Breaking Bad - Season 5, Part 1 - Sundays on AMC

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Fry8 said:
We should have a thread to discuss top tier tv shows.
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Sentry said:
The Wire is grossly overrated, honestly. It's great for its realism but beyond that, it has a great sense of indirection. Even after it's all over, you're basically back where you started. No real 'results' or 'conclusion'.
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That's the point. The failed drug war, failed social infrastructure etc. just keeps going on but with different people.
 
Sentry said:
The Wire is grossly overrated, honestly. It's great for its realism but beyond that, it has a great sense of indirection. Even after it's all over, you're basically back where you started. No real 'results' or 'conclusion'.
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That's the point. What exactly were you expecting? The war on drugs to end? The good guys winning?
 
Sentry said:
The Wire is grossly overrated, honestly. It's great for its realism but beyond that, it has a great sense of indirection. Even after it's all over, you're basically back where you started. No real 'results' or 'conclusion'.
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The Wire is a very angry show created by a man who both loves and hates Baltimore.

Ending the show with some shallow sense of accomplishment would be a massive betrayal to everything it stood for.
 
Sentry said:
The Wire is grossly overrated, honestly. It's great for its realism but beyond that, it has a great sense of indirection. Even after it's all over, you're basically back where you started. No real 'results' or 'conclusion'.

24 is highly repetitive and no where near anything that could be considered top-tier, imo (judging the entire package and not just a single season or two).
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Lol someone missed the entire point of the show
 
How could cautious Mike let Walt get the jump on him?
Gilligan: We all have our moments we wish we could take back. [Mike] was physically dominant over Walt at every turn …. We saw Mike not have much trouble handcuffing Walt to the radiator … Turning his back on Walt was a bad idea, but it was born of Mike having a lot on his mind … it was a tactical error … I guess the lesson is: Never turn your back on Walter White.
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...
 
I'm surprised at people thinking Mike was the end all be all. He was a cog in the machine, and Gus was his engine.

Oh, and I fucking hated that scene where Walt burns himself trying to get free.

Alternatives:

1) Burn the tie wrap off to the side and you won't get burnt.

2) Leverage the tie wrap with the broom in the closet behind you.

3) Take your glasses off and use one of the legs to pry off the lame locking mechanism from behind.

4) Bite through the tie wrap. You fucking bit through wiring that is more resistant.

I may or may not have experience with tie wraps.
 
Copernicus said:
I'm surprised at people thinking Mike was the end all be all. He was a cog in the machine, and Gus was his engine.
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especially when his whole entire life just unravelled, realize everything he did was for nothing, and he'll probably never see his granddaughter ever again. That and Walt just pissed him off.
 
Oxigen_Waste said:
Not on my book.



I'm not saying they're bad. They're just sloppy. Too many brilliant aspects of this show get marred by a tide of small bullshit that isn't done properly and doesn't do the show's potential and premise justice.



I mostly agree with this as quality distinctions between very good shows is always a matter of opinion. However, what separates BB from the top tier pack like The Wire, Sopranos or Deadwood is the writing. There's no real way around it nor any way to deny it. Most of the characters are cardboard and some of the plot points are just purely incoherent and borderline retarded (the airplane crash springs to mind, lol).



The Wire, Deadwood, Sopranos, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Dekalog and Band Of Brothers. That's the god tier, basically. Then you have Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Six Feet Under, Game Of Thrones, The Pacific, the first 4 seasons of West Wing and some other shows which are incredible, and then a slight notch down from those you have Breaking Bad as well as many other greats like Rome, Oz, The Shield, Battlestar Galactica and so on.

One needs to remind oneself that one's favourite isn't necessarily the same as the one you think is better. For example, my fav tv show ever is Battlestar Galactica, by far. I enjoyed it the most out of everything I've ever watched. But there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that it's probably the worst show I mentioned in my post. Me liking it and how good it is are 2 separate concepts. One is completely subjective, whilst the other one is quite objective, to a certain degree. I mean, it's absolutely impossible to deny that The Wire is, aside from 2 or 3 small and very specific gripes, as near perfect as a show can get (amazing writing, amazing story, based on a true story, social commentary runs rampant in a good way, very nice acting... fantastic pace and narrative... it's pretty undeniable).
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Bluntly put Breaking Bad is a better final film than all of those. The Wire and Deadwood becomes so self-obsessed with their settings that they lose the forest for the trees but mainly the point here is that it's a final film product and there's so much going on in Breaking Bad in that aspect.
 
I was expecting a
Heisenberg and Lydia sex scene. When they shake-hands, it looked like Walt was gonna bring her hand up to his mouth and kiss it.
 
