series 4 begins on Monday.

Here's an article I found about the show:

Spoilers Warning....

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6763000/bad-decisions

Spoiler

Though some may disagree (and I'm sure some will, because some always do), there doesn't seem to be much debate over what have been the four best television shows of the past 10 years. It seems like an easy question to answer, particularly since it's become increasingly difficult to write about the state of TV (or even the state of popular culture) without tangentially mentioning one of the following four programs — The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and/or Breaking Bad. The four fit together so nicely: Two from HBO that are defunct, two from AMC that are on-going, and all of which use nonlinear narratives with only minor experimentation. There have been bushels of quality television during the past decade, but these four shows have been the best1 (and by a relatively wide margin). Taste is subjective, but the critical consensus surrounding these four dramas is so widespread that it feels like an objective truth; it's become so accepted that this entire paragraph is a remarkably mundane argument to make in public. I'm basically writing, "The greatness of these great shows is defined by their greatness." There's no conflict in stating that good things are good.

Until, of course, you try to suggest that one of these shows is somehow better than the other three. Then it becomes a fucking bloodbath.

Because TV is so simultaneously personal (it exists inside your home) and so utterly universal (it exists inside everyone's home), people care about it with an atypical brand of conversational ferocity — they take it more personally than other forms of art, and they immediately feel comfortable speaking from a position of expertise. They develop loyalties to certain characters and feel offended when those loyalties are disparaged. This is what makes arguing about these particular shows so intense and satisfying — even though most serious TV watchers enjoy (or at least appreciate) all four, they habitually feel a greater internal obligation to advocate the superiority of whichever title they love most. As a result, you hear people making damning, melodramatic criticisms of TV shows they ostensibly like. You hear a lot of sentences that begin, "I love Mad Men, but …" or "The first two seasons of The Sopranos were great, but …" And whatever follows that "but" is inevitably crazy and hyperspecific. This is especially true among people who prefer The Wire. There's never been a more obstinate fan base than that of The Wire; it's a secular cult that refuses to accept any argument that doesn't classify The Wire as the greatest artistic endeavor in television history. It's almost as if these people secretly believe this show actually happened, and that criticizing the storyline is like mocking an episode of Frontline. This was not a documentary about Baltimore: Wallace is not alive and playing high school football in Texas, Stringer Bell was not reincarnated as a Pennsylvania paper salesman, and you are not qualified to lecture on inner-city education because you own Season 4 on DVD. The citizens on that show were nonexistent composites, and the events you watched did not occur. As a society, we must learn to accept this.

Which is not to say The Wire wasn't brilliant, because it was. Of the four shows I've mentioned, The Wire absolutely exhibited the finest writing; Mad Men has the most fascinating collection of character types, and The Sopranos was the most fully realized (and, it's important to note, essentially invented this rarified tier of televised drama). But I've slowly come to the conclusion that Breaking Bad is the best of the four, or at least the one I like the most.2 And I've been trying to figure out why I feel this way. It's shot in the most visually creative style, but that's not enough to set it apart; the acting is probably the best of the four, but not by a lot (and since good acting can sometimes cover deeper problems with direction and storytelling, I tend not to give it much weight). I suspect Breaking Bad will be the least remembered of these four shows and will probably be the least influential over time. Yet there's one profound difference between this series and the other three, and it has to do with its handling of morality: Breaking Bad is the only one built on the uncomfortable premise that there's an irrefutable difference between what's right and what's wrong, and it's the only one where the characters have real control over how they choose to live.

Certainly, all of these series grapple with morality — more than anything else,3 it's the reason they're better than the shows around them. But the first three examples all create realities where individual agency is detached. Mad Men is set in the 1960s, so every action the characters make is not really a reflection on who they are; they're mostly a commentary on the era. Don Draper is a bad husband, but "that's just how it was in those days." Characters can do or say whatever they want without remorse, because almost all their decisions can be excused (or at least explained) by the circumstances of the period. Roger Sterling's depravity is a form of retrospective entertainment, so very little is at stake.4 The people on this show need to be irresponsible for the sake of plausibility, so we can't really hold them accountable for what they do.

Now, The Sopranos and The Wire were set in the present, so the actions of their casts are harder to rationalize away — but both shows had fixed worldviews, so that process is still possible. Every important person on The Sopranos was involved with organized crime, and its protagonist was a (likeable) transgressor who regularly murdered for money — subsequently, there were never any unresolved questions over Tony Soprano's "goodness." When Tony did something nice, he did it in spite of the fact that (we all know) he's fundamentally bad (otherwise he couldn't exist as the person he was). The Sopranos was compelling because we were continually watching innately bad people operate within a world not unlike our own — this, in one sentence, was the crux of the series. Meanwhile, The Wire was more nuanced: In The Wire, everyone is simultaneously good and bad. The cops are fighting crime, but they're all specifically or abstractly corrupt; the drug dealers are violent criminals, but they're less hypocritical and hold themselves to a higher ethical standard. There were sporadic exceptions to this rule, but those minor exceptions only served to accentuate its overall relativist take on human nature: Nobody is totally positive and nobody is totally negative, and our inherently flawed assessment of those qualities hinges on where we come from and what we want to believe. And this, of course, is closer to how life actually is (which is why The Wire felt so realistic). It's a more sophisticated way to depict the world. However — from a fictional, narrative perspective — it ends up making the message a little less meaningful.5 If nothing is totally false, everything is partially true; depending on the perspective and the circumstance, no action is unacceptable. The conditions matter more than the participants. As we drift further and further from its 2008 finale, it increasingly feels like the ultimate takeaway from The Wire was more political6 than philosophical. Which is not exactly a criticism, because that's an accomplishment, too … it's just that it turns the plot of The Wire into a delivery mechanism for David Simon's polemic worldview (which makes its value dependent on how much the audience is predisposed to agree with him).

