Breaking Bad, Season 1 review: Bryan Cranston shines at the start of a saga

In the September of last year, the programme many have hailed as the greatest American television drama of all time came to its dramatic conclusion, five years and sixty two episodes after its inception. Now that the dust surrounding Breaking Bad’s final episodes has finally cleared, what better time to revisit the show’s first season, originally aired back in 2008?

American popular culture has forever cherished a love affair with drug dealing; The Wire for instance; one of the most critically acclaimed US TV shows in history; focused on the efforts of the Baltimore Police to crack down on the rampant local narcotics trade. Breaking Bad is something else though, in that it takes its cynical and uncompromising stance from the perspective of the criminals themselves. Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is a quiet and mild mannered chemistry teacher living, to a certain extent happily, with his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) and his son Walter Jr. (RJ Mitte). Of course, events take an unpleasant turn on Walter’s 50^th Birthday with the discovery that he has contracted terminal cancer, and it’s not long before he’s cooking methamphetamine with former student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) to generate extra money for his family’s future. The show’s sharp and intelligent scripts draw a wealth of black comedy in the early episodes of the series by juxtaposing Walt’s timid persona with the murky and violent world of illegal drugs, but more impressive than this is the sriptwriters’ grasp of the importance of character. By the conclusion of the first season, there are no cut-out protagonists, with every character given time to develop into a believable person, and still better are the performances given by the actors themselves. Cranston is perfect as Walt, presenting a dark portrait of an utterly pathetic man adapting to a life of crime and creating a character that can be pitiful and terrifying almost simultaneously. Aaron Paul also shines as amateur dealer Jesse, both angered by his former teacher’s slip into the drugs trade and impressed by his professionalism and attention to creating a “reliable product”.

Where this first season can be accused of making mistakes is in its plotting. Always intended as a slow burner, the programme certainly takes more time than it needs to on subplotlines in order to stress the importance of its moral decisions and to develop its characters. However, it’s all too easy to get bogged down in a plot detail while using this technique, which is exactly what happens on several early episodes. While these do wonders for giving extremely minor characters lives of their own, they lack enough action and conflict to make them particularly entertaining or watchable. Fortunately, the scripts pick up the pace towards the finale of this seven episode series to set up a shocking set piece conclusion.

So a first series which is in many ways transitional fails to instate the dramatic, overarching plotlines employing in later seasons for consistently exciting episodes, but Breaking Bad is at its best when it’s somewhat understated anyway. By mixing constant development of character relationships with some intense set pieces the series manages to create television drama at its best by the final episodes, and paves the way for the darker and more spectacular seasons to come.

7/10