Mythology
Breaking Bad and Futurama
By Martin Felipe
August 15, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Breaking Bad isn’t so much revolutionary as it is a scrappy, under-the-radar rascal that plays by its own rules. It’s not an obscure offering. It has certainly enjoyed its share of critical high fives and award back pats, but it’s always lived in the shadow of its AMC older brother Mad Men. While Mad Men is high-end, Breaking Bad is blue collar, Mad Men is a martini, Breaking Bad is beer.
The thing about Breaking Bad is that its status as secondary to Mad Men has allowed it to enjoy less media scrutiny. The pressures of being the prom king have to be hard on Matthew Weiner and his Mad team. Not that they haven’t lived up to the pressure, but Breaking Bad has carved out its own little corner of the television social structure. To make yet another analogy, if Mad Men is Jacob, Breaking Bad is the Smoke Monster.
When last I spoke of Bad, I compared it to a spaghetti western. I think this style of exaggerated realism has held true in its recent season. The season premiere features an elongated ten minute scene wherein drug kingpin/fast food impresario Gus Fring methodically slaughters one of his henchmen before our heroes Walt and Jessie’s eyes. The tension of the scene builds to an almost unbearable level over the course of a sixth of an hour. Long takes, exaggerated close ups, silences coupled with heightened rhythmic dialogue, all create one of the most intense televised scenes since Tony Soprano ate onion rings while listening to Journey.
This is what I mean when I say the show plays by its own rules. The general rule in television is that scenes shouldn’t last more than 30 seconds to a minute, and a minute is pushing it. Yet I can’t imagine a single eyeball turning away from the screen during Gus’s threatening dance of death. This intense block of television suspense is the payoff of three seasons of slightly stylized, true-to-life storytelling.
To bring this all back to the mythology, the show explores the contrast between straight laced academia and the world of organized crystal meth in New Mexico, but the oppressive beauty of the landscape coupled with the not-quite-extreme stylization gives the show a gritty, fantastical edge that allows for unconventional though oh so effective, moments like the one above. The show plays in its version of the real world, no hobbits or vampires here, but it does so in a way that heightens the reality to the point where it gives the New Mexican desert an almost supernatural quality, ominous and foreboding.
Of course, none of this matters if the show were not populated with compelling characters, the ultimate necessity of any great story. And this cast has created such a menagerie of fun, empathetic characters. My favorite changes every time we cut to the next one. Jessie, Hank, Gus, and Saul are all a pleasure to watch, and they're backed up by ringleader Bryan Cranston’s Walter White. I must admit, I wasn’t a fan of Cranston’s mugging in his role as Hal on Malcolm in the Middle, but here he creates a brilliant, obstinate, loving, impulsive, foolish genius in Walter White, a man both finding his true calling, and finding himself in over his head. It's an amazing accomplishment for Cranston, worthy of the acclaim heaped upon him.
Speaking of shows living in the shadow of giants, no matter how great Futurama gets, and it gets pretty great, it will always be The Simpsons' younger brother. It’s not that The Simpsons doesn’t deserve its status as a genuine pop culture phenomenon, of course it does. Despite the obligatory griping about how it’s past its prime, the show, at its best, is as good as television has ever gotten. Problem is, what gets lost in the face of this is that the same can be said of Futurama.
A zombie show, reanimated from cancellation, Futurama has always been the cleverer of the two, while Simpsons the warmer. This is not to say that there isn’t cleverness in Simpsons nor warmth in Futurama, but Futurama has a tradition of trusting its audience to understand the layers of wit that Matt Groening, David X. Cohen and their team infuse into every episode.
This is, of course, appropriate for the fan base, which includes a high proportion of nerds. I’m sure by now most nerds have accepted the term with affection and, though we could debate the hair-splitting difference between nerds and geeks, a nerdy pursuit to be sure, I’ll just move on and hope we can all agree that we Futurama fans are nerds.
Nerds don’t like being condescended to. We prize intellect and want our entertainments not to coddle, but to challenge, speak to, and embrace us. Futurama, a show made by nerds, for nerds, is just that kind of entertainment.
It is both a parody of science fiction convention (the nerdiest of genres) and a science fiction narrative in its own right. It pokes holes at the genres tropes while embracing them. It has its own science fiction mythology, while making gentle fun of the narrative need for mythologies. It adheres to a pretty solid continuity for an animated program while mocking the nerd desire for strict continuity.
The targets of its comedy range from the extreme nerdiness of mathematics and science, to the lowest depths of poop jokes. It doesn’t explain the jokes or even acknowledge that the joke is there. Shows that do this provide a major pet peeve of mine in television comedy. The obvious example of this is the laugh track, but I’ll also point to the extreme reaction shots and music stings of a show like Scrubs, which punctuate the joke, just in case the viewers didn’t realize that the joke is there. Futurama, on the other hand, tells its joke, then goes on to the next one, figuring that you’re smart enough to understand it. Besides, if you missed it this time, you’ll catch it the second time around.
Another of Futurama's great hallmarks, like its big brother Simpsons, and other comedy classics like Arrested Development, is that it’s in multiple viewings that the show really shines. While much of television is disposable one-and-done viewing, revisiting old episodes of Futurama not only reveals more jokes, but often greater thematic depth. There’s been many an episode that I’ve been unimpressed with the first time but have gone on to love with further viewings.
So this time around, I really didn’t get too into the mythologies of Breaking Bad or Futurama, I pretty much just raved about them. I figure since they’re both pretty much shows on the fringe, a little hyping can’t be a bad thing. And they keep you in the air conditioning during this extremely hot summer we’re having. So quit reading this and go watch them before summer turns back into a television dumping ground.