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DVR Cleaning: Breaking Bad: Pilot

By fred | January 27, 2008

(S01E01) Yep, so last week to the day (pretty much) premiered on AMC this new show called Breaking Bad, and I wanted to give it a try because it looks like it could be a good one. I know AMC it trying to get up there and have shows that can compete without shame against those of Showtime or FX, and while I personally didn’t enjoy Mad Men, which had been praised by so many, I wouldn’t call that show awful either, it wasn’t Heroes or Private Practice.

So, back on Breaking Bad. I’m sure most of you have seen it by now, and if you haven’t I have only one thing to say to you : go watch it now !! Really, you need to watch it quick because tonight comes the second episode, and I am pretty happy actually that I don’t have to wait one week before I get to see more of it, because I really want to find out what will happen next !

Oh yeah, this show was good. No, it’s not revolutionary or anything new, and I’m sure plenty will make some kind of comparison with Weeds, if only because there’s the whole drug issue about the main plot of the show. But don’t be fooled, this show is no Weeds.

And I say that after having watched a mostly disappointing season of the Showtime series, which started pretty good actually but ended up being mostly lame and annoying. The problem with Weeds is that Nancy is dumb, like really, she’s freaking stupid. She’s clueless about the whole drug business and what to do and how to behave, but she got lucky overall, and so she keeps things up. She never learn, and be the end of the last season, I was more annoyed than anything else by her little smile because once again she got lucky and escaped DEA investigation, got out of the hands of a crazy dealer, and so much more.

But Breaking Bad looks like it will be much better than that. In its first episode only, Breaking Bad showed a lot more maturity and realism, it was much daring and provocative than Weeds ever was, and the best part is that it does not do it just because it can, or for the sake of it, it’s only a natural evolution for the character of the show.

Starting with Bryan Cranston, absolutely brilliant once again (loved him on Malcolm In The Middle), who plays Walter White, a struggling high school chemistry teacher with a handicapped child and a pregnant wife. And a terminal lung cancer. As we’re nicely shown throughout the episode, without ever being too obvious, his life isn’t the best for now, and his situation isn’t what you could dream of. Now he’s dying, and he can’t take it anymore.

He can’t take the humiliation his son had to go through every day by morons because he’s handicapped, he can’t take to have two jobs and still panic over a little bill of only a few bucks, he can’t take the abuse from his boss and the despicable attitudes from his students… He can’t, and he won’t. Now that he knows he’s dying, he has to ensure that his family can survive after he’s gone, and because he’s a chemistry teacher, and thanks to his “inside” through his DEA connection (his step-brother is a field agent), he finds out that one of his old student is now running a meth lab. Or used to.

He knows there’s some easy money to be made out of this, and so he goes up and gets a partnership going on. But unlike Weeds, this show feels a lot more realistic, you can feel White’s pain as well as his transformation. When he “attacked” the football captain who was making fun of his son, threaten him and ask for a fight, much to his family’s surprise, and maybe his own, he was starting to feel free, he was starting to feel alive as he broke out of his chains.

At first he’s clueless about everything, but how to cook meth. But by the end of the episode, when he realized that he could get away with it (for now), that things were still rolling, after he killed the two bad guys who dared to go after him, things started to really change. Things are changing, now. He is morphing into someone else, someone who will not let people walk over him they way they may have gotten used to, someone who won’t fear to stand up for himself or his family, and break the rules if he has to, oh men I can’t wait to see how things are going to go down for White and his crews.

It probably won’t be easy, and it might get bad. One thing for sure, is that I want to be there for the ride, because it looks like it’s going to be one hell of a ride !

The show was really fun, it never tried anything but to show real-life character going through their days and trying to survive, one way or another, and it wasn’t without taste or humor. No, AMC is not Showtime and they can’t say “fuck” here, unlike Weeds where they have not be shy about it, still whenever they say it on Breaking Bad, or not say it as it gets nicely silenced out, it feels incredibly more real. When White told his boss to go fuck himself, I may not have heard the actual F-word, yet it resounded into our ears with a much stronger and more accurate than anytime I heard it on Weeds.

White looks like a regular guy who’s about to make a radical turn in his life, for better or for worse, and you really do not want to miss out on that. No, this show isn’t amazing or something you’ve never seen before, but I feel really enthusiastic about it right now, as you can probably tell, it is real good and looks like nothing else. I have no idea where things are going to go now, but I can’t wait to find out. Lucky me, there’s a new episode tonight at 10.00 on AMC !

Posted in Reviews
Shows: Breaking Bad