Almost finished with Season Six. It's a good series, in some ways better crafted and more tightly written than BREAKING BAD. No extraneous characters and no dud episodes that don't advance the larger narrative. And they do a good job building suspense when the audience knows which characters have to be delivered intact to their BREAKING BAD future. But I'm not sure I'd recommend it. In the end, this comes across as skillful fan fiction. It wouldn't exist without BREAKING BAD, but it's totally unnecessary to the parent show. On the other hand, without BREAKING BAD, no one would watch this very slow, deliberate narrative. I feel like I watched sixty hours of of backstory notes that, for whatever reason, had been developed into a TV show.
You'e speaking strictly from a story perspective, though. Every episode of this show was such a feast -- visually, the editing, the acting, dialogue, everything. It lost some of the drama over time but IMO every episode of BCS was a thing to be savored. The anti-binge show, if you will.
Maybe it's just me, but paragraph one and two seem kind of at odds. Not that one can't make both sets of points. But I don't think it's true that nobody would watch it without "Breaking Bad", from a quality/story perspective. (If you want to argue the BB branding got it attention, it certainly did. But that goes for so many works that are quality works.) But we'll never know of course, other than I suppose tracking down someone who knows zero about BB and having them watch BCS (I've seen some folks online who have only seen BCS and really like it). The show is very different from "Breaking Bad" in a lot of ways, and neither shows actually needs the other I think. I'm glad BCS wasn't non-stop BB easter eggs and original stories. They the shows don't need each other, but also pair nicely is one of the strongest points for both in retrospect. I'd recommend BCS before BB to be honest, though I'd highly recommend both to anybody interested in quality television. The only people I've run into that don't like either show are *some* folks who are only into genre stuff, like just superhero stuff or horror, etc.
I just didn't think that the Jimmy/Kim half of BCS justified its very lengthy exploration. That was dragged out interminably. I always sighed a bit when the show would return to that storyline from Mike's.
My wife had watched -- and adored -- two full seasons of BCS before ever seeing a single episode of Breaking Bad. I myself didn't watch any of BB until it had already wrapped up -- and then I binge-watched the series twice in a couple of short months. My wife continually told me she had no interest in watching BB, but as it happened, she fell into watching BCS from the first airing, just because she happened to be in the same room when I put it on that night. I kept telling her she was missing tons of subtext, not getting references, and couldn't appreciate dynamics between characters we knew from BB. She insisted that the show worked on its own as a standalone series, and that she didn't need that side of it to enjoy the show for what it was. I eventually convinced her to watch Breaking Bad during the downtime between BCS seasons 2 and 3, and of course she then "got" so much of what she was missing. And she loved it, of course. But she definitely would've and could've enjoyed it as a show in its own right, straight through the end. However, I do think the last handful of episodes, where Walt and Jesse show up, would've been confusing.
One thing I do NOT want to see is 43-year-old Aaron Paul reprising his role as Jesse Pinkman. Enough already.
Saul /Jimmy mentions “ Pinkman still on the run” I would like Kim to get hitched up with Pinkman … drum roll / song north to Alaska.
One thing “ Make the character older. He’ll pull it off regardless. Bit of mileage left. Preferred El Camino to last BCS season.
Patrick Fabian has surfaced as a big bad guy in the most recent episode of "Kung Fu" and is likely to figure in a few more this season.
I think he is a terrific actor. Got to disagree on the "aging thing". After BCS ended we started BB again (second time) and I find that Mike looks significantly younger in that series.
Not me. I'm not the one who brought up a prequel. And even if I had the skillset to do it, I'm too lazy.
A younger but still recognisable Banks plays a cop in Gremlins. Given the film’s supposedly set in Pennsylvania, I’d like to think it might’ve been the actions of Spike et al who drove Mike to break bad.
