Below you will find the two readings that comprise Packet 8, due to be read by Friday.
Also, because of my absence last Wednesday, a few reminders for this week:
1. As always, be sure to bring your Viewer's Journal to every class session.
2. Please continue to bring your notes from the lecture on how to read critically this week.
3. Please bring any notes you may have taken while watching the TED Talk from Packet 7.
PACKET 8
(TWO READINGS. FULL TEXTS FOR BOTH ARE BELOW.)
Tuned In: 'Breaking Bad'
New AMC offering has promise but missing details muddle plot
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Last summer AMC finally became known as something other than "the cable network that ruined classic movies by adding commercials" with the critically acclaimed period drama "Mad Men." As with other cable networks, AMC is seeking to define itself through original programming. "Mad Men" was the first salvo, and "Breaking Bad" (10 tonight) is the second.
While definitely not the tour de force "Mad Men" was, "Breaking Bad" puts forth a distinctive premise. High school chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston, best known as the dad on "Malcolm in the Middle") is diagnosed with inoperable, terminal cancer and decides to provide for his family financially by squirreling away as much money as possible. To accomplish this, he teams with small-time crystal meth dealer Jesse (Aaron Paul), who's also his former student.
'Breaking Bad'
When: 10 tonight, AMC.Starring: Bryan Cranston.
Created by "X-Files" veteran Vince Gilligan, who wrote and directed tonight's premiere, "Bad" has its moments of dark humor, but it's largely a morose drama that covers familiar ground: characters with anti-hero tendencies leading double lives.
Viewers have been down this path before with "The Sopranos" and "The Shield," although "Breaking Bad" is more directly comparable to FX's "The Riches" (poor band of gypsies pose as a wealthy family) or HBO's "Big Love" (polygamists attempt to keep their lifestyle a secret to protect the wholesome image of dad's hardware store chain).
In "Breaking Bad," Walter doesn't immediately share the cancer diagnosis with his wife, which would be a sensible first step. Instead he keeps it a secret through the first three episodes made available for review.
Maybe Walter's decision to withhold the bad news is rooted in the characters and their relationships, but "Breaking Bad" only hints at why Walter, who is 50, may be uncomfortable sharing the diagnosis with his wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn), who is at least 10 years younger and pregnant with their second child. Perhaps future episodes will fill in the blanks, but a TV series must dole out morsels of character motivation often enough to keep viewers tuning in, and I'm not convinced "Breaking Bad" does.
In another instance where the series hints but fails to provide clarity, "Bad" introduces Walter's teenage son (RJ Mitte ), who suffers from a physical ailment, but his specific medical issues are unclear (the press notes say he has cerebral palsy). Then there's Walter's second job at a car wash, which remains similarly unexplained. Does he need extra cash to cover his son's medical bills? In the first three episodes, "Breaking Bad" offers no concrete answers, rendering the show frustratingly oblique.
Regardless, Cranston is a revelation. His performance as a mild-mannered, wildly intelligent, possibly henpecked family man is the primary reason to recommend "Breaking Bad." Cranston's Walter is a thoroughly decent guy who is prone to doing the right thing.
In next week's episode Walter finds himself in the unfamiliar role of captor to a murderous criminal. Rather than immediately killing the guy, the high school teacher makes a sandwich for the constrained captive . Walter slides a plate across the floor to the prisoner and follows the food with a bucket (to be used as a toilet), toilet paper and hand sanitizer.
Walter also takes pride in his work, even when it's illegal.
"You and I will not make garbage," Walter tells Jesse of their drug-producing joint venture. "We will produce a chemically pure and stable product that performs as promised."
In such rare instances, "Breaking Bad" achieves a perfect moment of nerdy believability, but too often the series fails to provide details that would help explain its characters' illogical choices.
While definitely not the tour de force "Mad Men" was, "Breaking Bad" puts forth a distinctive premise. High school chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston, best known as the dad on "Malcolm in the Middle") is diagnosed with inoperable, terminal cancer and decides to provide for his family financially by squirreling away as much money as possible. To accomplish this, he teams with small-time crystal meth dealer Jesse (Aaron Paul), who's also his former student.
