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

If the show is loyal to its foreshadowing, the way it hinted at Gustavo’s death in the elevator with the steady, persistent bell, Walt is not going to survive this season. He could sell or run the car wash and be way, way ahead, but he’s greedy and ruthless, and going to die. I’m glad the series is quitting while it is ahead, but this season just seems like housekeeping. Just making sure Walt makes his appointment with the bullet, or the knife or, as Mike puts it, the bomb that will strike him down for his hubris.

9

Breaking Bad fans need to back off of Skyler, seriously. There is one recurring female role in the show, and she’ll always be wrong because what she represents is the shrill, nagging harpy. The woman who won’t let her husband live his most authentic meth-cooking life. Even to the point that she’s been scared of him, she’s laundered money for him, put hired muscle on her ex-boss to protect his empire, and is still with Walt after everything he’s done to her. The end of the second episode of this season is his kissing her unresponsive form and trying to whisper poison into her ear to justify the measures he’s driven her to. She did those things for her family, like he’s flooding the Albuquerque drug market with blue meth for his family.

10

I’m skeptical of the things people are allowed to justify as done for their family. People can justify the proliferation of assault rifles because one day they might need or want one to protect their family. They can defend a man who covered up child rape because the university he worked for and the honor of it are important to their family; they can strike out with their shock and anger at not having the Golden Aegis of Football extended to their particular Astroturf dreams and ignore the way their need for football generates a desire in the sport to please them at any cost. Not all families are considered equal in America. It might benefit poor families to have a more rigorous social net that prizes allowing families in poverty to build lives for themselves, but first we’ve got to assure every person making over 250K but less than a million that, yes, it is important that they have a big house, at least three expensive cars, private school for their kids–all hardships and crosses they must bear that are way more important and deserving of our pity and understanding than someone trying to stretch an allocation of food stamps across a household of children and adults who cannot find work that will keep everything running. They’ve got cell phones! A refrigerator! The rich bastards! There is a lot more ambient empathy in the culture for people who own small businesses or have educations or have white skin. The hardships of these people are the ultimate injustices that human beings face. A white dude gets cancer? NOOOOO, WHITE PEOPLE ARE SUPPOSED TO LIVE FOREVER.

11

There are perfectly good reasons to have cathected the character of Walter White, because he often says really true, really important things about how a person’s life can get away from them. How a person can make all of the “right” choices and still come up short. Having a giant amount of privilege doesn’t mean your life is going to be one long afternoon with your head under the mashed potato dispenser. Shit can go wrong in your life that no amount of money will fix, but any amount of money will mitigate. At final tally this show has a lot of unacknowledged issues of race, a lot of issues having to do with whose life story is worth rooting for. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been amazing performances given by people of color–Giancarlo Esposito being at the very top of that list. His character, his back story, his tight, controlled merciless cold anger was perfectly executed. But now that he and his people are dead or on the run, we come back to a mostly white party of people left alive, plotting how to start over again. With the White family and their white lawyer, Jesse and Mike and Lydia and Hank and Marie all circulate around each other, waiting for the no doubt painfully white finale. That’s what we’ve got to look forward to.

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