Best Show, Evah!

Allen St. John at Forbes thinks "Breaking Bad" is the best TV show ever. Whom am I to disagree?:

Twenty three minutes into Episode 514, entitled “Ozymandias” after a Shelley poem, Breaking Bad made television history. Except that most fans didn’t notice. They were instead ready to cry, scream, vomit, or hurl a waffle iron at the plasma TV, or some combination of the above.

Sometime around that first commercial break, Breaking Bad broke away from the pack and staked its claim to the title of television’s Best Show Ever.

Over the course of five years, Vince Gilligan and his friends have constructed a world piece by piece, with attention to detail worthy of a Faberge egg. They created a compelling protagonist, a deeply flawed yet charismatic genius. They built a business at which he had savant-like skills, and depicted the family that often drove him crazy. Then blurred lines between the two. And in that way created a life for Walter White that many of us can relate to.

But other great and groundbreaking TV dramas had done something similar, most notably David Chase’s The Sopranos, David Simon’s The Wire, and David Milch’s Deadwood.

But Breaking Bad did something those iconic shows didn’t do. Showrunner Vince Gilligan set his protagonist in motion. Television had always been about a kind of inertia. After every episode of M*A*S*H or The Rockford Files there’d be a cosmic reset button that would allow the characters to return to exactly where they started at the beginning of the episode. That’s how you can make the Korean War last eleven years.

And as that first generation of shows from television’s post-millennial Golden Era threw off so many of the shackles of convention inherent in the medium, they kept this one.

Tony Soprano was a man who didn’t change, couldn’t change. Jimmy McNulty, Stringer Bell and other characters of The Wire fought hard for change—changing themselves and changing the system—but Simon’s message was that the drug/cop/court/prison/politics system in a fictionalized Baltimore was, tragically, too big and too strong to be taken down by a few angry men and women.

Vince Gilligan started Breaking Bad with no such constraints. Whereas Tony Soprano spent seven seasons running errands around North Jersey, Walter White embarked on an epic journey, tracing an arc reserved for iconic characters of literature and cinema like Jay Gatsby and Michael Corleone.

As he morphed Mr. Chips into Scarface, Gilligan wrote his own version of The Great American Novel. On Steroids.