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Aug. 1st, 2013 07:22 amI'm more excited about Breaking Bad right now than I've been about any show since Lost at its peak. Which was far more exciting than this even, but probably not in a way that was good for me.
The Wire (and probably only The Wire) was, is, will be a better show overall, I admit it. But Breaking Bad is more enlivening for wretches for whom watching only avails, never the having watched, and I'm one of those.
Maybe it's also that there's something very '90s about Breaking Bad. And I don't mean Odenkirk, who's nothing without Cross (who's nothing without Odenkirk). Like certain '90s movies, I guess I mean, the sort we associate with Tarantino but that he largely spun out of the Coens and Goodfellas and (proto-'90s) Badlands and Lynch. And that he may have trivialized by making the criminal life a norm rather than the violation of one, thus dropping the complex of feelings about whether the normal life deserved violation, might itself constitute one. The annoyance of not knowing either way, surely that was behind the famously infinite irony spiral as much as anything else was. Breaking Bad isn't '90s (in this sense) in its sympathies, but consistently is in its procedures. It's a bit like the careful post-mortem of a flawed earlier mindset by someone who's truly moved on. Which maybe will be symbolically addressed if Jesse ends up having I'M VERY EXCITED
The Wire (and probably only The Wire) was, is, will be a better show overall, I admit it. But Breaking Bad is more enlivening for wretches for whom watching only avails, never the having watched, and I'm one of those.
Maybe it's also that there's something very '90s about Breaking Bad. And I don't mean Odenkirk, who's nothing without Cross (who's nothing without Odenkirk). Like certain '90s movies, I guess I mean, the sort we associate with Tarantino but that he largely spun out of the Coens and Goodfellas and (proto-'90s) Badlands and Lynch. And that he may have trivialized by making the criminal life a norm rather than the violation of one, thus dropping the complex of feelings about whether the normal life deserved violation, might itself constitute one. The annoyance of not knowing either way, surely that was behind the famously infinite irony spiral as much as anything else was. Breaking Bad isn't '90s (in this sense) in its sympathies, but consistently is in its procedures. It's a bit like the careful post-mortem of a flawed earlier mindset by someone who's truly moved on. Which maybe will be symbolically addressed if Jesse ends up having I'M VERY EXCITED
