I have never seen this show, but of course, I have heard about it. For those who liked it, do you think it may have helped to romanticize, if not even normalize Meth use in the general public? Or was it always clear that this was for entertainment purposes only? I don’t know, since I never saw it.
I also had similar apprehension about Dexter, that TV series about a serial killer. Have shows like these worked to deflate the soul, erase the morals of America?
The whole series is a warning that greed and drugs destroy the body and soul.
There was not a single frame of Breaking Bad that made meth use look attractive or glamorous. It was always portrayed as destructive, as were the people involved in it. Walter White never touched the stuff he cooked up.
I literally binge-watched the show every single night and stayed in an entire weekend finishing watching it.
There’s no romanticization in BB, or Dexter. They’re both very much about bad people and not at all shy about them being bad people. Now like the Godfather they’re very good at making you root for these bad people, but you feel guilty about it. If anything they’re good for the morals of the country, they show bad as bad.
Without a doubt it portrays a seedy criminal world in its darkest base behavior that you’d never want to go near. Completely opposite of romantizicing it and wholly appropriate for the subject matter. A great study in human nature. Watch it!
It made me want to break to the bad side. It made me start doing something, growing weed, that turned out to not be a wise choice. I learned something about the game Walter played though, in real life. Had a super close call where cops were IN MY HOUSE after a break-in and they didn’t search the whole place. But the main thing I learned, is once you start to play the game, and the money starts rolling in, it becomes extremely difficult to stop. It takes on a life of its own. As Walter’s career trajectory tragically depicts. I was not making a lot of money, I never figured out how to scale up, but it was enough that I didn’t stop, even when I got to the point where I wanted to.
“For those who liked it, do you think it may have helped to romanticize, if not even normalize Meth use in the general public?”
Absolutely not.
The exact opposite.
In this show it’s the centerpiece of the darkest world imaginable to man. And it’s only a plot device.
Walter White could have been a moonshiner in the 20’s and the story would have been as good.
On the show, everything about meth and the industry was extremely negative. The character developments of everyone, as they relate to the drug life, were interesting.
SPOILER ALERT... One of them became more evil as the show progressed, and one of them became less evil. All of the characters were excellent.
I tried to watch “Dexter”, but could not get into making a serial killer the hero. It was a creepy show.
I don’t think that it glorified meth. I think the show should be a warning to the world of what will happen if you reduce the American middle class to poverty. If you want to see organized criminal activity that will collapse governments, reorder the world, and eventually destroy the establishment then that is one way to do it.
It's a TV program. Entertainment. Fantasy. Make believe. Not real.
One of the best series ever.
I watched it originally and then watched the marathon of it last year.
And somehow I am still a normal, well-adjusted 70 year old who hasn't started doing meth.
Flawed theory.
These shows don’t appeal to everyone.
I watched all of Breaking bad, and it just seemed at its core to be about a dumbass who couldn’t shoot straight, and as a result screwed up the lives of everyone who he owed loyalty to. He screwed people over he didn’t need to screw over, did stupid things that put him in a corner and forced him to kill relative innocents, and in the end got his brother in law, who had his family’s back when he had cancer, killed in the desert. I though it was depressing, outside of the interesting aspects of learning how smart drug dealers camouflage their operations, and a few clever plays he made.
I got done with it and was happy to be rid of it.
Dexter was more entertaining, as he was always killing bad people, and it had a dark humor at times. But as with the shows like this which are good, as time went on toward the end, they wrote out of character, had Dexter do dumb things he wouldn’t have done, and in the end he spares a genuinely evil person, effectively kills the sister who was always loyal to him, abandons his son and girlfriend, and it ends with him miserable and isolated.
For some reason these writers seem to need to ruin the character’s lives at the end of the stories by making them do dumb things they would never have done. Even Burn Notice suffered from this toward the end. I suspect the writers who start the good shows, end up by season five or six wanting some down time so they allocate writing duties to newbies who feel they have to change things to put their own stamp on it and not just be formulaic.
And by the end the show is a different character doing things that screw everything up.
My very conservative elderly mother just binge watched all five seasons, staying up to 4:00 in the morning a few times. She loved it and would tell me about which episode she had just finished. I would ask if “Pollos Hermanos” or “Vamanos Pest” meant anything to her to to gauge where in the series she was. I’ve rewatched the entire series twice. I told her to watch “Better Call Saul” next.