Viewers have been down this path before with "The Sopranos" and "The Shield," although "Breaking Bad" is more directly comparable to FX's "The Riches" (poor band of gypsies pose as a wealthy family) or HBO's "Big Love" (polygamists attempt to keep their lifestyle a secret to protect the wholesome image of dad's hardware store chain).
In "Breaking Bad," Walter doesn't immediately share the cancer diagnosis with his wife, which would be a sensible first step. Instead he keeps it a secret through the first three episodes made available for review.
Maybe Walter's decision to withhold the bad news is rooted in the characters and their relationships, but "Breaking Bad" only hints at why Walter, who is 50, may be uncomfortable sharing the diagnosis with his wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn), who is at least 10 years younger and pregnant with their second child. Perhaps future episodes will fill in the blanks, but a TV series must dole out morsels of character motivation often enough to keep viewers tuning in, and I'm not convinced "Breaking Bad" does.
In another instance where the series hints but fails to provide clarity, "Bad" introduces Walter's teenage son (RJ Mitte ), who suffers from a physical ailment, but his specific medical issues are unclear (the press notes say he has cerebral palsy). Then there's Walter's second job at a car wash, which remains similarly unexplained. Does he need extra cash to cover his son's medical bills? In the first three episodes, "Breaking Bad" offers no concrete answers, rendering the show frustratingly oblique.
Regardless, Cranston is a revelation. His performance as a mild-mannered, wildly intelligent, possibly henpecked family man is the primary reason to recommend "Breaking Bad." Cranston's Walter is a thoroughly decent guy who is prone to doing the right thing.
In next week's episode Walter finds himself in the unfamiliar role of captor to a murderous criminal. Rather than immediately killing the guy, the high school teacher makes a sandwich for the constrained captive . Walter slides a plate across the floor to the prisoner and follows the food with a bucket (to be used as a toilet), toilet paper and hand sanitizer.
Walter also takes pride in his work, even when it's illegal.
"You and I will not make garbage," Walter tells Jesse of their drug-producing joint venture. "We will produce a chemically pure and stable product that performs as promised."
In such rare instances, "Breaking Bad" achieves a perfect moment of nerdy believability, but too often the series fails to provide details that would help explain its characters' illogical choices.
TV editor Rob Owen can be reached at rowen@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1112. Ask TV questions at post-gazette.com/tv under TV Q&A.
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Speed Demons: Breaking Bad
New series traffics meth labs and fatherly love gone awry
By Robert Abele Wednesday, Jan 16 2008
Expect a fair amount of hype for Breaking Bad, a new series on AMC that traffics in some grim subjects — namely terminal disease and crystal-meth production. But this infectious, crazy blast of bitter humor, wild storytelling and pungent melancholy about a beleaguered family man should also earn its television keep for managing to steer clear of sentimentality or simple moralism. What this sharp if unsettling show wants to meet head on is middle-class angst, the quiet desperation that starts to unravel in the upstanding when their obligations suddenly seem insurmountable — or what happens when the folly of controlling one's destiny starts to resemble the riskiest of lab experiments.
Our guide into this world is Albuquerque, New Mexico, science teacher/husband/father Walter White, played by a helmet-coifed, moustached, stiff-bodied Bryan Cranston as if he'd never spent seven loosey-goosey years of wacky dad-dom on Malcolm in the Middle. Amazingly, Cranston exhibits no performance residue from that popular comedy, even though the first frantic moments of creator/executive producer Vince Gilligan's pilot appear to hint at a Tarantino/Coen Brothers-style misadventure. Khaki pants fly through the air as we pan down to see an RV peeling away across a lonesome desert road, with what look like bodies and liquid sloshing around in back, a passenger tied up and out cold in front, and a panicky driver wearing only underwear and a gas mask. Walter is the guy at the wheel, and after crashing the RV in a ditch, he grabs a camcorder, shoves a gun in the belt of his Haneses and, in the unforgiving New Mexico sun, proceeds to tape a teary goodbye to his wife and son — but only after addressing the feds to say that the video is not an admission of guilt. As sirens in the distance get increasingly louder, Walter does his best imitation of a movie antihero and points the gun toward whatever fate awaits him. Cue the main titles.
