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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 3:53 pm 
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I still miss Breaking Bad on Sunday nights. Mad Men will begin soon, but MM isn't as great as BB.

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 3:56 pm 
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Dr. Kenneth Noisewater wrote:
Seasons 2 of both BB and The Wire were not their best efforts and about equal.

Season 5 of The Wire was not good.

Season 1 of BB ended abruptly because of the writers strike.

Overall, BB was more consistent. The Wire had a richer cast of characters.

I'd give the nod to BB just based on consistency.

Couldn't disagree more with your Wire thoughts. Seasons 2 and 5 were among the 10 best TV seasons in history.

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 3:57 pm 
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FavreFan wrote:
Dr. Kenneth Noisewater wrote:
Seasons 2 of both BB and The Wire were not their best efforts and about equal.

Season 5 of The Wire was not good.

Season 1 of BB ended abruptly because of the writers strike.

Overall, BB was more consistent. The Wire had a richer cast of characters.

I'd give the nod to BB just based on consistency.

Couldn't disagree more with your Wire thoughts. Seasons 2 and 5 were among the 10 best TV seasons in history.


What? 2 was OK.

5, with the whole newspaper plot and the evidence planting? That was awful.

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 3:58 pm 
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Dr. Kenneth Noisewater wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
Dr. Kenneth Noisewater wrote:
Seasons 2 of both BB and The Wire were not their best efforts and about equal.

Season 5 of The Wire was not good.

Season 1 of BB ended abruptly because of the writers strike.

Overall, BB was more consistent. The Wire had a richer cast of characters.

I'd give the nod to BB just based on consistency.

Couldn't disagree more with your Wire thoughts. Seasons 2 and 5 were among the 10 best TV seasons in history.


What? 2 was OK.

5, with the whole newspaper plot and the evidence planting? That was awful.

The newspaper stuff was great, and the evidence planting thing wasn't the best but the season concluded perfectly given the message the show was sending.

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 4:00 pm 
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Breaking Bad is as good or better for mindless entertainment.

The Wire actually makes you think.

Guess at that point it's a personal preference thing. I can see why shakes chose BB.

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 4:01 pm 
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Yeah, OK, I didn't have a problem with an examination of the newspaper industry. That was not as strong as their look at the drug culture but it was still good.

But that crap with McNulty was beyond belief...belonged in a different show.

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 4:03 pm 
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Dr. Kenneth Noisewater wrote:
Yeah, OK, I didn't have a problem with an examination of the newspaper industry. That was not as strong as their look at the drug culture but it was still good.

But that crap with McNulty was beyond belief...belonged in a different show.

Yeah, I've heard people say that. I disagree. People acted like they had a martian come down to Earth and take over McNulty's body. It wasn't THAT unbelievable. Hell, I bet shit like that has definitely happened in major police departments in the past 20 years.

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 4:07 pm 
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The newspaper industry machinations > Walt Jr.'s breakfast nonsense

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 4:08 pm 
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That a rogue policeman is setting up evidence for a serial killer for a political agenda?

I don't think that's happening.

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 4:12 pm 
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Dr. Kenneth Noisewater wrote:
That a rogue policeman is setting up evidence for a serial killer for a political agenda?

I don't think that's happening.

That a rogue policeman is planting evidence to get overtime for the squad to catch top level dangerous gang members? Yes, I do not think that is far fetched. Maybe I'm crazy.

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 4:49 pm 
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FavreFan wrote:
shakes wrote:
Wire sucked, couldn't get through the first season before getting bored.

Even the biggest proponents of the Wire say that the last couple seasons sucked.

That alone gets you nixed from any sort of best tv show discussion.

BB is in a whole different class than the Wire.

Blatantly false.



LOL, go read the first 4 or 5 links that RPB listed, every single one of them calls season 5 shit.

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 4:51 pm 
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FavreFan wrote:
Breaking Bad is as good or better for mindless entertainment.

The Wire actually makes you think.

Guess at that point it's a personal preference thing. I can see why shakes chose BB.



You think I'm an idiot and I think you're an idiot. Glad we at least settled that.

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 4:52 pm 
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shakes wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
Breaking Bad is as good or better for mindless entertainment.

