We Have to Wait HOW Long?!


Thanks to netflix and vudu, I've just spent the last three weeks getting up to speed on all currently available mind-blowing episodes of what has to be the most lethally addictive, stunningly compelling, brilliantly written and performed non-major-network television series in the history of the medium.

With Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan and Co. demonstrate what television actually can be; to say it's ground-breaking entertainment is a deplorable understatement. Each and every episode of the fifty four that have been released thus far - with the last eight to start filming next month and set to air in the summer of 2013 - have left me wanting more, craving more, like an addict. One night I watched six at one time, should've been heading to bed after the third but instead I found myself hitting 'play next episode' until I'd finished the last one of that season.

It's all been said already, of course - the staggeringly genius performance of Cranston as Walter White and his slow, magnificently staged transformation into Heisenberg (at this point I call him WaltHeisen), the also magnificent performances from everyone else in the cast, the sheer dazzlingness of the writing, the direction, the photography. . .Everything about the show is perfection incarnate. I especially love how they don't start the episodes off with 'Previously on Breaking Bad. . .' but rather they use the far more effective method of an opening scene, followed by the Breaking Bad music and title sequence.

Sometimes the scene (particularly in the earlier episodes, from season one) picks up right where the last one left off but most often, it's a teaser scene, which ties in with something later in the episode or in a different one altogether, like with season five starting off with WaltHeisen 'celebrating' his fifty second birthday in the diner, but eight episodes later, in the half-season cliff-hanger (with the cleverly-titled Walt Whitman poetry line Gliding Over All), WaltHeisen is still fifty one. The ultimate teaser, morbid shades of things to come. Absolutely cannot freakin' wait - another deplorable understatement.