Breaking Late to BREAKING BAD

OK, OK. I’m one of THEM: the late-comers, the band-wagon jumpers-on, whatever name I must assume, as another bête noire of BREAKING BAD fandom. I started watching BREAKING BAD regularly with the start of the final season. I’ve seen an episode here and there (I fondly remember Gustavo Fring’s Harvey Dent impression) but I was not among the faithful week-in-week-out. I knew the jist of the story: high school teacher gets cancer, cooks blue meth, builds an empire, fucks over and up a LOT of people and is the one who knocks.

Even with only being a regular watcher for the past seven weeks, I can say without hesitation that BREAKING BAD is the best television series in the history of the medium. It is brutal, it is harsh and it is everything that the characters in Vince Gilligan’s masterpiece deserve. Every single iota of story pours from deeply-realized characters–people–and their selfish and self-preservational motivations that they masquerade as selflessness. BREAKING BAD is a wound rubbed raw; it is something sorely lacking in today’s storytelling: it is honest.

Each and every episode is accessible, adhering to the old adage that every (insert serialized medium here) is someone’s first – or their last. Each episode makes me want to do the two things that every installment of a serialized story should aspire to: keep watching and dig deeper into the story, to see what came before. BREAKING BAD’s continuity is irresistible, not expectant.

I know I’m not watching BREAKING BAD in the optimal manner; I did, after all, miss out on a large portion of the experience (one that, as Ray Bradbury said, truly, will never happen again): the anguish between episodes (I took it in a small dosage this season), the hellish existence between seasons.

It’s like going to a bookstore and reading the end of the book. The cover interested me and I happened upon a random page.

And I kept reading.

And reading.

And reading.

And before I knew it, I had finished the story. And then, the book was in my hands, out the door and ready to be ripped into from the beginning.

Now that the series is ending on Sunday, I will walk out of the bookstore with the book whose ending I will soon learn and go back to the first page and experience a different journey, the DVD-watching one, without commercials, in binges and bursts, the trade-paperback version of BREAKING BAD. For me, the journey is just beginning; I entered ever further than en media res. I know what happens, now I get to experience HOW it happens.