BREAKING BAD AND THE PRECARIOUS PLEASURES OF GOOD TV

By Todd Hasak-Lowy

In 1999, The Sopranos premiered on HBO. Rather quickly David Chase’s story of contemporary New Jersey mob life made every previous drama ever aired on television seem trivial, superficial, and just a tad bit embarrassing. Bolder, smarter, thematically richer than anything before, “The Sopranos” gave birth to Good TV.

Good TV is not merely good TV (i.e. better-than-average TV), but TV that is so good it deserves to be taken as seriously as great films and even great Literature (yes, with a capital “L”). As such, watching Good TV and discussing Good TV are qualitatively different than watching and talking about other kinds of TV. The emergence of Good TV is a rather big deal in the recent history of American culture. It may well be one of the top two or three cultural developments of this still-young century. ¹

I’ll admit I have some, as people seem to say an awful lot these days, skin in this game. I’m a writer. A writer of books. And as everyone knows, books have been getting the shit kicked out of them by movies and TV for many decades now. It seems unlikely that these visual mediums will ever fully kill books. Instead, they’ll force books to continue retreating further into their distant, trivial corner of the culture.² So yeah, I don’t come to any conversation about TV neutrally (but who does?).

But however much my stance would seem to be informed by some primal, I-resent-you-for-kicking-the-shit-out-of-the-my-medium animosity toward TV, I should also mention that I watch TV. Not a ton of it, not every night, but I watch it, and like watching it. A lot even. Moreover, I think about it and talk about it, and, most relevant to this piece, much of what I watch is considered Good TV. Lately I’ve been watching Breaking Bad. I started on Netflix, but now, like many millions of others, I am watching it on AMC, each Sunday. ³ I am now watching it in this way because I can’t wait to see what will happen, because I do strongly believe Breaking Bad is Especially Good TV, and because the end of this show has become a Thing Of Consequence Happening Right Now In Our Culture. Reason #3 has recently swelled to the point that I can’t help wondering if Breaking Bad won’t transcend Especially Good TV and become (cue the music) Historic TV.

All this rapt watching and thinking and talking and reading about Breaking Bad as an important chapter in the short history of Good TV has got me wondering: what does it mean to invoke the concept of Good TV (whether we explicitly use...