Another choice here that will definitely spawn some debate. Breaking Bad has been a consistently excellent show since it first aired in 2008. Vince Gilligan had a plan, employed an excellently-cast group of actors to play it out and it was exciting from the word go. However, whatever excitement that season 1 delivered was blown out of the water by season 2, and again by season 3. Like a good thriller novel, it established stakes and made them even higher with each chapter introduced. Breaking Bad can be analysed from a lot of perspectives and compared to many other pieces of fiction. One show I have always likened it to is Showtime's Weeds, in which Mary Louise Parker gets herself into the drug game, and with each passing season finds herself getting deeper and deeper into the world of crime. The comparisons between the two don't need to be spelled out, as Breaking Bad obviously deals with the drug game too. But where Breaking Bad differs from Weeds (apart from the tone being 100 times more serious) is that the quality of the show actually improved as Walter White got deeper into the game. The journey we take with this character is absolutely enthralling and as he slips deeper into the world of danger and power, he becomes terribly more fascinating. Equally as fascinating is Jesse Pinkman's journey, which sees him question the morality of his decisions more and more as the show progresses and he becomes the light to Walter's dark, wanting to escape from the world he finds himself in, but never quite able to. We feel for Jesse so much, and as the show neared it's end, the most important resolution a lot of the fans wanted was for Jesse to get a deserving conclusion. The show burns and burns and burns for 5 seasons right up until possibly the most exciting and terrifying episode the show has ever produced, "Ozymandias" where everything comes to a halt and pretty much explodes, leaving the last 2 episodes feeling more like an epilogue than anything else, delivering a thoroughly satisfying and almost full-circle ending to one of the best shows TV will ever know.
Joe is a television junkie. A film fanatic. A pop culture know-it-all. An interactive media masters student, and a bass player.
22 years old and Irish. Thinks Netflix is a Godsend.