The Wire actually makes you think.

Guess at that point it's a personal preference thing. I can see why shakes chose BB.



You think I'm an idiot and I think you're an idiot. Glad we at least settled that.

:lol: We'll always have Rectify

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 4:57 pm 
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I agree with both of you


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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 5:13 pm 
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FavreFan wrote:
shakes wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
Breaking Bad is as good or better for mindless entertainment.

The Wire actually makes you think.

Guess at that point it's a personal preference thing. I can see why shakes chose BB.



You think I'm an idiot and I think you're an idiot. Glad we at least settled that.

:lol: We'll always have Rectify



what about Happy Valley? You seen that yet? I just found it on Netflix, is a BBC drama. The first season is only 6 episodes. I watched the first one yesterday and its really good.

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 5:13 pm 
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shakes wrote:
LOL I just read 4 of those articles you linked and pretty much everyone of them said season 5 of the Wire sucked and half of them said season 2 sucked as well.

A breakingbad.wikia forum favors BB. I'm shocked.

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 5:47 pm 
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shakes wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
shakes wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
Breaking Bad is as good or better for mindless entertainment.

The Wire actually makes you think.

Guess at that point it's a personal preference thing. I can see why shakes chose BB.



You think I'm an idiot and I think you're an idiot. Glad we at least settled that.

:lol: We'll always have Rectify



what about Happy Valley? You seen that yet? I just found it on Netflix, is a BBC drama. The first season is only 6 episodes. I watched the first one yesterday and its really good.

Haven't seen it yet, but I have been meaning to. I've heard good things.

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 11:05 am 
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Motivated by the Breaking Bad-Wire controversy, I am concurrently re-watching both series from beginning to end. So far, The Wire has a big edge over Breaking Bad, but I am only on the first season of The Wire, and I recall the season 2 story being pretty disappointing.

I disagree with the notion that Breaking Bad is "mindless entertainment." I take Walter White to be a stand-in for White America amid an era of material and social decline, and thus I think Breaking Bad engages key aspects of American ideology and cultural anxiety in a fascinating way. Breaking Bad is centrally concerned with the demise of the American middle class and its apparently imminent proletarianization, a dynamic which is presented through Walt's descent into "blackness" via his immersion in the drug trade. Rather than depicting this racially-coded economic decline in purely negative terms, however, the show uses its narrative of disintegration to demonstrate the genius of Walter White (and thus the genius of White Americans more broadly). Thus, even if BB signals the end of American exceptionalism as the foundation of an internally coherent and credible ideological system, it still clings to the notion that White Americans are truly exceptional. In so doing, it posits an individualistic solution--Walt's ambition-fueled rise to power--to a structural problem (the widespread lack of economic opportunity in a deindustrialized and corrupt society). Consequently, Breaking Bad embodies the notion of ideological ambivalence.

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 11:22 am 
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Tall Midget wrote:
Motivated by the Breaking Bad-Wire controversy, I am concurrently re-watching both series from beginning to end. So far, The Wire has a big edge over Breaking Bad, but I am only on the first season of The Wire, and I recall the season 2 story being pretty disappointing.

I disagree with the notion that Breaking Bad is "mindless entertainment." I take Walter White to be a stand-in for White America amid an era of material and social decline, and thus I think Breaking Bad engages key aspects of American ideology and cultural anxiety in a fascinating way. Breaking Bad is centrally concerned with the demise of the American middle class and its apparently imminent proletarianization, a dynamic which is presented through Walt's descent into "blackness" via his immersion in the drug trade. Rather than depicting this racially-coded economic decline in purely negative terms, however, the show uses its narrative of disintegration to demonstrate the genius of Walter White (and thus the genius of White Americans more broadly). Thus, even if BB signals the end of American exceptionalism as the foundation of an internally coherent and credible ideological system, it still clings to the notion that White Americans are truly exceptional. In so doing, it posits an individualistic solution--Walt's ambition-fueled rise to power--to a structural problem (the widespread lack of economic opportunity in a deindustrialized and corrupt society). Consequently, Breaking Bad embodies the notion of ideological ambivalence.


Come on, you don't get much more mindless than that.

