Breaking Bad and Doing the Work
All that knocking is hard work, y’all.
Breaking Bad is widely regarded as one of the best TV shows of all time, and for good reason. It’s part of that classic first wave (along with Mad Men and The Sopranos) of “prestige” programming that suddenly made watching TV something you could write seriously about, instead of something you did at 3AM after one too many Tequila Fanny Bangers1 or on humid Saturday afternoons when none of your friends had returned your calls and you were imagining them all out at the beach without you, laughing and making up secret nicknames.
Yes, that was curiously specific.
You probably know the fundamentals of the show: Pitched as Mr. Chips breaks bad, it follows meek, passive-aggressive high school chemistry teacher Walter White after he learns he has lung cancer. Unable to afford the necessary treatment and faced with leaving nothing behind for his family, he desperately launches a new side hustle cooking meth. He becomes quite good at it—so good he eventually has to keep his cash in places like oil drums and entire self-storage units and begins wearing a pork pie hat that would look ridiculous on anyone who didn’t have literal barrels of cash lying around2.
The appeal of Breaking Bad seems obvious: Good writing. Sure, but that’s not very helpful3. Saying that people like Hamlet because of “good writing” isn’t helpful either. But even if you list some of the specifics of the show that make it great—the perfect, intricate plotting, the knockout performances, the exceptionally well-developed characters (especially, of course, Walter White himself), the beautifully detailed setting—you’re still not getting to the core of it.
Put simply, there have been a lot of great shows. And all of the great shows have good plotting, great characters, detailed settings, etc, etc. Most of these shows do well, get watched, and then we move on—but Breaking Bad remains a big part of the public consciousness. It gets referenced all the time, and it obviously has enough lingering interest to support one spinoff show (Better Call Saul, also excellent, and for many of the same reasons) and one sequel film (El Camino). The shows that maintain their hold on the zeitgeist years after they end always have something special, something subtle that sets them apart, and if you aspire to come up with your own stories that have that kind of hold on people it can be useful to understand how it works. So what is it about Breaking Bad that makes it so singularly interesting?
It’s the work. Creator Vince Gilligan and his writers understand how important it is to do the work.
Congratulations On a Job: Done
First off, let’s get one thing out of the way: Walter White isn’t a brilliant chemist.
He’s a very good chemist. He obviously understands the science very deeply, and he knows precisely how to set up, calibrate, and run a lab. White is intelligent, resourceful, and well-trained. But he’s not brilliant in the sense of having incredible, unique ideas4. While we never learn the specific details of Walter’s involvement with Gray Matter, the company he co-founded that went on to have a valuation north of $2 billion, we know two facts. One, when Walter left the company it only had a small number of patents and was years away from the breakthroughs that made it so successful. And two, Walter’s share was only worth $5,000. That’s not a company with ground-breaking science in its back pocket. That’s not a company where Walter White is laying down incredible new ideas.
No, Walter’s brilliance comes in the form of discipline. He makes the greatest methamphetamine ever known not because he sees some kind of innovative way of making it, but because he labors over the process. Even in a rusting RV out in the desert with equipment scavenged from the local high school, Walt insists on doing things meticulously, correctly. Walter does the work—the right way, every time. He doesn’t skip steps or approximate anything. He does the work5.
And the show glories in it. One of the defining visual motifs of the Breaking Bad universe is a the work montage: A character decides that something must be done, and so they set about doing it, and the audience gets to see the work being done in compressed and stylized fashion. In the very first episode there’s a montage depicting Walt and Jesse Pinkman cooking out in the desert for the first time. It’s sequence a little over a minute long that communicates the precision and discipline Walt brings to the project (and the lack of it that Jesse brings)6. What’s remarkable about it and the many sequences like it is how it uses precious screen time to show the audience just how much work goes into this, and how vitally important the work is. Jesse wants to get rich fast and easily. Walt shows him that nothing is easy—the people who win, in any profession, at any level, are the people who do the work.
Perhaps the greatest example of how the Breaking Bad universe drives home the idea that it’s all about doing the work actually comes from the prequel series, Better Call Saul. Ex-cop and all-around competent henchman Mike Ehrmantraut7 suspects his car has been tagged with a tracking device, and he drives to a junkyard to look for it. What follows is over three minutes of Mike meticulously tearing his vehicle apart, piece by piece. The creators didn’t have to show us all of this. It could have shaved the montage down to an efficient half minute, or implied it as opposed to showing it. It’s a remarkable sequence, and it underscores the fundamental rule of this universe: The people who survive do so by doing the work, no matter how sweaty, boring, or laborious it is8.
And the reason the work is so valued in this story is simple: Because god-given talent is boring9.
The One Sucks
An extremely low number of people have managed to be highly successful without a lot of training, practice, and experience on top of naturally ability. And it’s much more possible to become great despite a lack of natural ability than it is to be great relying on nothing but a genetic disposition.
More important to any discussion of why a story works is this: Being “A Natural” is really dull, because there’s no struggle. No cost. Being born as The One with super special powers and a prophecy stating you’re going to save the world entire is an appealing fantasy, but there’s no conflict baked into the premise, and it robs your story of any kind of urgency. Characters who go from country bumpkin to Arch Wizard of All Time in one hazy afternoon of soul-searching is a terrible, lazy, no-good trope.
That’s what makes a character like Walter White so compelling. If you thought he was brilliant, you’re just buying his hype—Walter never misses a chance to press a grievance or claim genius. What sets Walter apart from his enemies, by and large, is that he isn’t afraid to do the work. He glories in the work, actually. He loves to work out train schedules and coordinate prison assassinations, he enjoys the minutiae of working out problems. There are no flashes of genius. There are just the results of long nights working on the science and doing the drudge work involved.
This is also why Walter’s greatest enemy is Gus Fring. Gus also does the work. He runs his front business, a fast food restaurant, with meticulous care even though it serves only to mask his drug business. He plans everything down to the tiniest detail. He accounts for every penny spent and every loose end. When Walter meets Gus it seems like a match made in heaven.
But there’s a thing in superhero movies where the villain often turns out to simply be the inverse of the hero—General Zod to Superman, or The Iron Monger to Iron Man, figures with essentially identical powers separated only by their ethical orientation. Their battles thus devolve into fistfights with special effects because they’re essentially the same. That describes the Gus Fring/Walter White combat on Breaking Bad. Neither one is skilled with a weapon, but they both have resources, they both can get others to do terrible things for them, and they both are happy to do the work. And Vince Gilligan and the writers of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are happy to show us that work, and that’s why were still talking about this show a decade after it ended.
Me, I prefer to hire neighborhood urchins to do my work, which is why this essay originally made so many regrettable Pewdiepie references.
Next week: The Whitest show ever made: Mad Men
These are just shots of tequila, but you slap your own ass every time you drink one. Shouting “Bouillabaisse!” each time is entirely optional.
This is how I describe my retirement plans when people ask.
Take it from me: Good writing is also not very lucrative <ugly cries>.
This also describes my writing career, amiright? … I’ll show myself out.
Me, I once ate three slices of bologna for lunch because I didn’t have any bread or other sandwich fixings and the supermarket is across the street from my house but I didn’t want to put on pants.
The one quibble you can legitimately have about the verisimilitude of Breaking Bad is that the show doesn’t end with Jesse Pinkman blowing them both sky-high in a meth lab accident.
I cannot be the only person who fears folks like Mike because of their competence. People who just, yanno, know how to do thinigs are basically Super Villains as far as I’m concerned.
And there are people like me, who once wore the same underwear for three days because the laundry facilities were in the basement and it was dark and scary down there.
Not that I would know <ugly cries>.