BREAKING BAD. REVIEW

Over the course of five years, Vince Gilligan and his friends pieced together a world with the attention to detail of a Faberge egg. They fashioned a compelling protagonist in the form of a deeply flawed yet charismatic genius. They created a business in which he excelled and portrayed the family that frequently drove him insane. Then there were blurred lines between the two. In this way, he created a life for Walter White that many of us can identify with.

Breaking Bad did something none of the other classic shows did. Vince Gilligan, the show's creator, set his protagonist in motion. Television has always been about inertia. And, while the first generation of shows from television's post-millennial Golden Era broke free from many of the medium's conventions, they kept this one.

Vince Gilligan began Breaking Bad with no such restrictions. Unlike Tony Soprano, who spent seven seasons running errands in North Jersey, Walter White embarked on an epic journey, tracing an arc reserved for literary and cinematic icons such as Jay Gatsby and Michael Corleone.

Gilligan wrote his own version of The Great American Novel while transforming Mr. Chips into Scar Face. On anabolic steroids.

Visually, 'Breaking Bad' is one of those shows that is both stylish and beautiful, with cinematic-quality photography and editing that puts a lot of films today to shame, where there are a lot of visually beautiful ones but also some that look painfully amateurish. The music is always in the right mood, never too loud, never too soft.

'Breaking Bad' writing is a great example for all shows of how to have a lot of style while also having a lot of substance. The dialogue is thought-provoking and tense throughout, with a darkly wicked sense of humour and heart-tugging pathos. The stories are textually rich, intimate, tense, and layered, with a deliberate but taut pace.The direction couldn't be better.