by Doctor Science
I never saw Breaking Bad -- it's really not my kind of thing, too morally dark and too realistic (no dragons, no spaceships) -- but I could hardly avoid being aware of it. This was especially the case as it built to the finale in September 2013.
The reaction to the "Breaking Bad" finale on my social media sites (Tumblr, Livejournal/Dreamwidth, Facebook), both while it was airing and immediately afterward, was: "I'm weeping for the characters. What a great, satisfying ending." As I saw viewers' reactions, it was clear to me: "Breaking Bad" is tragedy in the classical sense. It depicts a person of noble character (in Walter White's case, a man of intelligence and talent) overthrown by fate and their own flaws, evoking emotions of pity and terror, and leading the audience to a feeling of catharsis.
No wonder "Breaking Bad" is held in such high critical esteem: tragedy is still the most prestigious of genres, in Western drama, and the tragic sequence of emotions is still our standard for Most Important Art.
I was thinking about this recently because I've been getting back into Smallville. I was part of the first wave of Smallville (abbreviated "SV") fandom: I came in on the fall 2001 bandwagon, started detaching at the end of Season 3 (spring 2004), and left completely by the fall of 2006.
What does this have to do with "Breaking Bad"? BB is generally acknowledged as one of the best TV series ever, while Thamiris, a brilliant essayist and writer, admitted that:
Watching Smallville is like dating a really gorgeous idiot-savant. If only he weren't so pretty, you think to yourself. If only he didn't display flashes of brilliance. Then I could leave him and find a nice accountant.(Thamiris died of cancer in 2007, and ohgod, we miss her bitterly.)
One of those flashes of brilliance was that, in the beginning, SV looked like a Greek tragedy. Just as with the classic tragedies, everybody knew how the story was going to turn out: Clark Kent was going to become Superman, Lex Luthor would become his greatest antagonist. But "Smallville" showed their first meeting like this:
Then later in that first episode:
direct YouTube link
Instead of being "naturally evil" from the get-go in the usual Lex Luthor fashion, Smallville's Lex is complex, charismatic, and trying hard to do good. As Thamiris said at the start of Season 2 in an essay comparing Lex to Oedipus:
The worst part is the harder Lex tries, the greater he'll fail, and I just want to hug him and tell him what Creon says to Oedipus at the end of the play: Do not crave to be a master in all things; the mastery which you won has not followed you through life. But Lex won't listen. He's spent his life learning about grand gestures, needing them, too, because his father's cut a hole in him the size of a meteor crater. Lex will cut another hole in himself trying to help Clark, trying to be his friend. For us, as Kleenex-clutching viewers of the tragedy, we can only do what the chorus counsels in the final lines of Oedipus Rex:We, that first wave of SV fandom, we *loved* Lex, we felt the full weight of Aristotle's "pity" (better thought of as "empathy", IMHO) and of terror, the fear of his future villainy and the "Rift" that is destined to separate him from Clark.Therefore, while our eyes wait to see the destined final day, we must call no one happy who is of mortal race, until he has crossed life's border, free from pain.
And the Clark-centric fans felt it, too, the fact that the innocent, good-hearted Clark Kent we saw onscreen was destined to fail, to not be able to truly save Lex, the first person he rescued.
We watched SV as though it was a tragedy; we called it "the fandom of pain". We wrote and discussed and analyzed -- and we wept, raged, and re-wrote the future to be happier. I've never been in a fandom where I was so *emotionally* engaged. Not surprisingly, when it became clear that the show wasn't going to present the full-scale Tragedy of Lex Luthor and Failure of Clark Kent, I felt bitter, furious, and betrayed. It was a really bad break-up, as fandom goes, and I wasn't even up to writing a SV retrospective when the series finally ended in 2011.
Frankly, we were all nuts. Now that I'm finally able to look back at SV rationally, the idea that a broadcast TV series -- on a second-rate network aimed at teenagers -- would actually be trying to present tragedy is preposterous. Of course they weren't going to make a show where Superman fails, what were we thinking? Tragedy *hurts*, that's not how you *sell stuff* -- and selling stuff is what broadcast TV is *for*. Of course they were going to make Lana Lang the critical catalyst for "The Rift", because they were doing soap opera and that's how soap operas work.
