I'm only partway through the second season of "Breaking Bad," the AMC phenomenon that garnered award after award. I don't want to say anything in-depth quite yet—not until I'm through this season, which will put me almost halfway through the entire series. Very quickly, though, I'll note that "Breaking Bad" does make for extremely engrossing TV—but only because the show's creator and main writer, Vince Gilligan, is a master of the "train-wreck effect," i.e., you can't look away because there's always the potential for some smoking, twisted disaster, or the disaster's already happened and you're only just now driving by it. Someone should make a study of the psychological hooks that TV writers weave into their narratives (or maybe this is typical Film Studies 101 stuff... I dunno).
I remember loving "24" because its story structure was exactly like that of a Dan Brown novel—just cliffhanger after shameless cliffhanger, not suspenseful because you thought that this time, Jack Bauer was going to die, but rather because you needed to know how Jack was going to get out of his latest mess, and what the body count would be. "Breaking Bad" uses a different sort of catnip, but catnip it is, and I'm hooked.
More on this engaging show later.
_
Tuesday, December 01, 2015
"Breaking Bad": prefatory
1 comment:
READ THIS BEFORE COMMENTING!
All comments are subject to approval before they are published, so they will not appear immediately. Comments should be civil, relevant, and substantive. Anonymous comments are not allowed and will be unceremoniously deleted. For more on my comments policy, please see this entry on my other blog.
AND A NEW RULE (per this post): comments critical of Trump's lying must include criticism of Biden's or Kamala's or some prominent leftie's lying on a one-for-one basis! Failure to be balanced means your comment will not be published.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Have you watched the TV series Fargo? TV at its best, IMHO.
ReplyDelete