On your standard TV show, this is when we'd be introduced to the cop protagonist assigned to take down the runaway lawbreaker. But after everything from The Sopranos to The Shield to Dexter, cable has conditioned us all to broaden our acceptance of who can lead a series and to even relish the stories of flawed criminal souls, and Breaking Bad— with a slang title that actually means defying convention — is one more such journey. So Walter is indeed our guy, and the rest of the pilot proceeds to lay out the three weeks leading up to his crisis stance in the desert. He's turning 50, he can't get his bored students interested in chemistry, his teenage son Walt Jr. (RJ Mitte) has cerebral palsy (but, more naggingly, is a smart-ass), he's alienating his pregnant wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn), and finances are such that this once-promising science whiz — he has a plaque at home congratulating him on research that eventually led to a Nobel prize — has to moonlight at the car wash. It's a rutted, Bush-era portrait of dashed dreams and soft-boil resentment, depressing in its pressurized blandness, even before a coughing Walter collapses on the floor of the car wash and gets a diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer.
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Keeping the news to himself, Walter realizes his condition will likely send his family into a financial abyss. And then a switch goes on. Inspired by a news report of a meth-lab bust that uncovered scads of cash — led by his obnoxious brother-in-law, a DEA agent named Hank (Dean Norris) — and emboldened by a chance encounter that reveals a former student of his named Jesse is a successful meth dealer, Walter initiates (via blackmail) the idea of teaming up with a meth lab: matching his chemical smarts and access to materials with Jesse's trade knowledge. Naturally it's an odd-couple partnering that earns more than a few laughs at first. A safety-first Walter insists on an emergency eyewash station where he and Jesse cook, and is frustrated at Jesse's ignorance about which flasks are for mixing and which are for boiling: "Did you learn nothing from my chemistry class?" he grouses. At the same time, Jesse's suspicions about the motives of this man he once pegged as a middle-aged prig suddenly turn this wigga-talking drug capitalist into a concerned business spouse.
"It's weird, is all," says Jesse, played with a great, whiny brio by Aaron Paul. "It doesn't compute. If you've gone crazy, or depressed — I'm just sayin' — that's something I need to know about. Thataffects me."
Walter will only cryptically respond, "I'm awake."
You may think this all sounds like Showtime'sWeeds. I prefer to think of it as the twisted version of the current flick The Bucket List, where instead of rascally old short-timers filling their final days with self-help-sappy to-do items like "Laugh till you cry" and "See something majestic," you have Walter putting at number one: "Provide for my family by making money off a national scourge." And in execution the two series have hardly anything in common. Weeds and its subdivision-mom-selling-pot scenario ultimately play like empowerment farce, even when weaponry is drawn and lives are threatened. Whereas Breaking Bad— shot with a muted palette and frill-less camerawork, like a low-key indie you'd discover at Sundance — is more a gallows-humor tragedy, a scary mixture of quotidian verisimilitude and sheer gruesomeness befitting a launch into a dark business and a lead character who can see the writing on the wall. Because as darkly funny as the idea of the show is, shit goes wrong instantly for Walter and Jesse, and disgustingly wrong by the end of the second episode. Then there's the irony that in prying open a side of him he never thought to explore, Walter may only be increasing the amount of pressure in his life, not to mention setting himself up for a scrutiny he never thought he'd suffer as a mild-mannered nobody.
The material is a fresh gamble, and the cast is uniformly solid, but I wonder if it would work quite as well without the supertalented Cranston, who it must be said is giving it his all. The role requires him to look useless, essentially — it's a sense of style Ned Flanders or the BTK Killer would envy — yet he also must suggest a churning wave of conflicting emotions that covers rage, humiliation, acerbity, caring, strength, biting wit and punishing solitude. It's a true tour de force.
In class, we see Walter at his most animated, trying to position chemistry to his students as the study of change, letting on that he finds it fascinating because its continually reformulating elements mirror life's cycles. "It's growth, then decay, then transformation!" he says to a mostly uninterested audience, before dispiritingly shutting off the flame shooting up from the gas valve on his desk.
Sometimes it's an explosion, too, and Breaking Bad — which may feel less like a TV series than a collection of freaky updates on a damaged, stumbling soul — could wind up being one of the more toxically exhilarating shows to corrupt the programming schedule.
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