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 11:48 am 
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Tall Midget wrote:
I disagree with the notion that Breaking Bad is "mindless entertainment." I take Walter White to be a stand-in for White America amid an era of material and social decline, and thus I think Breaking Bad engages key aspects of American ideology and cultural anxiety in a fascinating way. Breaking Bad is centrally concerned with the demise of the American middle class and its apparently imminent proletarianization, a dynamic which is presented through Walt's descent into "blackness" via his immersion in the drug trade. Rather than depicting this racially-coded economic decline in purely negative terms, however, the show uses its narrative of disintegration to demonstrate the genius of Walter White (and thus the genius of White Americans more broadly). Thus, even if BB signals the end of American exceptionalism as the foundation of an internally coherent and credible ideological system, it still clings to the notion that White Americans are truly exceptional. In so doing, it posits an individualistic solution--Walt's ambition-fueled rise to power--to a structural problem (the widespread lack of economic opportunity in a deindustrialized and corrupt society). Consequently, Breaking Bad embodies the notion of ideological ambivalence.


Sounds like the trailer for Johnny Dangerously to me...


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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 12:06 pm 
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shakes wrote:
rogers park bryan wrote:
shakes wrote:
Wire sucked, couldn't get through the first season before getting bored.

Even the biggest proponents of the Wire say that the last couple seasons sucked.

That alone gets you nixed from any sort of best tv show discussion.

BB is in a whole different class than the Wire.

With time people are starting to realize that while Breaking Bad the show was great, The character of Walter White and Cranston's performnace alone was better.


And no, nobody says season 4 of The Wire sucked

You are unqualified to speak on The Wire


LOL I just read 4 of those articles you linked and pretty much everyone of them said season 5 of the Wire sucked and half of them said season 2 sucked as well.

Now go find anyone who would say the same about BB.

Incorrect


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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 12:08 pm 
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shakes wrote:
rogers park bryan wrote:

You are unqualified to speak on The Wire


so are you evidently.

No, Im right.

And Ive seen both shows, so I can compare them.

Its not really contraversial to say your thoughts should be dismissed when you didnt even watch the show


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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 12:08 pm 
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Dr. Kenneth Noisewater wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
Dr. Kenneth Noisewater wrote:
Seasons 2 of both BB and The Wire were not their best efforts and about equal.

Season 5 of The Wire was not good.

Season 1 of BB ended abruptly because of the writers strike.

Overall, BB was more consistent. The Wire had a richer cast of characters.

I'd give the nod to BB just based on consistency.

Couldn't disagree more with your Wire thoughts. Seasons 2 and 5 were among the 10 best TV seasons in history.


What? 2 was OK.

5, with the whole newspaper plot and the evidence planting? That was awful.

2 was Awesome

5 was good and wrapped up the entire show nicely


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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 12:10 pm 
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shakes wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
shakes wrote:
Wire sucked, couldn't get through the first season before getting bored.

Even the biggest proponents of the Wire say that the last couple seasons sucked.

That alone gets you nixed from any sort of best tv show discussion.

BB is in a whole different class than the Wire.

Blatantly false.



LOL, go read the first 4 or 5 links that RPB listed, every single one of them calls season 5 shit.

Every link was a debate about whether it was the greatest tv show of all time


I posted it when Greg acted like it was just MY theory.

Clearly a ton of people think The Wire is the best ever


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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 12:13 pm 
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Is 'The Wire' really the greatest TV show of all time?
Newsweek, Time and Entertainment Weekly agree that HBO's "The Wire" is the best series ever—do you?
July 12, 2013
By: Leah Pickett


A stark, low-budget drama that hardly anyone watched during its five-year run has been named the greatest TV show of all time by Entertainment Weekly. Other publications such as Time, Vulture, Slate, Complex and Newsweek also have cited The Wire as the best show in American television history, both before and after the HBO series went off the air in 2008.

Responses to EW's most recent announcement have been mostly positive, which got me thinking—how did a series like The Wire become the default answer to queries about "the best show ever" and why does it still resonate so strongly with televison audiences today?

