The Whitest Show On TV: 11 Statements About AMC’s Breaking Bad

By Guest Contributor Garland Grey; originally published at Tiger Beatdown

1

I am totally hooked on this show.

2

The actors and the writing are solid. The plot lines are interesting, and the dialogue is fresh; it is very well done, and it is part of the much-lauded television renaissance. It always finds a way to reveal character in really interesting, visually terse ways. Last season revealed so much about the status of Walter White’s moral vacuum with a single shot of a potted plant on a patio. The cinematography and visual palette is engaging, and the show is very hard to stop watching once you absorb a emotional defense against its weird, slow, anxiety-based drama.

[There are spoilers under this cut, you have been warned.]

3

I’ve found the show stops being so much mental work when you start rooting against Walt. Watching Walt manipulate and hurt Jesse Pinkman allowed me to make peace with the idea of Walt dying or going to Federal prison. Which allowed me to sort of sit back and be an unemotional observer instead of pausing every few minutes and being torn up by the tension.

4

There is a problem with the way Breaking Bad portrays the aspirations of my race, people who look like me, and how those aspirations justify the deaths of people of color. There is a moment in the fourth season where Gustavo Fring orders Jesse to go do some bit of grunt work to leave Walt to clean up the mess from the cook alone, and Walt recruits three ladies from Lavandería Brillante to finish the job in the underground meth lab. This is the space Gustavo slit a man’s throat in, that he has been clear about being willing to murder people over. These women are not killed (which was a distinct and clear possibility) but they are deported back to Honduras. Their entire lives upended so that Walt could sit on his ass, shake a cup of coffee at a camera, and get one over on his boss. He had every reason to think he’d be dumping those women into barrels of acid, and he did it anyway.

5

There’s a mythology that undergirds this country’s understanding of race and seeks to explain why white people succeed at the things they do…and the name of that mythology is white supremacy. What I see in Breaking Bad is a story that is partially about how easily white people can dominate and outmaneuver people of color. The show invokes this dangerous, cutthroat drug world in order to create tension and then deifies Walter by showing us how expertly he masters it. The men he comes into contact with are considered to be human anomalies in their ruthlessness, yet Walt murders every single one of them. He gets people killed because he wants the privilege to make the rules in established systems of conduct; he wants to do things his way. Doing Things His Way is what makes Walt the hero (or antihero) of Breaking Bad. He got a bum hand but he played it like a real star, and the graveyard of dead contacts, henchman, distributors, and dealers is just collateral damage. I haven’t finished the 3rd season yet (I watched the 4th, then the 1st and 2nd) but taking into account the last episode on Sunday, I’ve counted 5 dead white people in the entire series, and two were from the last episode (the German dude and the henchman). The other three were Spooge, Jane, and Gale. That’s a lot of dead people of color versus dead white people.

6

I said on Twitter that Breaking Bad was a “white privilege fantasia.” Think about the one most special thing about Walt, the thing that gives him power: the purity of his meth. If you look at the breakdown of who can create pure meth it is Gale, Jesse, and Walt–all white characters. Possibly Maximo, Victor, and the chemist in Mexico could have attained such purity but all of them die after attempting it. So purity in the series is tied to whiteness.

7

The last name of the main character is White.

8

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