Breaking Bad, did it ever almost "jump the shark"?

It shot through the wall, but didn't he have it set up to shoot "up and down" while it was turning from right to left. I may be wrong, but it looked like an amazing setup to me.

 

Probably, I don't remember. Still highly implausible regardless.

 

....but Walter White

 

No.

And Better call Saul is awesome too!

 

another aspect that bothers me...he's a science guy, not a gun guy. just goofy. they wanted walter white to go out on a win, and do it in a brilliant way, but couldn't think of anything plausible, so they went with something implausible.

 

"Sneaky Pete" on Amazon Prime is an excellent show too. It also has Bryan Cranston playing a villain.... And playing it so well. If you liked BB, you'd probably like this too.

 

You underestimate the psychological profundity of the show. It's not simply that White 'appears' to change; more significantly, the show's progress is a slow reveal and impowerment of his true nature. There's a reason that he spends his very last moment gazing at his own reflection: he is--to say the least--a malignant narcissist.

 

You consider this a miniseries?

 

Everybody forgets that Mr. White tested the automatic machine gun in the desert for a solid day before he drove into town to see the drug dealers. He knew it would work because of science: he had tested it and worked out all the bugs to the point where it was totally workable... as long as he held on to the remote garage-door opener. (And that was the one bit of tension in the whole setup.)

 

Yeah, Sneaky Pete is an awesome show. I love it more than Breaking bad.

 

The Path.

 

That's high praise. I'll have to look into how to access it.

 

you would have thought Walter would have went with a bomb instead of a machine gun - what if they had him park his vehicle in a different spot - or merely at the wrong angle - what if some of the guys weren't in the same room .....a lot of things have to go exactly right or that to work... those guys at the compound were super paranoid - wouldn't they have been expecting something like this(?) - that was probably the most implausible part of the series ...for me....

 

Let's not forget, it was a TV show. Reality is occasionally suspended.

 

Mythbusters showed that unlike dissolving people, and causibg nice explosion with triwing a pinch, the set up with the machine gun in the truck works very nicely.

Yeah, they jumped the shark with Fring fixing his tie looking like Twoface from Nolan's Dark Night. That was unnecessary and laughable to the point that I thought it was a joke. As for planes colliding above Walter's house, the world has seen even stranger coincidences. And Hank not noticing Walter's crime - that's the blind spot. Akin to how mothers do not see or refuse to see that their daughter is molested or raped by the father or smth. There is a monent when he ponders the W. W. initials in the dedication. And asks Walt "Walter White?" Half mocking and yet with this awkward smile as if he is about to realise it.

 

Yes, all these are signs of the sophomoric writing and lack of realism. Sure, there have been stranger coincidences, but almost every character is ultimately developed or presented in a way that defies belief as the story goes on. And the drawn out way they dance around Hank refusing to look at Walt as Heisenberg gets a bit silly. But so much of BB snaps you out of believability in favor of ridiculous writing. It also gets old how each character will just randomly launch into a soliloquy or anecdote that is not at all in their nature. In Season 4 this got intolerable. The dialog was just awkward and forced.

 

Has this series been bettered yet since it's demise in 2013?

 

Mad Men was far better. I also prefer GoT.

 

I don't believe so. Not in my book, anyway.
Though, Fargo is/was great. (and starts again tonight!)

 

Neither of those match up to "Breaking Bad" in my opinion, though obviously especially with GOT versus BB we're talking about vastly different genres.

"Awkward Realism" is not really something I ever thought would be the genre such a great show would start with, but that's what "Breaking Bad" did.

My favorite of recent times next to BB and "Better Call Saul" has been "Bates Motel."

 

I know what you're talking about, but I don't think BB ever got *that* bad. I think the larger controlling plot and tone of the show became less realistic, but there were *always* individual moments on the show, personal moments and conversations, that were more uncomfortably, awkwardly realistic than anything I've ever seen on TV. I always point to the at-first seemingly innocuous, funny scene with Jesse eating a dinner with Walter and Skyler and asking about where she got the pasta salad. A show unafraid to do something so seemingly bland yet cringeworthy in its awkwardness is one of the reasons I think the show succeeded.

Most people can't relate to being a flamboyant drug maker and dealer or getting tied up in mafia drug business. But some can relate to packing stuff up to sell on eBay to try to make enough money, or the somber, lonely aspect of being terminally ill, or of being the bland, wheat-toast pushover of the family, or Skyler and Walt's realistically ambivalent, awkward marriage, and so on. I'm probably more in tune to this because I've just started re-watching again. I think the early stuff is more along these lines, and then the show *did* get somewhat more flamboyant and theatrical.

 

I had no trouble believing Hank never thought of Walt as a possibility, even though he was a DEA agent. He knew Walt as a mild-mannered teacher, the sad sack, emasculated figure he was when the show started, who wasn't a tough guy like him. I think it's probably difficult for anyone to get past their own conviction that "I know him, he'd never do anything like that."

 

Examples?

 

I think it succeeded because the audience suspended disbelief out of sheer boredom to get to the racier sequences. It took huge risks to get and keep that audience, e.g., the tug at the end of the first episode.

Clearly the show is depending on all that, particularly ignorance about what people with Walt's education or Jesse's experience would actually do or say. The rest goes to a certain demographic that was targeted, e.g., gamers, home theater enthusiasts, etc.

The problem isn't that Hank would have trouble believing it. The problem is the specific ways in which the show danced around it. When Walt went out of his way to assure Hank that WW pointed in another direction, helping Hank's conviction that Gale was Heisenberg, and then a few scenes later was trying to convince Hank of the opposite, it just got very coy and tiresome, like the writers couldn't decide how Hank would figure it out. They were more interested in dragging this out in sophomoric ways than in adhering to the characters they created, to the point where everyone had to break character multiple times to accommodate the silly twists and turns that were essentially bad writing/filler.

There are many, many examples and they all seem inspired by the Tarantino Tim Roth anecdote from Reservoir Dogs. It never fails to pull me totally out of the scene. Perhaps the most egregious example is where Walter Jr. sleeps over at WW's apartment after Walt took the beating from Jesse and was bloodied. In the morning Walt launches into a painfully long anecdote about seeing his father with Huntington's disease. It's a very long soliloquy that is not at all broken up by W Jr., who remains silent throughout. Finally the story ends, and in one succinct sentence, Walt Jr totally undermines the entire point made in the anecdote, rendering it totally pointless filler. You're like, "I want the last five minutes of my life back." There are other examples. The entire story concocted by Walt and Skyler about the gambling--the way they dote on this, and the way they feed this to Hank over dinner is so painful and out of character.

For me, though, the worst are the extended sequences with no dialog but with obnoxious audio/video effects. Like when Hank is suffering his "condition" before getting his promotion and for many scenes thereafter. The slow mo. The filter. The postproduction effects. It is so amateur.

 

Why in the world did you keep watching a show that you found so "sophomoric"?