Of course, the reasons that The Wire deserves to be credited as one of the best shows ever (if not the best) could wrap around multiple Baltimore city blocks. Created by former police reporter and newspaperman David Simon, the 60-episode series crackled with surprising realism and seared with a social urgency that most audiences had never been exposed to on scripted television before.

Each of the show's five seasons focused on a different facet of Baltimore city life—the drug trade, the seaport system, city government and bureacracy, the school system and news print media—with mostly no-name character actors playing cops, drug lords and corrupt politicians out for blood. The sociopolitical issues were so raw, and the stories so real, that The Wire often felt like a documentary; a mirror reflecting back onto America what we needed to see.

Perhaps for the same reason that the Harper High School episodes of This American Life resonated so strongly with listeners, The Wire was so culturally important at the time (and, with the exception of a misguided final season, flawlessly executed) that it changed the landscape of its medium—in this case, television—forever.

Still, I maintain that plenty of other shows have been just as influential in taking TV to new heights, while also leaving lasting impressions upon their audiences and society as a whole.


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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 12:17 pm 
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shakes wrote:

Now go find anyone who would say the same about BB.



What Did The Critics Say About ‘Breaking Bad’ Before It Premiered Five Years Ago?
BY DUSTIN ROWLES / 08.15.13 #BREAKING BAD #BREAKING BAD FINALE COUNTDOWN
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When you have what many consider to be the greatest television series of all time going into its final seven episodes, it’s amusing to look back and see what the critics were saying about the series before Breaking Bad gained its place in American television history. I mean, nobody knew obviously what Breaking Bad would become, and anyone that watches it (except for THIS guy) understands that it’s only gotten better over its five season. It’s understandable if critics, at the time, were somewhat hesitant about Breaking Bad: Recall, that it was only the second series on AMC (after Mad Men) and that it came out during the height of Weeds, which relies on a vaguely similar premise.

I know I’ve been watching it since it debuted (in the month of January, no less, which seems weird for a show so associated with the summer now), but I couldn’t tell you what I thought of it after the premiere. Thanks to the Internet, however, we can at least look back at some of the early reviews (including Alan Sepinwall’s) to see what critics thought of the show at the time. NONE of them knew what was to come.


A modest review from the New York Times, noting that it’s “a hard slog” and not as good as Mad Men. It also draws comparisons to Weeds:

It’s the pacing that makes “Breaking Bad” more of a hard slog than a cautionary joy ride. It has good acting, particularly by Bryan Cranston (“Malcolm in the Middle”), who blends Walt’s sad-sack passivity with glints of wry self-awareness. But the misadventures of Walt and his slacker sidekick, Jesse (Aaron Paul), are a picaresque comedy filmed at the speed of a tragic opera — jokes, visual and verbal, are slowed down from 78 r.p.m. to 33 1/3 by an underlying earnestness, as if it were a foreign art film set in the American Southwest.

“Breaking Bad,” created by Vince Gilligan, a writer and executive producer of “The X-Files,” couldn’t be more different from “Mad Men,” but it also lacks that series’s originality and sparkle. This crime story is in many ways a bleaker male version of “Weeds,” Showtime’s comedy about a widowed soccer mom who sells pot to keep up with the Joneses.

The rest of Tom Shales review over on the Washington Post is better than this blurb would suggest, but for historical purposes, these two paragraphs are the most interesting:

[A] “cult hit” still seems the most that the creators of “Breaking Bad” can hope for. A mondo-bizarro, dark-as-midnight, bitterly bleak tragicomedy, the series premieres tomorrow night at 10 on AMC and all but busts a gut straining to be edgy and grim.

Obviously a show that finds humor in the production and distribution of a deadly, addictive drug, a show whose hero learns in the first episode that he has terminal lung cancer, a show in which vigorous attempts to destroy a corpse in a bathtub full of acid end with the remains of the body, and the tub, crashing through the ceiling to the floor below — well, there you have a show that is definitely “not for everybody.”

I think it’s quant in 2013 to think that Breaking Bad wouldn’t exactly fit on AMC — a channel, at the time, known for classic movies — when just five years later, the channel is virtually defined by Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Walking Dead. This SFGate review also offers an amusing reminder that FX passed on the series.

