After a visit to Baltimore I had a hankering to revisit the characters from The Wire, I do miss them so. And my regard for the show may have turned me into an snob when it comes to the current crop of popular cable tv series — Mad Men and Breaking Bad. A colleague believes I have set the bar too high when watching Breaking Bad, for instance. By the same logic, I should like Miller High Life compared to Smutty Nose IPA (but when Miller Lite drafts are $1 is on tap, why not order it like it’s sparkling water. Wait, it is.)
A recent piece on Breaking Bad just doesn’t convince me, anyway:
Early on, Walt refuses a sincere offer from a former colleague to help him pay for his treatment. Here we catch a glimpse of a man whose low station in life belies an enormous amount of pride. Soon, in an inversion of the Book of Job, Walt leverages his personal suffering to justify entering “the business.” As the factors that ostensibly led him to “break bad” disappear, each justification gives way to the next until he is completely convinced of the righteousness of his cause simply because it is his. How else could a man utter lines such as, “I’m not in the drug business, I’m in the empire business,” with a straight face?
All this thematic potency wouldn’t matter much if the writing weren’t so taut, the performances so spellbinding, the suspense so addictive. But without fail they are. Which is why we have every reason to trust that Gilligan and company will bring their parable of pride to a satisfying conclusion.
I know some don’t think that David Simon developed characters on The Wire sufficiently. But Walt is not developed — full stop. He seems to be a weather-vane the writers can turn, depending on the direction the plot needs to go. With Jimmy and Bunk and Omar you had a decent sense of who they were and the nature of their demons. With Walt, he’s an adoring father one minute, a milk toast another, and Stringer Bell the next. His wife is almost as bad, from dipsy mom, to trampy drug boss spouse, to pouting and intimidated soccer mom. Jesse is a far more believable character, as is Mike, the muscle. And even if the attorney, Saul Goodman, is a tad clownish, I’d much rather see a series about his life than Walt’s.
A show that helps to reveal the Breaking Bad’s limits is Foyle’s War, starring Michael Kitchen (who now replaces Gabriel Byrne in my list of male crushes). We are only about six episodes into the series, but what has made it so charming is what also sold us on The Wire — you have appealing characters depicted on a richly textured canvas. In the case of The Wire it was Baltimore and the woes of a somewhat major American city. In Foyle’s War the context is England during World War II. In this it resembles Downton Abbey (though Foyle’s War came first), but Foyle’s War is not soap operaish. And Michael Kitchen’s facial gestures accomplish what Vince Gillian’s writers only wish they could achieve.
I don’t regret watching Breaking Bad though I can’t believe it took until the end of season three with the introduction of Saul Goodman for the writers to figure out that the characters’ conflicting motivations make for real drama. Have they never seen a Coen Brothers movie!?! But I do seriously regret the comparisons of Breaking Bad to The Wire. Anyone who spent any time in Avon Barksdale’s Baltimore knew that Walt was going to need a lot more human capital and connections than little old Jesse. Breaking Bad never broke plausible.
Old Life 