Breaking Bad

[MarkGrace]

What's funny is that as a baseline comparison, BB and Weeds are basically the exact same premise, but to me couldn't be more different. And, really, Weeds is kind of just dumb.

[COUGALICIOUS]

I agree w/ what MG said about the reality level of the show.

Twin-badasses = cartoonish. (Synchronized movements, silent, steely stare-downs? BB is capable of so much better.)

I'm ready to get the ladies (Skylar and Hank's wife) more involved again because their husbands are more interesting when they are trying to deal with their crime/crimefighting AND their wives, rather than just one or the other. (I'm thinking Skylar, particularly, isn't getting a lot of playing time.)

Just like with Mad Men, I am always interested to see how BB is going to find new riffs.

I can see Hank breaking bad before Skylar does, but maybe that is just me.

Robin F. wants Walter to get more criminal. But:

Spoiler for Walter's recent crime::

What Walter did to his lab assistant was so unconscionable (though necessary) that it temporarily satisfies my desire to seem behave like a criminal.

Love BB (though not as much as MM).

[RobinFinderson]

I wonder what Walter is going to do when he finds out that...

Spoiler for Prediction:

... in firing his lab assistant, the Chicken Man had to have him killed. The lab assistant would have obviously known way too much. Maybe by this point Walter is beginning to accept all of the collateral damage that he is causing, but I think when he finds out about the lab assistant it will be a bit different, because he could see a lot of himself in that guy.

[MarkGrace]

I wonder what Walter is going to do when he finds out that...

Spoiler for Prediction:

... in firing his lab assistant, the Chicken Man had to have him killed. The lab assistant would have obviously known way too much. Maybe by this point Walter is beginning to accept all of the collateral damage that he is causing, but I think when he finds out about the lab assistant it will be a bit different, because he could see a lot of himself in that guy.

Spoiler for lab guy:

Do you think that's the last of the lab guy? I get the hunch that there's more in store for him.

[RobinFinderson]

Spoiler for lab guy:

Do you think that's the last of the lab guy? I get the hunch that there's more in store for him.

Spoiler for Lab Guy:

I figure they could go either way with Lab Guy. On the one hand, they had him articulate a philosophical position (libertarian), he is played by a decent character actor, and we got to know him (none of those holds for the two brothers). On the other hand, per my original guess, he knows too much about Chicken Man's operation, and all of that 'getting to know you,' could have just been an emotional setup for his murder. I guess the latter.

[MarkGrace]

I enjoyed this little article, because whenever I recommend BB to anyone, I'll always tell them about the level of artistry in the show. I swear this show has more shots that look like they could be hung on a wall than any other show I've ever seen. I was trying to get a couple in our ward to watch the show just this Sunday and mentioned to them that whoever the cinematographer and artistic directors are on the show they need a raise.

Do you notice cinematography on TV? Perhaps if you’re a cinematographer. And yet you can’t not talk about it when you watch Breaking Bad—and particularly in its third season. The creative team behind AMC’s grim (a)morality tale squeezes as much emotional juice from the production’s often breathtaking camerawork and location as they do from their justifiably lauded actors and writers. “The big skies and stark beauty of New Mexico have become characters all their own,” says Bad creator Vince Gilligan.

The story follows chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston), who, after a financially ruinous cancer diagnosis, “breaks bad” to save his family, cooking up and selling pure crystal meth. It’s the American dream squashed to a cow patty, and the shots are appropriately wide and flat. “One of the first things we did before doing the pilot was look at what everyone else was doing,” says Gilligan. “We shoot the show a little wider than most.” And in the service of the show’s oppressive sense of free-floating anxiety is the production’s location, a choice originally driven by a tax break. Gilligan has made copious use of New Mexico’s desert environs to put a Sergio Leone spin on Walt’s Job-like struggle. “I love these images that you find in old Westerns of a solitary man against the sky, against this wide empty backdrop,” he says. “It’s wonderful to pull our cameras back and have our actors be tiny little dark figures against this endless landscape.” Michael Slovis, the show’s director of photography, says, “We are not only encouraged, we are mandated to give imagery evocative of what the characters are going through at that moment.” The result is a powerful “sense of removal.”

Slovis has fallen in love with the desert palette. “You get drawn into the browns and the golds,” he says—and especially the yellows. A color often associated with optimism and happiness, on Bad it’s deployed with relentless cheek, from the hazmat suits donned by Walt during the “cooking” process, to the pastel buttoned-down shirt worn by Giancarlo Esposito’s drug kingpin, Gus, to, most ubiquitous, the deadly sun. “I’ll often counterpoint what’s going on narratively,” says Slovis. “It’s ironically pretty.”

http://nymag.com/arts/tv/goodtvguide/66080/

[RobinFinderson]

I enjoyed this little article, because whenever I recommend BB to anyone, I'll always tell them about the level of artistry in the show. I swear this show has more shots that look like they could be hung on a wall than any other show I've ever seen. I was trying to get a couple in our ward to watch the show just this Sunday and mentioned to them that whoever the cinematographer and artistic directors are on the show they need a raise.


http://nymag.com/arts/tv/goodtvguide/66080/

This is totally true. I love the cinematography in BB, and have noticed a similar lusciousness in the cinematography in Mad Men (MM? maybe they are going to complete the alphabet with double letter titles.)

Sometimes a shot seems to be set up more for the cinematic effect than for how it contributes to the story.

