På overfladen handler Breaking Bad om en high school-kemilærer, som får konstateret dødelig kræft, og derfor begynder at lave og sælge metamfetamin, så han kan efterlade penge til sin familie. Serien er fyldt med fantastisk skuespil, flotte billeder, medrivende karakterer og ikke mindst nervepirrende scener med ægte valg og ægte konsekvenser.Brombi skrev:Hvad handler Breaking Bad om? Alle snakker seriøst om den....
Under overfladen handler det om verdens måske største løgner, der af egen fri vilje går fra at være en fejlbehæftet, men trods alt betænksom familiefar til at være en bundegoistisk Tony Montana-type. Den gode Chuck Klusterman har skrevet følgende om dette tema:
[Breaking Bad] seemed like this was going to be the story of a man (Walter White, portrayed by Bryan Cranston) forced to become a criminal because he was dying of cancer. That's the elevator pitch. But that's completely unrelated to what the show has become. The central question on Breaking Bad is this: What makes a man "bad" — his actions, his motives, or his conscious decision to be a bad person?
There's a scene in Breaking Bad's first season in which Walter White's hoodrat lab assistant Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) tells Walter he just can't "break bad," and — when you first hear this snippet of dialogue — you assume what Jesse means is that you can't go from being a law-abiding chemistry teacher to an underground meth cooker. It seems like he's telling White that he can't start breaking the law after living a life in which laws were always obeyed, and that a criminal lifestyle is not something you can join like a club. His advice seems pragmatic, and it almost feels like an artless way to shoehorn the show's title into the script. But this, it turns out, was not Jesse's point at all. What he was arguing was that someone can't "decide" to morph from a good person into a bad person, because there's a firewall within our personalities that makes this impossible. He was arguing that Walter's nature would stop him from being bad, and that Walter would fail if tried to complete this conversion. But Jesse was wrong. He was wrong, because goodness and badness are simply complicated choices, no different than anything else.
