Breaking Bad At 10: 8 Ways It Changed TV For Good

1. Binge-Watching And The Netflix Boom

There were a number of factors in Breaking Bad's rise over the years, but a crucial one was Netflix.

When the show found its way onto the streaming service - especially here in the UK - it opened it up to a vast new audience, and it's no surprise that the show was at its biggest when Netflix were streaming new episodes just after the aired in America, nor that it fast became one of the service's most binge-watched shows. The show hit Netflix for the first time in 2011, and watched its ratings increase over the next two years; it was revealed that 50,000 people binged Season 4 in one day before Season 5 premiered, for example, and the show has frequently been cited as one of the company's most binged ever since.

But Breaking Bad was as good for Netflix as the other way round. Back in 2013, the year Breaking Bad's final season aired, its original offerings were just fledgeling series. House of Cards and Orange is the New Black were popular, but didn't have the same global audience of Breaking Bad at that time. It was a show that put Netflix on the map as much as any of the Original Series, and with it the concept of binge-watching. That particular phrase was Collins' word of the year for 2015 but, in the years preceding that, you can find Breaking Bad commonly cited as a show to binge-watch in correlation with its debut on Netflix in 2011.

What do you think of Breaking Bad and its legacy? Share your thoughts down in the comments.