This is where Breaking Bad diverges from the other three entities. Breaking Bad is not a situation in which the characters' morality is static or contradictory or colored by the time frame; instead, it suggests that morality is continually a personal choice. When the show began, that didn't seem to be the case: It seemed like this was going to be the story of a man (Walter White, portrayed by Bryan Cranston) forced to become a criminal because he was dying of cancer. That's the elevator pitch. But that's completely unrelated to what the show has become. The central question on Breaking Bad is this: What makes a man "bad" — his actions, his motives, or his conscious decision to be a bad person? Judging from the trajectory of its first three seasons, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan believes the answer is option No. 3. So what we see in Breaking Bad is a person who started as one type of human and decides to become something different. And because this is television — because we were introduced to this man in a way that made him impossible to dislike, and because we experience TV through whichever character we understand the most — the audience is placed in the curious position of continuing to root for an individual who's no longer good. And this is not a case like J.R. Ewing or Al Swearengen, where a character's over-the-top evilness immediately defined his charm; this is a series in which the main character has actively become evil, but we still want him to succeed. At this point, Walter White could do anything and I would continue to support his cause. In fact, his evolution has been so deft that I feel weird describing his persona as "evil," even though I can't justify why it would be incorrect to do so.7 Gilligan detailed this process in a recent interview with Newsweek: "Television is historically good at keeping its characters in a self-imposed stasis8 so that shows can go on for years or even decades. 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?"

In that same Newsweek article, the writer suggests Walter White's on-going metamorphosis is what makes Breaking Bad great. But that doesn't go far enough. It's not just that watching White's transformation is interesting; what's interesting is that this transformation involves the fundamental core of who he supposedly is, and that this (wholly constructed) core is an extension of his own free will. The difference between White in the middle of Season 1 and White in the debut of Season 4 is not the product of his era or his upbringing or his social environment. It's a product of his own consciousness. He changed himself. At some point, he decided to become bad, and that's what matters.

There's a scene in Breaking Bad's first season in which Walter White's hoodrat lab assistant Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) tells Walter he just can't "break bad," and — when you first hear this snippet of dialogue — you assume what Jesse means is that you can't go from being a law-abiding chemistry teacher to an underground meth cooker. It seems like he's telling White that he can't start breaking the law after living a life in which laws were always obeyed, and that a criminal lifestyle is not something you can join like a club. His advice seems pragmatic, and it almost feels like an artless way to shoehorn the show's title into the script. But this, it turns out, was not Jesse's point at all. What he was arguing was that someone can't "decide" to morph from a good person into a bad person, because there's a firewall within our personalities that makes this impossible. He was arguing that Walter's nature would stop him from being bad, and that Walter would fail if tried to complete this conversation. But Jesse was wrong. He was wrong, because goodness and badness are simply complicated choices, no different than anything else.

[close]

[Frank.]

Monday? Yes

[Gili Gulu]

Monday? Yes

Well, Sunday for people watching in the US

[Frank.]

Well, Sunday for people watching in the US

Ill more than likely just download it as soon as it's up.

['Mondzz']

Canny wait for monday!

[theCanadian]

Not nominated for a single emmy.


 

[Brian Blessed]

Not nominated for a single emmy.


 

It hasn't been on. Season three got it awards last time, including Brian Cranston for his third best actor in a row. At least John Hamm can win this year, fully deserved.

[theCanadian]

It hasn't been on. Season three got it awards last time, including Brian Cranston for his third best actor in a row. At least John Hamm can win this year, fully deserved.

Cool - I figured it must've been something like that. Why such a long gap?

[Brian Blessed]

Cool - I figured it must've been something like that. Why such a long gap?

No idea, maybe they were negotiating contracts and stuff, same thing that caused Mad Men's delay.

[Timbo's Goals]

Series 4 begins on Monday.

Here's an article I found about the show:

Spoilers Warning....

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6763000/bad-decisions

Spoiler

[close]

Enjoyed that. Cheers leftie.

Watched the final two episodes of season 3 last night so I can relate to what the guy's saying. I'll have a ponder.

[Gobias Industries]

I watched season 1 of this show in about a week about 7 months ago. Then I started watching season 2 and 3 a few weeks ago and finally finished two nights ago.

Fantastic show. It's going to be really weird being forced to watch it one at a time. That's the bad thing about catching up.

[Ginamos]

Fantastic show. It's going to be really weird being forced to watch it one at a time. That's the bad thing about catching up.

It's also a good thing.

I've loved watching this weekly, they always leave something to "look forward to". I found something like The Shield was great for that type of catchup, Breaking Bad and The Sopranos imho are better watched weekly, if you have the opportunity.

Great show, massively looking forward to the new season.

[IndianaRed]

I can't wait for this tonight.  This show is amazing... bitch!

[IndianaRed]

good god

[Fuson]

Downloading now. Can't wait.

['Mondzz']

Looking forward to getting home and watching this, dont have a clue whats happening thought with it being that long since the last episode so may have to download the last ep of season 3 first..

[Yiannis]

Downloading it right now likewise and looking forward to watch it in the evening.
Elzhar,personally i downloaded and watched the whole 3 seasons again at the start of July,in order to remember it and also have it as an archive whenever i feel like watching it once again.
"Yeah Mr. White! Yeah Science!"

[Canada Loves Anfield]

Only read this if you watched the latest episode

http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/30856/breaking-bad-creator-vince-gilligan-on-last-nights-season-premiere

[gamble]

Downloading now. Can't wait.

where from pretty please??!?