Now What The Hell Am I Supposed to Watch??
In the afterglow of the Breaking Bad finale there is this nagging dark spot. Now, won’t everything seem, well, less than 'Bad'?
I don’t think I’m alone. The one consistent thought friends had on the DABB (Day After Breaking Bad) was, in effect, that everything would pale by comparison and frankly, nothing could match the thrill of the last three weeks as Breaking Bad broke towards its monumental ending.
"I have no idea what to watch next," said one irked co-worker. Another frazzled friend said she watched Homeland after and regretted it. "I felt like I spoiled the great buzz I had. I shouldn't have watched it," she said.
I might have been feeling the loss of the series more than the triumph of the episode--even as I was watching. Scrawled in my notes from the finale is, "feeling so sad this is the last show." And it’s all underlined.
"Felina," the final episode, was so good I had to watch it again Monday night, listening for bits of dialogue more carefully, and bits of art direction I was too rushed by deadline to write about – like the opening scene of Walt cloistered in the snow-covered car. As an unseen police car rolled by, its blue lights flashing, Walt was entombed in a shell of blue ice – blue crystals, of course.
Or, the image in the final scene, with the overhead camera swiveling slowly as it zoomed out from an impossibly high crane mount above Walt's body, like his spirit ascending.
Was that fade away over the top in more ways than one? There has been criticism the final scene seemed too poetic for a character who was, after all, a lying, murdering drug pusher. Walt wasn't redeemed, but Vince Gilligan and the Breaking Bad writers did give him opportunities to rewrite his obit. When Walt patted Gretchen and Elliott Schwartz on the back, he said to them, "This is where you get to make it right." It’s as if Gilligan gave Walt that chance, too.
So, what do I do next? I have problems.
Because of the Saturday Night Live parody of Homeland last year, I can't watch the bratty daughter or the weepy-face Carrie very seriously anymore.
The Good Wife? Excellent direction, snappy pace, but the characters move around on a chess board with no real boundaries. But it was the five-season boundary – the risk of every moment – that gave Breaking Bad its pulsing heart.
Boardwalk Empire? Not for me. It replaces the wit and ingenuity of Breaking Bad with grisly murders heaped on by the pound.
(And it's here where I have to admit skipping two season of The Walking Dead because it started to feel like a weekly chop-fest. I know, I know. My loss. I am going back to Season 3, to try that one again, being a David Morrissey fan.)
So that leaves me with anticipating the next seasons of House of Cards or Orange is the New Black. Those are great shows, especially OITNB, but binge watching is a lonely, isolated experience. There’s no communal excitement over a last episode. There is absolutely zero viewer camaraderie. The water-cooler experience is about how much you watched and when, not what you watched and felt...
So what to watch? Whatever it is, it won’t be like the show that I truly cared about and walked around thinking of almost every day during the last three weeks. I cannot remember a story quite having that effect on me, except in novel form.
That was the true accomplishment of Breaking Bad. It was one-of-a-kind -- absorbing us through its construction, its performance, its story and its artistic vision, as well as, or better than, any other long-form narrative has.
So, what the hell am I supposed to watch now?