Breaking good

So about a year ago I started watching Breaking Bad. By this spring I had gotten about three episodes in to the fifth season, and then stopped because it was feeling tacked on, and I didn’t want to reprise my experience of watching the last season of The Wire, which was a big step down from the rest of the show. Scott and several commenters advised me to soldier on, and boy were they right. I finally finished it late this summer, and the fifth season ends up being arguably the best of the whole series.

So this thread is about comparing and ranking, if you’re into that kind of thing, three great prestige TV crime shows: The Sopranos (which debuted more than 25 years ago!!!) The Wire, and Breaking Bad.

I’ll just throw out a few thoughts:

(1) The Sopranos is, in my view, in third place. This isn’t meant as a criticism: it’s like saying Mickey Mantle is the third greatest centerfield of all time. Nevertheless, I just don’t think it all holds together quite as well as the other two shows. One problem is that the initial narrative conceit — the mob boss going to a psychiatrist — feels somewhat forced and unrealistic. Another is that David Chase very clearly has an ambivalent attitude towards his source material: The show is among other things a kind of meta-critique of the mob movie genre, which is in some ways a strength — Chase recognizes that the genre is in danger of feeling badly played out and cliched — but also leads it to tumble sometimes into self-parody. In addition, there are some weak actors: the boy who plays Tony’s son, the E Street Band refugee, and others, like Paulie Walnuts, who can do one bit really well, but nothing outside of that. Also, Chase has a weakness for Bergmanesque dream sequences and the like, that end up feeling pointlessly arty.

But James Gandolfini is so fantastic that in the end most of these weaknesses seem pretty trivial. Still, I feel less inclined to rewatch the series than either of the other two shows.

(2) If The Wire and Breaking Bad were each four seasons long, I would have no hesitation to rank The Wire #1. What an amazing show. Everything about it is just fantastic — unlike a lot of people, I think the second season. is actually just as strong as any of the others, and the acting and writing are just superb. The fifth season is obviously a problem, because it appears Simon was just too close to his source material. Even so, there’s a lot of great things in it as well. And Omar is one of the most memorable characters in any genre. But there are way too many good things to list.

(3) Breaking Bad pulls off the stunning feat of gradually making its protagonist completely loathsome, yet not alienating the audience. Skylar White is a great character in her own right — quite a bit more complex and interesting than her husband, ultimately. Jesse Pinkman is also a great creation, offering a character who is deeply flawed but easier to sympathize with than the rest of the main characters. And Saul Goodman is genuinely hilarious in an often scene-stealing way. One small but annoying flaw for me is that Giancarlo Esposito, who does a wonderful turn as the reticent drug kingpin Gus Fring, is very obviously not a native Spanish speaker, which is really odd given that all the other Spanish-speaking characters, even the bilingual gringos, speak perfect Spanish.

In any event, I would very strongly recommend all these shows to anyone who is at all attracted to the genre, although if someone were to watch just one of them, I guess I would say watch . . . The Wire.