[MarkGrace]

What do you think of Friday Night Lights? That article mentions BB's great shots of the desert, and I think for me the only show that rivals it in terms of panoramic landscapes is FNL. Those guys get some just drop-dead stunning shots of Texas.

EDIT: desert, not dessert!

[RobinFinderson]

What do you think of Friday Night Lights? That article mentions BB's great shots of the dessert, and I think for me the only show that rivals it in terms of panoramic landscapes is FNL. Those guys get some just drop-dead stunning shots of Texas.

Sure, I see the same eye for color and photographic excellence in FNL as well. Those three shows all stand out in this way: BB, FNL and MM. The look is 'cinematic.' Reminds me of David Lean, or how the city was shot in Lost in Translation, or any number of stills from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

[RobinFinderson]

Uggh... last night's episode, in which Walter and Jesse kill a fly, was a total freaking waste. With only three episodes left in the season, they ware wasting time with crap like that. There is still a lot of fertile territory to mine with this story, but with episodes like that, the viewers are going to leave, and the show will get canceled. That was a mess.

[COUGALICIOUS]

Uggh... last night's episode, in which Walter and Jesse kill a fly, was a total freaking waste. With only three episodes left in the season, they ware wasting time with crap like that. There is still a lot of fertile territory to mine with this story, but with episodes like that, the viewers are going to leave, and the show will get canceled. That was a mess.

Amen and amen. If it had been a really tightly-written episode that would be one thing (e.g., there are some Mad Men episodes that (in my memory, at least) take place between 2 people and work quite well), but I felt it was just indulgent and so so slow. Did it even advance the plot at all? I am thinking it didn't. There's gotta be a story as to why it sucked so bad.

[woot]

Amen and amen. If it had been a really tightly-written episode that would be one thing (e.g., there are some Mad Men episodes that (in my memory, at least) take place between 2 people and work quite well), but I felt it was just indulgent and so so slow. Did it even advance the plot at all? I am thinking it didn't. There's gotta be a story as to why it sucked so bad.

I'm sure it was one of those episodes that just saves money because of other episodes being over budget. It was definitely a weak show, but I think it advanced things along a bit, mostly with the relationship between the two main characters and Walter discovering that Jesse is skimming. The fly thing was really annoying though, and the way Walter was smashing his stuff up trying to catch it was extremely out of character. That may have been the point, I guess, since he's feeling trapped in the new contract he just agreed to with Gus. Still, throwaway episode.

[COUGALICIOUS]

I'm sure it was one of those episodes that just saves money because of other episodes being over budget. It was definitely a weak show, but I think it advanced things along a bit, mostly with the relationship between the two main characters and Walter discovering that Jesse is skimming. The fly thing was really annoying though, and the way Walter was smashing his stuff up trying to catch it was extremely out of character. That may have been the point, I guess, since he's feeling trapped in the new contract he just agreed to with Gus. Still, throwaway episode.

You're right about the skimming discovery. I forgot about that. The fly was the kind of symbol I didn't like, because I didn't care. I felt like they were all, "you should care about this evocative symbol: the fly they just can't kill." Well, I didn't care. I assumed that his inability to kill the fly represented the futility of his efforts to be happy. His happiness is evasive, pesters him, drives him to obsessiveness. Maybe it could've been a few things.

[BigPiney]

I really thought that Walter was going to let it slip that he could have saved his girlfriend, or at least that he was in the apartment. I think it may come out at some point.

[MarkGrace]

Finally saw this and didn't hate it as bad as the rest of you. Perhaps I had the benefit of reduced expectations and knowing a bit about why they did it -- I had read Sepinwall's explanation before watching the show. Here's what he said:

I am going to talk to you for a few paragraphs about how the sausage gets made in television. If you'd rather not think too much about production logistics and budgets and whatnot and just focus on why "Fly" was such an unusual, incredible hour for this series, just skim until I start talking about "The Sopranos."

But I want to start off with sausage-making because it was clear to me that "Fly" was what's known in the industry as "a bottle show" - that is, an episode of the series shot almost entirely on existing sets, with a minimum of guest stars. The idea is to keep the budget as small as possible, so that you can then spend whatever money you saved on another episode down the road. (Or, in some cases, so you can compensate for a previous episode that cost more than anticipated.)

Last year, "Breaking Bad" tried to do a bottle show with "4 Days Out," the episode with Jesse and Walt trapped in the desert after the RV's battery runs down. The idea was that it would only feature Cranston and Paul and take place largely on the standing RV set and therefore be dirt-cheap. Instead, it wound up being one of that season's most expensive episodes, as more and more of the action began creeping outside of the camper and into the desert itself, which meant lots of location filming, often at irregular hours (a lot of that episode, you may recall, took place around dawn and dusk to get a particularly beautiful light quality), and that costs man-hours, it costs crew overtime, and it costs simply to transport all the men and materials back and forth from the studio to the desert.

Still, the basic idea of that episode went to the core of "Breaking Bad" - that of teacher and pupil stuck together, getting on each other's nerves, and revisting all the damage they've done to themselves, to each other, and to the world at large since they teamed up. So it wasn't surprising that the show would try to revisit the basic conceit - nor that Vince Gilligan and company (here with Sam Catlin and Moira Walley-Beckett on script, and Rian Johnson directing) would find a way to do a bottle show as a bottle show. Having already spent the money to build the huge Walt-cave set, they were able to dwell inside it for 95% of an episode, with no castmembers other than the two leads (which is valuable, since most TV shows these days can only sign a few regulars to appear in every episode), and no other speaking parts.

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/whats-al...ttle-show-ever