8 Utterly Ridiculous TV Castings That Totally Rocked Anyway

1. Bryan Cranston As Walter White €“ Breaking Bad

I have a theory about Vince Gilligan's decision to cast Bryan Cranston as Walter White in Breaking Bad. According to the trivia page at IMDB, the bosses at AMC were reluctant to cast a well-known comic actor in a serious and at times incredibly brutal drama. Looking at it from their point of view, employing a man who was known as Hal the incompetent patriarch in Malcolm in The Middle for six years as a drug lord would seem to undermine the show's credibility before it even began. In this case though, I think Cranston's time on the sitcom actually helped to shape Walter White's characterisation in astounding ways. At the beginning of Breaking Bad there were many parallels between Hal Wilkerson and Walter White. Both were bread-winners to steadily growing families, stuck in relatively low level jobs and emitted a palpable sense of dissatisfaction with their lot in life. I'd even go so far to say that Walt is merely a future version of Hal, and while we never see the chemistry teacher make such a gormless expression, the photo to the right of the images above is practically interchangeable with both characters €“ save a pair of glasses and a moustache. So when we watch Walt approach Jesse for the first time or break into a warehouse to steal methylamine in season one, you can't help but picture Hal in the same situation. Similarly, the scene where he strangles Crazy 8 in episode three is so disturbing because we for all intents and purposes see a familiar character perform a very unfamiliar act. On top of this, Walt's gradual change in appearance is a fantastic marker for the moral decline and destruction of Hal, the ordinary well-meaning man to the selfish and manipulative Heisenberg. The man on the right of the screen would rather keep an extremely dangerous drug distributor hostage and feed him regularly to avoid taking his life. Conversely the man on the left would watch a woman choke to death, sign off on multiple murders and poison children just to fulfil his own self-serving agenda. It's difficult to judge whether or not Vince Gilligan had intended any of this when he made the case for Bryan Cranston to undertake the huge endeavour that was Breaking Bad. Knowingly or not, casting him in such a role undoubtedly had a hand in constructing what is one of, if not the greatest TV character of all time. Come on, who really thought Hal from Malcolm In The Middle would ransack the Emmys as the psychotic lead in a gritty, drug-focused drama? If you said you did, you're most certainly a liar.