Breaking Bad versus The Wire: A Tale of the Tape

Maybe it is my fascination with comics, but I love a good struggle for supremacy. As a nerd, I categorize, rank and label all facets of my pop culture diet. My favorite movies change as new ones are introduced. My favorite bands battle it out with each new release. And my favorite comics, don't get me started. I wrote a facebook note over a year ago that posited my top two favorite television shows as The Wire (#1) and Breaking Bad (#2). I said, "depending on how it ends, Breaking Bad might beat out the Wire." Well, now is the time to see if that actually happened.

You have the right to remain...smoldering.

Firstly, let me say that comparing the two shows is difficult. The Wire is about a city, Breaking Bad is about a man. Both series deal with corruption and the loss of innocence but The Wire demonstrates how institutions are flawed while Breaking Bad shows how people are flawed. Also, there is no central character in The Wire. Jimmy McNulty is, hypothetically, the main character. However, he is pretty much absent from Season 4 (which is also, arguably, the strongest season). And it isn't like his absence is a theme of the show, he isn't missed or discussed. Breaking Bad has been the story of Walter White from the first episode. And, although the show grew to encompass a pretty large cast of central characters, the creators made a specific effort in the final episode to bring it all back to one man.

Uncertainty personified.

Let's look closer at the implied goals of each series and how well they achieved these goals. The Wire was five seasons long (60 episodes) and each season dealt with a different aspect of life in Baltimore. The first season was all about the drug war with a group of police officers from narcotics and homicide being brought together to take down a drug lord. This first season was a very balanced look at life on both sides of the law. Perhaps the biggest innovation was in portraying criminals as three dimensional humans with insecurities, failings, pride and a position in society that did not offer them many alternatives to crime. Season 2 (most people's least favorite) placed the drugs and the police on the back burner, focusing on corruption in a dock workers union. This update of On the Waterfront had plenty of pathos and had a statement to make about employment in the city. The third season brought the cops and drug dealers back to the foreground but managed to work politics into the mix. The bureaucracy that hamstrings the police while allowing crime to flourish was the major target of the season and also brought the McNulty/Stringer Bell plotline to a close. Season 4 looked at the educational system in Baltimore. With four young men introduced and followed as they found themselves tempted by the easy money of a criminal life, this season still had police and criminals but it dug even deeper into how the city produces such violence and loss. The fifth season is usually labelled as being the most ridiculous. The institution being targeted is the media and how facts take a back seat to sensationalism. This is all tied back into public policy and a pretty outrageous scheme by McNulty to keep his department funded while they attempt to target the newest player in Baltimore's drug scene. The ending of the series is one of the most compelling I have seen as all the surviving characters are shown falling into their various fates. Just like in real life, there are happy endings and sad ones. Not everything gets resolved and life just continues.

One of these kids ends up just fine, the others...

Say what you will about the second and fifth seasons of The Wire but I always found it to be a very watchable, compelling show. The struggles of Bubbles, a homeless heroin addict, moved me to tears at least once. I was emotionally and intellectually invested in the characters on the show. My cousin says that Breaking Bad was more entertaining, but I would be hard pressed to agree. I was thoroughly entertained by the sprawling cast of characters in The Wire and completely caught up in their lives. The body count was high and heartbreaking on several occasions. Although lots of the series dealt with the machinations of police commissioners and school boards, it never felt like you were being educated. It was all highly watchable, is what I'm saying.

You speak so much truth.

There is a serial killer plot in the fifth season that seems to be the target of any disappointment aimed at the show. Moments strain credulity and  some fans argue that the show stepped off the path from realism and into satire with that season. The scariest bit, to me, was that it didn't seem all that far fetched and (when read as a satire on the Bush administration's excuses to go to war) it wasn't out of place in the zeitgeist. True, maybe the tale of a Baltimore cop isn't the right place to try and tell big socio-political allegories but I was willing to go for the ride.

Also, what a lot of people forget is that there are other plotlines going on in that same season that do work pretty well. The strain on realism was the largest flaw here.

