10 TV Shows That Completely Shifted The Balance Of Power In America

5. Breaking Bad (AMC: 2008-2013)

If Mad Men kicked things off for AMC, Breaking Bad cemented them as one of the must have channels on your cable package. In what is now being likened to The Wire in discussions about the greatest shows of all time, Breaking Bad ended its epic run last year and created a frenzy of people on NetFlix trying to catch up in time to witness the show's finale. This is one of the greatest examples of the power 'word of mouth' can have in determining a show's fate. The audience for this, much like the plot of the fifth season, was a slow burn, built over time, eventually becoming event viewing. This was a story of a high school chemistry teacher who squandered the potential of his genius and finds out that he is dying. In an attempt to not leave his family poor and struggling, he teams with a former student to begin cooking and distributing meth. Their product, because of the precise science used to create it, is a hit and things take off from there. Now the adventures of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman are forever ingrained in the pop culture realm, but more than just a show about meth, crime and cancer, Breaking Bad is about transformation. Over the course of five full seasons, we watched Walter White become something darker; a family man just trying to take care of his kids before he passes eventually becomes an amalgam of greed and selfishness - sort of like Gollum in Lord of the Rings, but instead of a mythical ring, Walt is possessed by money, power and respect. So actually he's more like a rapper from the late 1990s...