Well, FX gave up on it. The network, which appears to have very few qualms about mangling the so-called envelope, loved the pilot of “Breaking Bad,” created by Vince Gilligan, a writer-director who was instrumental in making “The X-Files” a phenomenon. Still, FX apparently looked at Bryan Cranston (a long way from “Malcolm in the Middle”) cooking crystal meth in the New Mexico desert and said, “Uh, who’s going to advertise on this?” …

… It’s hard to watch. And you have to wonder whether people seeking out classic films on AMC who stumble on it are going to stay. It’s one thing to get intoxicated on the lush beauty of “Mad Men” and quite another to watch a desperate, dying man cook drugs in his underwear while wearing a gas mask.

Then again, let’s not worry about that. Once again AMC has put its money where its artistic ambition is, and “Breaking Bad” promises seven compelling and unique hours of drama – and who knows, it might get renewed – in a strike-damaged TV season.

I absolutely love that Alan Sepinwall, still writing for the New Jersey Star-Ledger at the time, wasn’t completely sold on the series yet, especially considering how much support he shows for it now.

“Breaking Bad” isn’t an out-of-the-box triumph like AMC’s previous drama series, “Mad Men.” “Mad Men” knew what it was from its opening shot, where the new show is still testing new compounds. Cranston’s performance alone is enough to keep me watching for a while, but I’d like to see something resembling a completed formula, and soon.

The Chicago Tribune compares it to a TNT show. Yikes.

My recommendation — and I do think the show is worth checking out — is not as hearty as I’d like it to be. “Breaking Bad” reminds me of TNT’s “Saving Grace,” another cable series that started strong then began to fizzle soon after its promising premiere. “Breaking Bad” likewise starts out strong then loses steam, especially in its unevenly paced third episode.

The Boston Herald, on the wrong side of history, was not a fan:

The opening shot confirms the worst. A pair of pants drop from the desert sky. A Winnebago careens crazily. A frantic Cranston yelps at the wheel, clad only in his underwear and a gas mask. Welcome to “Malcolm in the Meth Lab.” “Breaking Bad” is an uneven show about a man deep in crisis who chucks his moral compass and conversely finds his backbone once he is given a death sentence.

The other Boston paper, The Globe, wasn’t such a huge supporter, either:

You can feel creator Vince Gilligan (of “The X-Files”) straining to build an emblematic American fable and forgetting to fill in his story with particularities and believable motivations.

The most amusing of the bunch, however, comes from The AV Club, which loved the show:

After the towering achievement of Mad Men, third-rate movie channel AMC is suddenly a hot spot for serialized dramas. I hope that the basic cable equivalent of a sh*tload of viewers tuned in to the premiere of Breaking Bad on that basis alone. What they saw was nothing like the elegant social satire of Mad Men, but it certainly has promise, thanks to the mesmerizing presence of Bryan Cranston in the lead role and to the raw, keenly observed screenplay by writer/director Vince Gilligan. And really, if the sight of a doughy, middle-aged man clad only in worsted-weight socks, loafers, tighty-whiteys and a rubber apron doesn’t do it for you, I don’t know why you’re reading the TV Club …

but hated the title:

… Breaking Bad is a horrible, horrible name for a TV show. It’s not made any better by being included (and explained) in an actual line of dialogue from the show.


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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 12:23 pm 
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Season 5 of The Wire was kind of a letdown. The rest of it was awesome though.

I actually found most of the first two seasons of Breaking Bad to be average. I actually stopped watching due to lack of interest during season 2. I only restarted because pretty much everyone wanted to punch me in the face for daring to say that I didn't think it was anything special so far. It got a lot better obviously.

I have to watch it again, preferably in HD when they re-release it, but I'm going to give The Wire the edge.

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 12:30 pm 
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The Wire
Breaking Bad
The Sopranos
My Two Dads


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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 12:49 pm 
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Good work there, RPB.  I know of more than one person who gave up on The Wire because of the all the accolades and were expecting immediate payoffs in the first few episodes.  The buildup with Lester Freamon was done perfectly - who the fuck is this guy just sitting there building miniature furniture?  :lol:

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 Post subject: Re: Breaking Bad
PostPosted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 2:04 pm 
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