As many people have said, we're currently living in a Golden Age of television -- as exemplified by "Breaking Bad". I think the over-riding reason for this Golden Age is that it's now possible to make lots of shows that have 6-12 episodes per season, instead of the 22 in a "standard" season. Around ten 43-minute episodes is a good length for television, it's the right size to tell the sort of stories TV is good for. Because the TV audience has fragmented, it's also possible to make shows -- like Orange Is the New Black, for instance -- without being concerned about whether they'll appeal to everyone or not.
Tragedy is powerful, disturbing stuff, and it's not going to have enormously broad appeal in our society. Even with "Breaking Bad", Vince Gilligan didn't follow the full template laid down by Greek and Elizabethan tragedy, he wimped out. What Shakespeare or the Greeks would have expected is for Walter White's family to have been destroyed by the drugs he sold: for his son to die of an overdose, his wife to become an addict, his infant daughter to end up in the foster care system. That would have been a true, tragic overthrow of the old school -- but there's no way it would have been as popular in the U.S., even with a limited audience, as "Breaking Bad" turned out to be.
I do think SV's creators and early scriptwriters were playing with the idea of tragedy. This is clearest in episode 1x06, "Hourglass", which involves a woman named Cassandra who can see a person's future when she touches their hand. One time she holds Clark's hand, they share a vision of him standing in a cemetery, surrounded by the graves of everyone he knows:
... except Lex (though no-one points this out). When Lex holds her hand, they see a vision of Lex as President of the US, then of him standing in a field of sunflowers (Kansas is the Sunflower State) which turn into a field of bones when he touches them -- and then the sky rains blood:
Both futures are terrible and tragic, not the unvarnished triumph Americans expect from our superheroes. The SV creators were willing to think about tragedy, a little, but they weren't willing to commit to it, to make it central to their vision. And there's no way it could have been central to the series, no-one would have bought it.
I haven't seen Man of Steel or the new DC TV shows and I don't follow DC comics, but it's my impression that none of them have picked up any of the new elements SV introduced: that Kal-El came to Earth in a destructive meteor shower, that Kryptonite has effects on humans, that Lex and Clark started as close friends, or that Lex ever tried to be a good person. That the story of Superman could be tragic, not just "grittier" or "darker".
Even without a tragic ending, there are lots of opportunities to think about and explore what it really means to be a hero -- especially a hero like Superman, who has a very warm personality and who makes a point of not killing. But it's probably just as unrealistic to expect thoughtful plot and characterization from a $200 million movie as it was to expect tragedy from a TV series on The WB.
I'm of the opinion that the 'best' TV is when a series fans and it's writers KNOW they have EXACTLY x number of episodes, PERIOD. Have a beginning, a middle and an perhaps MOST IMPORTANTLY, an END. I think it's one of the reasons I like a lot of anime. They knew what they had to work with and didn't try to make a money grab by extending it.
Obvious exceptions, in that genre of course, but most of what I consider 'great anime' follows that pattern (beginning, middle, end).
Posted by: Berial | August 03, 2015 at 11:49 AM
I think you can still have great TV when each episode has a real beginning, middle, and end. You can still have an open-ended series with the same characters, and even have some on-going character development, but each piece has to be essentially complete in itself.
The other thing that great TV needs is some realistic interaction among the characters. That is, different characters interact in different ways. You don't have everybody treating one guy the same way. It's a concept a lot of TV shows manage to miss.
Posted by: wj | August 03, 2015 at 12:35 PM
wj,
Even the style of TV you describe needs some things:
*If status quo is god, you aren't going to get any real character development.
*If the networks don't commit to showing episodes in the correct order, you cannot have anything but a return to status quo at the end of every episode.
Nowadays, the networks show all series in correct order, so you can have storytelling. However, you can't really have a closure for stories if you don't know when you need to end the series. For example, "Rome" was destroyed by the fact that it was cut short. The second season became an awful mess as the writers tried to tie up several seasons's worth of loose ends in a few episodes. On the other hand, the harbinger of the Golden Age of TV, "Babylon 5", was marred by the fact that it was continued by one more season after closing the story arc.
An episodic TV may be great and compelling entertainment but the a fixed length series gives much better opportunity for real.art.
