Okay, time for a mandatory "Breaking Bad is good" post. I will leave it spoilerless.
To me personally, the show I remember the most are either ones that are overly absurd, like Metalocalypse, or fall in a perfect middle between absurd and realism. For this very reason, I have no idea what is it about Breaking Bad that got me so much amazed over... pretty much everything about that show. It is definitely not peer pressure or people talking about the show all the time, telling me to go watch it right now or selling it to me - never heard many talks about it neither in my environment nor on those parts of the Internet I tend to browse.
What I am certain about is how believable the entire series proved to be. Generally, I effortlessly laugh over anything in a show as it is way too obvious how everything is artificial and unreal. Something clicked with Breaking Bad from the very first episode, and there was initially nothing I could relate to within any of the characters, yet there was that energy and drive that kept me wondering what was going to happen next; sometimes the show told me what was planned to happen, and then I was wondering how that was going to happen. I felt myself tense watching it, and I genuinely couldn't laugh over the first two seasons, which had never happened to me before, even when a series or movie had no comedy elements at all and was great and serious and believable as well.
In the end, my perception changed to thinking that Breaking Bad is, in fact, about every single one of us, metaphorically speaking, of course. People tend to think they are not capable of doing things they usually find immoral, dark, out of their control or anything else, but deep down, at least once, possibly each one of us, people, had dreamed of something they are not proud of, something that they will never admit, or even allowed themselves to vocalize some thoughts they wish had never come out. What really made those feelings and thoughts of mine shine was how Breaking Bad didn't only show me things that made me judge someone - I was shown things I wanted to approve and admire about same people as well; I was shown the duality a person has, the duality I've seen in myself or people close to me, the duality that made me justify things.
And among all of that, Breaking Bad gave me enough action to jump and feel tense and anxiously wait for the climax of the scene, episode, the entire episode, and it had its quiet moments that gave me, the viewer, that crucial time to analyze what was happening, what I was feeling, and what the character were feeling.
So I say it's good. Having watched it from start to finish, I see it very clearly why people bring out the biggest flaw of the entire show, as well as its individual parts - you can only watch it for the first time once.
arstechnica.com