-Pyromaniac- said:
characters are human beings

DEUS EX MACHINAAAAAAAAA
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Characters do stupid things though they have all the reasons and means otherwise in order to move the plot along the way desired. Poor writing. Except when BB does it.

Too bad posters spend more time ridiculing those who bring up legitimate arguments and issues than to actually think them over and offer good counter-arguments.
 
Kafarabo said:
I was expecting a
Heisenberg and Lydia sex scene. When they shake-hands, it looked like Walt was gonna bring her hand up to his mouth and kiss it.
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lol yeah. I felt he was impressed by how meticulous and calculated she was. Almost as if he wished his wife was more like her, and shared his passion/ego to build an empire.
 
Sentry said:
The Wire is grossly overrated, honestly. It's great for its realism but beyond that, it has a great sense of indirection. Even after it's all over, you're basically back where you started. No real 'results' or 'conclusion'.
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In other words, you completely missed the point if you were looking for/expecting results or conclusions.

edit - lol looks like others have said the same to you. Over and over and over and over.


Fry8 said:
That will always reminds me of LOST.

Which is a top tier TV show.
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you're lucky minus is down, gif barrage was incoming.

In all seriousness, though, come on... it's probably one of the most engaging shows I've ever seen but it's a very mediocre show when you get down to it. There are SOME moments and characters which are incredibly good, and it pains me to see that the good parts were so ruined by the horrible everything else.
The ending of walkabout in particular is one of the greatest moments of tv history in my opinion (a plain just crashed. people are either dead, dying, or sufferig extreme trauma, pain and stress, meanwhile John Locke is having the best moment of his life), so yeah, there were some very good things about the show, but... come (the fuck) on.
 
I wonder if episode 9 will pick up immediately where episode 8 ended, ie Hank flushing (and washing his hands of course) then walking back to the dinner party
 
Oxigen_Waste said:
Not on my book.



I'm not saying they're bad. They're just sloppy. Too many brilliant aspects of this show get marred by a tide of small bullshit that isn't done properly and doesn't do the show's potential and premise justice.



I mostly agree with this as quality distinctions between very good shows is always a matter of opinion. However, what separates BB from the top tier pack like The Wire, Sopranos or Deadwood is the writing. There's no real way around it nor any way to deny it. Most of the characters are cardboard and some of the plot points are just purely incoherent and borderline retarded (the airplane crash springs to mind, lol).



The Wire, Deadwood, Sopranos, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Dekalog and Band Of Brothers. That's the god tier, basically. Then you have Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Six Feet Under, Game Of Thrones, The Pacific, the first 4 seasons of West Wing and some other shows which are incredible, and then a slight notch down from those you have Breaking Bad as well as many other greats like Rome, Oz, The Shield, Battlestar Galactica and so on.

One needs to remind oneself that one's favourite isn't necessarily the same as the one you think is better. For example, my fav tv show ever is Battlestar Galactica, by far. I enjoyed it the most out of everything I've ever watched. But there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that it's probably the worst show I mentioned in my post. Me liking it and how good it is are 2 separate concepts. One is completely subjective, whilst the other one is quite objective, to a certain degree. I mean, it's absolutely impossible to deny that The Wire is, aside from 2 or 3 small and very specific gripes, as near perfect as a show can get (amazing writing, amazing story, based on a true story, social commentary runs rampant in a good way, very nice acting... fantastic pace and narrative... it's pretty undeniable).
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What this post, and your lists, tell me is that you value a kind of hyper-real grittiness in your television and are allowing that to cloud your idea of the objective qualities of these shows. The fact that two of the qualities you list that makes The Wire 'perfect' are that it's based on a true story and that it has a lot of social commentary points to this as well.

I'm not gonna get into a list game, but Breaking Bad is a heavily stylized show that isn't trying to be hyper-real or even for the most part all that gritty. It's meant to take a humorous tone and have ridiculous things happen, not because the writers are lazy but because they're very good at that. If you can't recognize the long literary tradition of stories like that, and television's ability to bring them to a whole new level, that doesn't make them any less valuable on the whole.
 
PhoenixDark said:
I wonder if episode 9 will pick up immediately where episode 8 ended, ie Hank flushing (and washing his hands of course) then walking back to the dinner party
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With that generic 'ring in the ears' effect. Where all conversations around him around essentially muted until someone calls his name a couple of times.
 
jarosh said:
I *loved* this season of Breaking Bad, but I hate it when Vince Gilligan does that, when he goes out of his way to either explicitly answer questions about the plot or the last episode and even speculates about what this or that might mean for the future of the show or how they haven't decided one thing or the other. Makes me lose respect for the guy. You should know when to let your work speak for itself. I wish I hadn't read that post above. Only skimmed over the first few questions of the interview and closed the tab. Meh.
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Those answers were so vague you could've inferred all of it yourself and there's nothing in that interview that hasn't been discussed at length here already.
 