Posted by: Lurker | August 03, 2015 at 02:10 PM
And yet, you can have a series of books, good books, featuring the same character(s). Each book complete in itself. But the number of books being open-ended.
Granted, there are lots of book series which continue on long after the author has run out of things to say. Likewise there can be (and are!) TV series which continue too long. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the length of the series needs to be set in advance in order to be good.
Posted by: wj | August 03, 2015 at 02:26 PM
But "Breaking Bad," for instance, had 62 episodes. It would be more appropriate to compare books to full seasons in a TV series rather than individual episodes. I also think the variables that go into whether or not a writer puts another book out as part of an existing series are very, very different from those that determine whether a TV series gets renewed, not to mention the differences in the writing process (or the fact that, even when the writing is done for a TV show, there's still lots and lots of stuff to do to make it something people can watch on TV).
Posted by: hairshirthedonist | August 03, 2015 at 02:50 PM
Actually, I'd say that the variables on renewals are pretty identical: sales. If advertisers see big audiences, that means sales to them. If the publishers see high sales figures, that is obviously sales for them. And that, in either case, drives contracts to continue.
Posted by: wj | August 03, 2015 at 03:52 PM
if a writer gets dropped before finishing the series she can, at the very least, self-publish.
but self-publishing a TV series is essentially impossible.
Posted by: cleek | August 03, 2015 at 04:08 PM
Actually, I'd say that the variables on renewals are pretty identical: sales.
That's one variable, though it's a big one. Then again, it's a variable with a value determined by a bunch of other variables, and those variables differ greatly between TV and books.
The other variable that matters greatly is cost. Some TV shows aren't profitable because they cost so much to produce. Producing a book about people who spend most of their time in one place talking to each other doesn't cost much less than writing a book about people who fly around the universe interacting with alien civilizations.
You also don't have to worry about the actors portraying the characters in books, because there are none. You don't modify the story line midstream because somebody got a better gig in another book. Same goes for writers on TV shows, really. Most books are written by an author, not a writing staff (editors aside).
They're just different ballgames in many ways.
Posted by: hairshirthedonist | August 03, 2015 at 04:54 PM
I never watched Smallville and I feel sad for the waste of potential. The tragedy you described didn't happen was what I thought Smallville was about, so it's disappointing to hear that they didn't even try.
Posted by: schneefink | August 04, 2015 at 03:55 AM
I didn't watch Breaking Bad, but after hearing about it I expected that the ending would involve the wife destroying the drug money. Maybe just burning the big pile of cash, right in front of Walter, so it's clear he achieved absolutely nothing. I hear this isn't how it went, that he did manage to provide for his family with the drug business. That does seem to undercut the tragedy.
Posted by: Gareth Wilson | August 04, 2015 at 05:45 AM
there was plenty of tragedy in the BB ending.
(spoilers, obvs)
Walter's two tragedies are: 1) he was ostensibly trying to get money to cure his cancer, but what killed him was the quest for that money and not the cancer itself. 2) he kept telling himself that what he was doing was providing for his family, but in the end he ended up destroying it - by death or by betrayal or by neglect.
Posted by: cleek | August 04, 2015 at 07:25 AM
So sorry to go off-thread (and yet still dealing with long-running TV), but just in case you all hadn't seen this, I thought it worthy of note:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacktivists-sent-a-love-letter-to-jon-stewart-by-hacking-donald-trump
Posted by: Girl from the North Country | August 04, 2015 at 07:54 AM
Yes, "Breaking Bad" was a tragedy and superb watching.
What I like about this show, and many others now, is that the dense intensity of being involved with characters over dozens of episodes involves me like reading the great novels.
Add in great writing and production values and then exquisite choices in music to define a scene.
With "Breaking Bad", I came to it late on Netflix and didn't expect to like it, since anything to do with meth makes me queasy, but after three episodes, I was hooked (on the show, not meth).
The end of every episode had you by the cojones and all you could think was, well, what possibly could happen next that could be more gruesome and compromising to human decency than last episode and yet Walter White overcame every ruthless obstacle in the ruthless world he thrust himself into as a tragic result of not only the cancer, but also, as a revenge drama, his bitterness over the loss of his entrepreneurial wealth pursuits in private business coeval with his former lover leaving him for his former business partner, and really, when you think about it, the ruthlessness of these setbacks trained him, crippled him with vengeance, to take on the unimaginable technicolor ruthlessness of the Mexican drug cartel.
