The following article is about last night's Breaking Bad finale. Spoilers follow.
I haven’t written about Breaking Bad before now, because my recent obsession with the show is just that: recent. I watched the pilot many years ago, and was really turned off by it. It felt clunky and overly expository. I thought that, if a show had to spend so much time proving the legitimacy of the world, than this was not a show worth getting into.
Boy, was I wrong. Over the past year, marathon viewing
sessions of Breaking Bad have made me
a much darker person, but they have also instilled in me a hope for
television’s future. With a landscape populated with sub-par reality television
and inexplicably popular CBS sitcoms, it was nice to see a show that was both a
ratings hit (especially in the final, protracted season) and a critical
darling. It was incredible to see a show that didn't f*ck around with the
audience, that was constantly rewarding, and that didn't sacrifice character
for story (with a few minor exceptions). It was great to see a series that wasn't
so up its own ass that it was afraid to innovate and change, molding the narrative as it
went along. After years of Lost creators telling people that they
had an endgame in mind when they totally didn't, it was nice to see a
show that gladly flew by the seat of its pants when it came to breaking character and
story arcs. This loose structure made it
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