I was just watching the episode where Jesse starts walking towards the drug dealers with his gun and those sound effects/music sounds like something that could be in old Silent Hill games.
 
Downhome said:
Sounds good!

I loved The Shield, LOVED IT, so hopefully The Wire will really connect with me also.
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it's always important to temper expectations like these. I personally like the wire, I don't praise it as the holy grail of TV like a lot of others but I like it. But one thing it is not, is OMGGGWTFF thrilling. Some parts are..but it's a slow burn kind of show. In a lot of cases a super slow burn.
 
squidyj said:
Bluntly put Breaking Bad is a better final film than all of those. The Wire and Deadwood becomes so self-obsessed with their settings that they lose the forest for the trees but mainly the point here is that it's a final film product and there's so much going on in Breaking Bad in that aspect.
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You are delusional. I absolutely love BB, but the fact that you mentioned losing the forest for the trees regarding 2 shows who remained faithful to their main premise/the big picture throughout their entire span and then claim BB is superior because of that when in fact BB is the worst possible offender out of the 3 when it comes to losing the forest for the trees. The Wire was a story about the war on drugs on a small scale told essentially through character development. It started that way and it ended that way. Deadwood was about life during the goldrush in new frontier towns, was also told through character development (and it contains the best dialogs in the history of TV, by the way).

Along comes BB. BB is about a very smart and capable man who wasted his potential and ended up with a mundane and boring life he pretty much secretly despised. This man gets diagnosed with cancer and decides to leave some wealth behind for his family, no matter how low he has to go to achieve this goal. He uses his skills as a chemist to cook astoundingly good batches of chrystal meth with a former burnout student of his and make some money, at the same times transforming himself into a sociopath. That was the premise of the show. Then they lost track of it and it truly became a textbook example of losing the forest for the trees... they completely lose focus and suddenly the whole show became somewhat like Dexter, where every season has it's new wacky cartoon antagonist... covering everything from the mexican gangster who's muy loco, to the 2 moronic silent deathmachines, the highly inteligent billionaire psycopath who has an insanely skilled former police officer (wtf) from Philadelphia running his whole operation... btw, did I mention the burnout dates a girl who then ODs causing her father (who's an air traffic controller) to crash two planes, the wreckage of which lands on the portagonists house. Oh, and there's also a mute and paralyzed old mexican gangster who rings a bell to communicate. And then the pyscopath billionaire jesus is killed by a bomb which leaves him alive long enough to compose himself before dying whilst half of his head is carbonized. I can't forget to mention the lawyer, who's straight out of a sitcom, and then there's Hank, who gets promoted to head of the DEA by apparently being very dumb and taking ages puzzling things out. And Skylar!!! How could I forget Skylar, who's just a scapegoat who's basically there to make sure there are always problems at home. Oh yeah, and Walt's son has cerebral palsy. And then there's Gale, who's basically Pee Wee Herman. And Walt's pretty much just being an ass for the sake of being an ass.

BB is a very, very good show. But it's the #1 offender when it comes to losing the forest for the trees. I've never seen a show get so boggled down with minor insignificant and irrelevant details. For fuck's sake, man, wake the fuck up.
 
Deadwood is not a better show than Breaking Bad, at least in my opinion. It's got great writing and an awesome cast (except for Timothy Olyphant), but where it pales in comparison is the cinematography. Obviously it's got the patented HBO super budget/ridiculous sets, but it's not shot in an inspiring way like BB.
 
JasonMCG said:
Those answers were so vague you could've inferred all of it yourself and there's nothing in that interview that hasn't been discussed at length here already.
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I'm not talking about spoilers. I thought that much was obvious. I'm just not a big fan of creative people explaining and answering things so pragmatically, definitively without hesitation and, especially in a narrative art form, openly speculating about future plans.
 
