9. The Whites Breaking Bad
It's difficult to decide whether to place the Whites among the best families in television or the worst. The events that made up the five seasons of Breaking Bad certainly brought out the worst in each of the Whites and their extended family at some point, but even in the context of their many, many objectionable actions a part of me still loves all of them. Well, most of them anyway. Before Walt's cancer came along, the Whites spent the majority of their time struggling to make ends meet with a baby on the way whilst enjoying each other's company and creating family scrapbook moments. Once they received the news of his illness, they handled it as best they could, provided more support than Walt could stand and Skyler even started working right after giving birth to their newborn daughter to help cover the cost of his treatment. Individually, we were also given a panoramic view of everyone's personality that the audience either warmed up to or disliked accordingly. Personally, I found Hank's macho, bruiser cop routine particularly unpalatable in the early seasons for example- but he went on to display his commitment to his family on multiple occasions and was endowed with angelic levels of patience to carry a loaded gun around as a job requirement and not use it on the insipid Marie, let alone be happily married to her. On the flip side, there are some ramifications of the family's decision-making that we didn't quite see. Don't get me wrong, the team behind Breaking Bad did a fantastic job showing the extent of the stress put on the Whites after Walt's crimes came to light, but imagine how Walt Jr must've felt when he found out the website he created to get donations for his father's cancer treatment was being used as a front to launder dirty drug money? How is Holly going to cope growing up without a father, only to later learn of the despicable acts he committed in the name of family? No amount of therapy will ever truly repair that damage. The very fact that the Whites are such a divisive family is a testament to the quality of writing and direction Vince Gilligan and co. displayed with Breaking Bad. Instead of creating two-bit hollow characters who rebounded from one catastrophe to another, they constructed people with real conflicts for the audience to wrangle with. Unfortunately, they did miss the opportunity to put us out of our misery and make Marie the victim of Walt and Hank's game of cat and mouse during the latter stages of series five, but we can't have everything can we?