 

Breaking Bad never really had that problem. From the bath tub gag in Season 1, the show announced that some crazy shit was probably going to happen. There was a heightened reality to the show that made giant magnets and plane crashes seem reasonable. Perhaps it was this non-reality that kept several characters at arms length, emotionally. The only grounded character, to me, was Jesse Pinkman. Introduced in order to die right away, Aaron Paul managed to work some depth into his portrayal and (in my estimation) made the writers push themselves to round him out. His work on the show created some of my favorite emotional moments.

Yo, Bitch, etc.

Breaking Bad started from a character deficit. Most of Walter White's friends, enemies and family were cliched, cartoonish or one-note. As the show progressed, characters like Hank and Marie developed while others (like Junior or Skyler) stayed static, or worse, floundered for direction. One of the main ideas of the show was to demonstrate how everyone's life is affected by this one man's decision to become a criminal. The stronger a character was, the more specific the effect of Walter White on them. A lot of people reference Ozymandius (the third to last episode of the final season) as their favorite episode of Breaking Bad but it is just the most plot heavy. More "stuff" happens in that hour than in previous hours but there is almost no emotional impact. Bryan Cranston has to do the heavy lifting of playing a man who is angry, devastated, wounded, lost and scheming all at the same time. He pulls it off well but no one else sells their awkward character changes in that episode with as much grace.

Not an image from Breaking Bad, just a pic from my phone when I tried to get Cranton's autograph.

This, then, is the weakness in Breaking Bad. Shaky writing gets wall papered over with Big Action or Crazy Ideas. The sheer lunacy of the Ozymandius episode couldn't hide the flaws in the characterization. Both shows take a few episodes to find their voice. I wasn't hooked on either The Wire or Breaking Bad until about episode 4 of each. That is a lot of time to devote to shows you are only lukewarm about at first but you get to be glad you gave them a chance. Almost all shows have to be embryonic in their pilot forms, so I can't fault either for their initial weakness. However, Breaking Bad was guilty of skipping over story elements that didn't make much sense (how did Brock get poisoned, exactly?) and carrying the viewer through with gusto.

"So, if I were to just...hand you some berries, you would go to town on them, right?"

The seasons in Breaking Bad don't really break down into different ideas so much as different threats or arcs. The first season was famously cut short by the writer's strike so it is about Walter White creating Heisenberg as a legend. The second season of Breaking Bad featured a flash forward gimmick in the cold open of a few episodes that teased some horrible event at the White household. Once it was revealed, the knowledge was underwhelming and not really worth the wait (it did mark the biggest repercussion of Walter's selfishness but this show works better on a small, intimate scale). The next use of flash forwards (in Season Five) have a much better affect and resolve into a secondary cliffhanger of sorts that pays off better than, say, the last season of Lost. Season 3 and 4 follow the ascent of Walter and his deadly game with Gus Fring. Season 5 is about the cost of maintaining one's power and the consequences of becoming the bad guy.

I don't know if you were gay but you were scary as hell.

I think the strength of Breaking Bad will be remembered as the actors more than anything. The work of Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, Dean Norris, Bob Odenkirk, Betsy Brandt, Anna Gunn and RJ Mitte was continuously top notch. They elevated the material which was, at best, pulpy and engaging. Finally, I think this is the one idea that makes the show not as strong for me as The Wire. It is a character-driven show that was better at plot. There were jaw-dropping twists and white knuckle thrills but most of the characters were pushed and bullied into life by the cast rather than a guiding vision by the writers. When the whole show is centered on one man, and his characterization is almost perfectly realized, the faults in the other characters seem less glaring.

As an entertainment, I would say Breaking Bad entertained me more than The Wire. Just like Die Hard entertains me more than Magnolia. However, I love Magnolia more than Die Hard because it makes me think and the situations that arise seem to do so from character (even when external events influence a character in Magnolia, their reactions are very human). When characters in The Wire bounce off one another, they all tend to do so organically. They are all given little moments to shine. The plots (mostly) take a back seat to the people. In Breaking Bad, the people (mostly) take a back seat to the plots.

I guess I am just a character guy. The Wire is safe for now in my heart but you could do much worse than watch Breaking Bad. It is still pretty damn amazing.