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.