MidnightCowboy said:
Deadwood is not a better show than Breaking Bad, at least in my opinion. It's got great writing and an awesome cast (except for Timothy Olyphant), but where it pales in comparison is the cinematography. Obviously it's got the patented HBO super budget/ridiculous sets, but it's not shot in an inspiring way like BB.
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Breaking Bad has amazing cinematography but Deadwood looks a lot better to me in terms of how natural it looks. Breaking Bad is heavily stylized, lots of time lapses, great use of bold colors and awesome looking outdoor shots. Deadwood uses almost entirely natural light and really makes everything look realistic and old timey. Every shot looks like it could be a painting. That natural realistic look does a much better job of immersing me in the setting

As good as Cranston is, the entire cast of Deadwood overshadows the cast of BB, and it's got the best writing of any show i've seen
 
-Pyromaniac- said:
it's always important to temper expectations like these. I personally like the wire, I don't praise it as the holy grail of TV like a lot of others but I like it. But one thing it is not, is OMGGGWTFF thrilling. Some parts are..but it's a slow burn kind of show. In a lot of cases a super slow burn.
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I agree, I started watching it because of GAF.

I couldn't keep going a couple episodes into season 4. It's one of the first shows I feel is actually over rated.
 
maharg said:
What this post, and your lists, tell me is that you value a kind of hyper-real grittiness in your television and are allowing that to cloud your idea of the objective qualities of these shows. The fact that two of the qualities you list that makes The Wire 'perfect' are that it's based on a true story and that it has a lot of social commentary points to this as well.

I'm not gonna get into a list game, but Breaking Bad is a heavily stylized show that isn't trying to be hyper-real or even for the most part all that gritty. It's meant to take a humorous tone and have ridiculous things happen, not because the writers are lazy but because they're very good at that. If you can't recognize the long literary tradition of stories like that, and television's ability to bring them to a whole new level, that doesn't make them any less valuable on the whole.
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You seem to think I don't value BB's strenghts. I preffer BB to all of the shows I listed in the god tier. It's more fun to watch and I connect more with it. But the undeniable fact here is that quality resides more in certain factors than it does in others. The writing in BB is worse than the others, that counts alot. The acting is also worse. So is the narrative and the pacing in seasons 2 and 3 is terrible. Plus, BB is irrelevant. There's no "point" to it. It's pure entertainment. It's more fun that others. But fun is much less important than coherence and strong writing. There's a hierarchy.
 
26211625.jpg


Seriously, guys, shouldn't we just consider ourselves lucky that a medium of entertainment exists which has provided us with dozens of shows which could all be realistically considered to be 'top tier'? Whether you prefer gritty realism, cartoonish escapades, high-octane action, in-depth character studies, period pieces, or a little bit of each, television has you covered. Some people will consider this show as one of the all-time greats (myself included), but we would be foolish to assert that other shows were not equally good.
 
Dogfacedgod said:
Can't we just call a spade a spade?

Season 5 was 8 episodes.

Next year is season 6, also 8 episodes.

When a show takes a month break that's one thing, but a year? That's a different season.

Just sayin.
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I don't want a season whose final image is Hank taking a shit tbh. :lol
I wonder if the DVD boxes will eventually be all 16 episodes or released separately as S5 Part 1 and S5 Part 2.
 
Impeccable said:
I agree, I started watching it because of GAF.

I couldn't keep going a couple episodes into season 4. It's one of the first shows I feel is actually over rated.
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Wait, what? Season 4? So you got through the worst season of all (2) and stopped watching it during the best season in the whole show? That's weird, man!
 
blahblah...blah said:
26211625.jpg


Seriously, guys, shouldn't we just consider ourselves lucky that a medium of entertainment exists which has provided us with dozens of shows which could all be realistically considered to be 'top tier'? Whether you prefer gritty realism, cartoonish escapades, high-octane action, in-depth character studies, period pieces, or a little bit of each, television has you covered. Some people will consider this show as one of the all-time greats (myself included), but we would be foolish to assert that other shows were not equally good.
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Hell yeah and well said. I'm so glad high quality tv serial dramas came to be within the past decade and a half.
 
blahblah...blah said:
26211625.jpg


Seriously, guys, shouldn't we just consider ourselves lucky that a medium of entertainment exists which has provided us with dozens of shows which could all be realistically considered to be 'top tier'? Whether you prefer gritty realism, cartoonish escapades, high-octane action, in-depth character studies, period pieces, or a little bit of each, television has you covered. Some people will consider this show as one of the all-time greats (myself included), but we would be foolish to assert that other shows were not equally good.
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TV has become my main hobby in the last decade. I don't think there's anything better than finding a new show to watch and just marathoning entire series/seasons all at once. tv seasons are more enjoyable than films or video games to me nowadays
 
jarosh said:
I'm not talking about spoilers. I thought that much was obvious. I'm just not a big fan of creative people explaining and answering things so pragmatically, definitively without hesitation and, especially in a narrative art form, openly speculating about future plans.
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As opposed to what? Be some high-falutin auteur who refuses to give interviews? I'm at a loss as to how being pragmatic makes you lose respect for him.
 
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