Pop Culture Wrap Up (7/27-8/27)

It's been a big month for me, pop-culturally speaking. I've seen things. I've done things. I've seen some of the things I've done. Basically, I've had some experiences, and I want to talk about those experiences. But what do you do when your whole life is packed to the brim with pop culture but none of it is really deserving of its own blog post? Well, I'll tell you: you cram everything into one post and hope that your immediate family will account for less than 50% of the readership.

Everyone Dies Sometime, Kiddo – Thoughts on the ‘Breaking Bad’ Series Finale.

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