It was like watching Richard III. You cringe at the awfulness of it all, but you are seduced by the central character taking you into his confidence, not via soliloquy as in that play, but by the audience spending lots of quiet time alone with Walter White as he rationalized and connived his actions, and used those around him to his ends.
Really, wouldn't it be justice if El Chapo, the tunneling, murderous drug lord who just recently escaped -- again -- dug an elaborate fresh-air fed, well-lighted two-mile long tunnel the next time, and lowered himself in and just as he reached his escape hatch, met Heisenberg, his hat at a jaunty angle and his eyes behind dark lenses, and was blown to bits or upended into a vat of methylamine, sort of like Clarence in Richard III, who was not exactly a pristine human being his own self.
See, what I really like about the character's development was that he didn't start with a master plan. He met each challenge as they came along with narrow-eyed masterful competence like anyone does in his or her job, and his confidence in his abilities, so long held in check by life's previous obstacles, powered him on to meeting the next obstacle.
He finally realized he was smarter than all of the other d*ckheads.
It was a job, making a product, and he made the very best product and no one was going to thwart him.
The metaphorical possibilities of that are extensive.
And his confederates, the unwitting innocents, and then the professional sociopaths, were swept along in his wake. I mean, if a high school teacher (Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach --- the sociopaths in "Breaking Bad" had the same opinion of teachers as the pigf*cking sociopaths we deal with in real life every f*cking day) can win over a hard-case like Mike Ehrmantraut, who had seen everything sh*tty in life, as least twice, you have yourself an Ubermensch heading for uncharted grief and trouble.
I love too the fact that Ehrmantraut knew from the beginning that Walter was bad news, not in the conventional sense, not like the ruthless "businessmen" for who's bidding Mike worked, who had a set of rules, ruthless ones, but rules nevertheless.
This guy, Walter, didn't have any rules. He was a disruptor like Uber or Facebook, and he had other fish to fry, so don't get in the way. He made it up as he went along and if anything is more effective than ruthlessness, its unpredictable ruthlessness.
But, yes, most assuredly a tragedy. Innocence and the innocent betrayed and a damaged man destroying himself.
What did you expect? The Two Gentleman of Verona?*
*Although, at least one of those gentleman could see himself clear to furthering his own ends in a different setting by behaving like Walter White.
Posted by: Countme-In | August 04, 2015 at 08:55 AM
Good catch, GOTNC.
Stewart was great last night with his coverage of the Rethug candidates applying their lips to the fragrant, moneyed posteriors of the Koch twins and the idiotic coverage of our willingly and thoroughly compromised and corrupt media, let alone FOX.
Like Hector Salamanca took care of business, it's too bad someone doesn't bring a nervous finger to bear on the problem of the Gus Fring brothers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp_LfXUe6pE
Is Donald Trump the Hector we need?
Posted by: Countme-In | August 04, 2015 at 09:16 AM
I mean, if a high school teacher (Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach...
I think you're missing one of the essential ironies of the show: that WW was an absolutely godawful teacher.
(Though many I know in the teaching profession do admit that the temptation to scrawl "APPLY YOURSELF !" across a pupil's work, rather than marking it, is sometimes intolerable.)
Posted by: Nigel | August 04, 2015 at 09:19 AM
Well, another, but similar ironic way of looking at it is that he found his calling by applying himself instead of whiling away his life in a profession he was ill-suited for.
Yes, now that you mention it, he had the same contempt for teaching as did most of the American public, and went on to bigger and more remunerative competencies.
;)
Posted by: Countme-In | August 04, 2015 at 09:31 AM
I suspect that if all public school teachers in America quit their jobs tomorrow to get into the meth game, candidate attendees at the Koch lollapalooza would say good riddance and finally the former teachers can't do any more damage now that they are in a private sector endeavor whose profits are not encroached upon by taxes, nor does it depend on our hard-earned tax dollars to thrive.
Posted by: Countme-In | August 04, 2015 at 09:50 AM
1) he was ostensibly trying to get money to cure his cancer, but what killed him was the quest for that money and not the cancer itself. 2) he kept telling himself that what he was doing was providing for his family, but in the end he ended up destroying it
As I remember it, he didn't expect at the outset to survive the cancer, and genuinely was trying to stay alive long enough to leave sufficient provision for his family (including new child and son with disability). How that slowly morphed into a threadbare excuse made it interesting.
