James Meek's Fine "Breaking Bad" Review

London Review Of Books:

I’m not sure why Breaking Bad comes across as such a political drama: whether it’s because Gilligan and his collaborators intended it that way, or because the creative space afforded by the medium encouraged a deliberate, unblinkered look at American society that was bound to result in social comment, or because I’m projecting my own preoccupations onto its rich storyscape. But it does. And the glaring drawback of America’s war on drugs – that the war has become a bigger problem than the drugs – is the least of it. Albuquerque is presented in bleak terms: the faded, badly-lit, over-upholstered clutter of ugly furniture in middle-class homes, Walter’s mean little swimming pool in which no one ever swims but which will over time receive all kinds of substances (money, vomit, a false eyeball from an exploding plane), the cold carpet-tiled fluorescent barns of office space, the strip malls. Saul the criminal lawyer has an office on one of these, with an inflatable Statue of Liberty wagging on the roof. He sits at his desk inside against a backdrop of fibreglass classical columns and a wall-print of the US constitution, dealing out counsel on how to lie, kill and cheat without being caught. In a flagrant violation of traditional American aesthetics, including the aesthetics of crime, Walter and Jesse end up driving two of the ugliest cars ever seen on the American screen. The only haven against the man-made desert of Gilligan’s Albuquerque is the beauty of the actual desert, criss-crossed as it is by drug dealers, drug makers, killers and illegal migrants.