David Pierson: Breaking Bad

John Caldwell argues that broadcast and cable networks regularly employ a series of industrial textual practices—programming events, network IDs, making-ofs, video press kits, promo tapes, and ancillary digital media—to theorize and pronounce its presence in the American multichannel flow, as well as “insider” knowledge to audiences about their programming. He asserts that a critical part of network branding practices is the construction of a brand name identifier and a visual logo to establish an essential foothold within the multichannel clutter of cable programming (Caldwell 2006). After its format change in 2002, AMC Network decided to deemphasize its full name (American Movie Classics) and replaced it with AMC, primarily because the network was no longer pre-1950s classic movie channel like the Turner Classic Movies. As with many cable channels, the network began placing its AMC moniker or “bug” on the lower right corner of the screen during its programming for ease of channel identification by viewers. AMC also began employing “snipes” or animated advertisements popping up on-screen during its programming to promote up-coming programs and program events. AMC created a new slogan "Story Matters Here" to accompany its new logo and to emphasize its expanding reputation as the place for original dramatic TV series and specials. AMC’s original series and specials are accompanied by a series of print and video press kits distributed to cable operators and media outlets. The network also heavily promotes the premiere of its original series and specials as a major programming event. For instance, AMC provided audiences with an on-screen countdown clock in the movies preceding the new season premiere episodes of Mad Men and Breaking Bad .

Internet websites, electronic bulletin boards, and online chat sessions all serve as venues for broadcast and cable networks to mediate knowledge about themselves to their audiences. These sites provide a wealth of ostensible insider material: interviews with cast and crew, production stills and screen images to download, and cyberchats with program stars and producer-writers. He asserts that many shows like The X-Files (1993-2002) and Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-1999) have actually acknowledged that they have solicited input from fans on scripts and characters (Caldwell 2006). AMC provides a separate series-oriented web-page for each of its original series and specials. Breaking Bad ’s web-page includes full episodes, sneak peeks of upcoming episodes, behind-the-scenes videos, information on cast and crew, graphic novel games based on series characters, trivia quizzes, criminal aptitude test, press clippings, downloadable series images, link to sign-up for the series newsletter, and series’ merchandise and DVDs. While these promotional and marketing texts may often appear as textual distractions from the primacy of the show’s main texts—the episodes, nevertheless, they do function to provide new, distinct avenues for audiences into the series while serving to enrich their viewing experiences. Barbara Klinger (1989), in her seminal work on digressions in cinema spectatorship, argues that promotional and advertising materials serve to extend the social life of a primary text (film, TV series) within the competitive capitalist economy. Although network websites tend to make less money than they cost to develop and maintain, they do reap financial benefits from building and sustaining strong viewer loyalties, as well as intensifying the quality demographics that exist for shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

Situated in the American Southwest, one of the nation’s fastest growing regions, Breaking Bad , which is shot in and around Albuquerque, New Mexico, captures and expresses both the region’s dramatic, geographic beauty and its dark, socio-economic undercurrents. Since the passage of NAFTA, the region’s long border with Mexico has been the hub of immense commerce and trade both legal and illegal. The modern southwest is on the cusp of an expanding neoliberal economy promoting global trade, increased corporate profits and entrepreneurial initiatives, along with minimizing the government’s role in business and everyday life. With the exception of California, it is a region with low taxes, few labor unions, poor farming conditions, and limited government-supported social programs. As such, it is a place with great disparities of wealth between the rich and the poor. Working and middle-class Americans often must work multiple jobs to support their families. Walter White, for example, is an underpaid public school teacher who must work another job after school and on the weekends to support his pregnant wife and his disabled son. The southwest region also contains the nation’s largest concentration of resident and immigrant Latino Americans. It is an area rich in the myths and traditions of the Old West, especially those of the western outlaw figure, while busy building new myths and traditions for its inhabitants. Gilligan sets Breaking Bad in the heart of the southwest in New Mexico, the self-described “Land of Enchantment.” In order to address the complexity of topics and representations in the series, this critical anthology will be divided into three interrelated sections. Each section features a range of interdisciplinary perspectives focusing on the series.

Section one, “The Contexts of Breaking Bad ” examines how Breaking Bad is located in and addresses several contemporary social contexts, including cultural, historic, institutional, and socio-economic. My chapter argues that, through its characters and narratives, the series exemplifies several core neoliberal discourses and policies, especially in the areas of law enforcement and penal law, drug policy and its enforcement, criminality and entrepreneurism, and public schooling. As a public school teacher, Walter White is part of a public institution that is derided by neoliberal critics as bureaucratically incompetent, ineffective, and a danger to the capitalist market and democracy. Through circumstance and choice, White becomes an exemplar of neoliberal entrepreneurism as he transitions into a free-thinking criminal who carefully weighs the risks and benefits of his criminal actions. I further assert that, through the figure of Hank Schrader, Breaking Bad reveals the racial assumptions that underpin America’s drug policies and their enforcement.

Dustin Freeley places the series in the oft-harried existence of our modern daily lives, which includes social networks, smartphone technologies, and the growing ease with which we multitask. Exploring our modern cultural obsession with economies of “time,” Freeley analyzes the ways in which Breaking Bad expresses concerns about recouping wasted time, building a surplus of future time, efficiently utilizing present time, and dividing and constructing present time into multiple, simultaneous realities. In examining the commonly associated effects of crystal meth: euphoria, sustained energy, alertness, and a sense of power, the essay contends that these effects reflect latent social desires in our contemporary society. For Walt, facing his own mortality is a prison sentence wherein part of the punishment is recognizing time spent and time remaining. Freeley asserts that Walt’s choice to begin “breaking bad” is a symptom of our culture’s obsession with controlling, preserving, making up for, and extending time, as well as a side effect in a late capitalist society where time is often synonymous with commerce and wasted time represents lost time.

Locating Breaking Bad in the context of modern science and its practices, Alberto Brodesco examines the particular ways in which science is placed, displaced, and misplaced throughout the series. Breaking Bad provides its viewers with various legitimate scientific domains, like the high school classroom and the Gray Matter pharmaceutical company, as well as illegitimate ones: the RV, the domestic and industrial drug laboratories. Unlike the fictional mad doctor or scientist who is led by his insane desire to defy nature’s boundaries, Walt’s goals are more modest in design: he wants to leave his family wealthy when he dies. Following modern science’s principle of instrumental rationality brings him to make controversial decisions not only to cook meth but to watch Jesse’s girlfriend die or to poison a child. Walt’s alias “Heisenberg” provides an interpretive frame for all of Walt’s actions putting all of his rational actions under the guise of Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle” which maintains that a scientist or meth chemist can never stand outside of their experiments or productions, and every scientist is confronted with the impossibility of directing his actions and thus, is confronted with unpredictability and chaos.