Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Breaking Not All That Good

Here's another commonplace post entry. It comes from the March 3, 2008 issue of The New Yorker. It's about the television show Breaking Bad. Unfortunately, I forgot to note the author.

I don't feel won over by the show. It's more than two-dimensional, and yet somehow less than three. Eighteen years ago, Twin Peaks gave us the thrill of artfulness, black humor, weirdness, and mystery combined with the letdown of meta-shaggy storytelling and notional characters. A wide range of shows in the post-Twin Peaks television landscape have occupied the same inorganic, two-and-a-half dimensional world. Breaking Bad is very well done, but it has a bleakness that seems to be manufactured for no good reason. In its spiral down toward nothingness, Breaking Bad pulls viewers down with it, just because it can.

No comments: