Hot take: Most of Breaking Bad was actually boring filler

[Kobold Stew]

I'm a fan of bottle episodes. I maintain that arguably the greatest single hour of television was an episode of Homicide that's largely Andre Braugher going in and out of an interrogation room, wearing down a suspect the detectives are sure is guilty of murder, but just won't crack and they don't have the evidence to convict without him.

Gives me chills every time I think about this episode.

 

[AnotherGuy]

There are dozens of Oscar winning movies that manage to tell that kind of story in two hours.

For what it is worth I did enjoy your opening post.
It is a pleasant left turn from the predictable whether I agree with you or disagree.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

There are dozens of Oscar winning movies that manage to tell that kind of story in two hours.

Sure, I get that you like novels, but c'mon ... there are tons of short stories that tell the story in a shorter format! Why bother with Dostoyevsky or Nabokov when you can just read Lady with Lapdog, amirite?

I get that you didn't appreciate everything in it ... but ... wow. Different formats play to different strengths. You absolutely could not have told this story in two hours. If you think you could have, maybe you got something very different from the show than other people did.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

maybe you got something very different from the show than other people did.

That was sort of the point of my original post.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

That was sort of the point of my original post.

Yeah .... there's a difference in tone between the original post and the followup.

Here-

"I'm not a big fan of chocolate ice cream. Don't get why y'all keep ordering it."

"Look, I tried the chocolate ice cream, and it kinda sucks. There are tons of candy bars that do a better job giving you chocolate than ice cream ever will."

One is an expression of preference. The other is ... kind of shows that you are denigrating something, and says more about the person than about the subject. YMMV.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Gives me chills every time I think about this episode.

It also nicely sets up Brooklyn Nine-Nine, in that one of the big jokes, all the way to the end, is that we conflate Andre Braugher, the actor, with Frank Pembleton, his character from Homicide, and seeing him be funny never stops breaking our brains a little bit.

(Captain Holt, of course, got to be a very fully realized character with a lot of other things going on. But the fact that it's Andre Braugher doing them was always inherently funny.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Yeah .... there's a difference in tone between the original post and the followup.

Here-

"I'm not a big fan of chocolate ice cream. Don't get why y'all keep ordering it."

"Look, I tried the chocolate ice cream, and it kinda sucks. There are tons of candy bars that do a better job giving you chocolate than ice cream ever will."

One is an expression of preference. The other is ... kind of shows that you are denigrating something, and says more about the person than about the subject. YMMV.

I posted a provocative subject heading to provoke debate. (I think of "hot take" as signalling "here is my contrary opinion that is likely at least partially wrong.")

I don't think I've ever suggested, anywhere in my (yikes) 19-year history on this site that people are bad people for liking something different than I like (for one thing, you people would eat up all the pralines and cream ice cream, and that would suck). No one is bad for liking Breaking Bad more than me, any more than I'm bad for thinking that Lost was great until the moment the producers caved in to the audience that wanted things explained, which it had never been set up to support.

But the notion that one can't tell a story of a man's fall from grace and letting his theoretical morals get ground away by perceived necessity until he's ultimately an evil person -- and likely was, all along -- cannot be told well in a movie is simply wrong and a silly assertion to make. There's ample evidence to the contrary, and one liking Breaking Bad doesn't mean that all those movies are somehow bad as a result.

 

[Bedrockgames]

On the movie versus show debate. The beauty of a great movie is the editing down to time constraints and preserving what is needed to tell the story. I think my favorite visual storytelling medium is the film, and in most cases, I have greater admiration for 130 minute movies simply because that is such a tight format to work inside (but plenty of 2 hour, 2.5, 3 hour movies I've liked too). With long form in a show, there is more room for exploring things that might have been on the chopping ground floor in a movie (a bit of world building that is conveyed efficiently in one line of dialogue in a film, might get deeper exploration). If I had to pick between the two I would choose the movie format. I am just more of a film buff than a show buff. But I don't think one is bad and the other good. They are just operating under different constraints

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

But the notion that one can't tell a story of a man's fall from grace and letting his theoretical morals get ground away by perceived necessity until he's ultimately an evil person -- and likely was, all along -- cannot be told well in a movie is simply wrong and a silly assertion to make. There's ample evidence to the contrary, and one liking Breaking Bad doesn't mean that all those movies are somehow bad as a result.

You can tell a story.

You can't tell this story.

That's what you're missing. Not all stories are the same. Here, watch this-
Is the Sopranos not a good tv show just because Analyze This is a movie about a mob boss seeing a psychiatrist?
Is Buffy a bad tv show just because, um, Buffy is a movie?

But the ways in which this character study (and yes, it is a character study) is more than just the base of what you have stated is obvious. Where in this two hour movie do we see Gus Fring? Where does the movie have room for the pathos of Jesse and his girlfriend? Or Jesse's complexity? What about Skyler's boss (and Saul's henchmen)? Or even Tuco and his violence?

Yes, a movie can capture your parable perfectly. The beauty of this television series is that we saw how these people operated ... it became real. It was both hypertextualized (Gus Fring and the bomb) as well as sadly banal (Walt and Mike in their final scene).

It's not better, nor worse ... but it's very different. Not understanding that there is a difference and assuming that this story could just be a movie does an injustice to both movies and to serials.

 

[Kobold Stew]

It also nicely sets up Brooklyn Nine-Nine, in that one of the big jokes, all the way to the end, is that we conflate Andre Braugher, the actor, with Frank Pembleton, his character from Homicide, and seeing him be funny never stops breaking our brains a little bit.

(Captain Holt, of course, got to be a very fully character with a lot of other things going on. But the fact that it's Andre Braugher doing them was always inherently funny.)

Andre Braugher is such an underappreciated actor.