And in the end, he saved his family by (falsely) exonerating his unwitting/witting/repentant accomplice wife.
Actually, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the partially redemptive ending - either brilliant, or something of a copout.
Posted by: Nigel | August 04, 2015 at 10:32 AM
Yes, there was clearly tragedy in the BB ending. However, the Greeks would have had his son become a junkie (and probably die of it), because they knew that you can't save your family by poisoning the community, your family is *part* of the community.
I don't know if Gilligan knew that this would be a more logically tragic ending and rejected it, or if he just didn't consider the possibility.
Posted by: Doctor Science | August 04, 2015 at 05:09 PM
schneefink:
I won't say that they didn't even try to make Smallville tragic, but the showrunners didn't really commit to the idea. It's clear (from DVD commentaries, interviews, etc.) that they weren't even trying to make "quality" TV -- with the kind of writing and production values that was put into BB, for instance.
They were committed to more episodes a season than they could do well (they had a lot of trouble staying within budget) and so they didn't try all that hard. Their continuity was *terrible* -- they used fan resources to keep track of plot elements.
What really sold it to us was the acting: Michael Rosenbaum should have been nominated for an Emmy in Season 3, for Lex Luthor. John Glover as his father Lionel Luthor was wonderfully villainous: we called him "the Magnificent Bastard". Annette O'Toole and John Schneider as the Kents were also extremely good.
And though Tom Welling wasn't all that great an actor at the beginning, he could still sell an innocent, open-hearted Clark Kent. While being astoundingly beautiful, in a way that isn't the usual for Superman.
Posted by: Doctor Science | August 04, 2015 at 05:22 PM
I suspect that if all public school teachers in America quit their jobs tomorrow...
Don't look now, but we're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy!
We await with great expectation the forthcoming explanation from a free market conservative voice admonishing us libruls about how markets "really work".
Posted by: bobbyp | August 04, 2015 at 07:43 PM
Honestly, I resisted Breaking Bad, but was hooked once I finished the first season. And so forth with a lot of tv series now: my latest binge-watch was Peaky Blinders (still going on).
The fact is, the best drama these days is TV series. There are so many talented people. Who knew?
Posted by: sapient | August 04, 2015 at 08:10 PM
I like the count's take.
"It was a job, making a product, and he made the very best product and no one was going to thwart him.
And his confederates, the unwitting innocents, and then the professional sociopaths, were swept along in his wake."
*SPOILERS*
I didn't watch Smallville or very much BB but I did catch the last episode and as I watched Walter lying on his back with "Baby Blue" I noted he was smiling and I thought...
...Love or Glory, Baby. Love or Glory.
Personal ambition versus social responsibility (including toward family)or for the Japanese Giri vs ninjo duty vs compassion, a lot of narratives and tragedies can be viewed under this lens.
The Greeks were not so simple and clear. Was Oedipus being selfish, doing his duty? My other favorite, Odysseus gets the kid kill in Philoctetes. I never have quite figured out where Antigone's duty lies.
But duty aside we still have smaller glories, the boy running off to the army, the farm girl abandoning family for the Streets of Baltimore. Is Ray's Apu Trilogy a tragedy?
Posted by: bob mcmanus | August 04, 2015 at 09:47 PM
There are so many talented people. Who knew?
I'm often surprised by that, too. It's one thing when someone you've never heard of gives incredible performances, and that's surprising enough sometimes. It's even moreso when the actor is someone picked for a very particular purpose, like playing a younger or older version of an already-established character, looking very much the part, while still delivering not only a very convincing version of the character, but otherwise performing outstandingly while doing it.
If they can find someone under those specific constraints who can act that well, how many great actors are there out there in the first place?
Posted by: hairshirthedonist | August 04, 2015 at 10:05 PM
Feel free to remove a "there" in that last.
Posted by: hairshirthedonist | August 04, 2015 at 10:11 PM
Breaking Bad is also incredibly funny in a Cohen Brothers way. It's brilliantly edited as well.
Posted by: novakant | August 05, 2015 at 03:09 PM