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.
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Have you watched the TV series Fargo? TV at its best, IMHO.
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