I like mad men quite a bit & i do think the first season is pulled back from in quite a few ways, but considering what’s come out about Matthew Weiner after the fact i do also think ur instinct here is correct.
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i always have to stop my rewatches of mad men around when they torture joan
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wait i’m like halfway through season 5 and she’s certainly been through some shit so far, is there more?
poor joan…
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oh ew
…that was otherwise a very good episode though. had to just sit there for a while and process my many murky feelings. get that 5%…
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As a teen or whatever I remember both mad men and breaking bad bothered me cuz I just thought the main guys sucked so bad/were way too relentlessly cruel and I didnt rly comprehend the wish fulfillment/identification element that was so much of the contemporary (teen esp.) discourse.
I ended up liking mad men way more at the time just cuz of how badly don ends up totally eating it & burning out for most of those later seasons. When he’s just like laying in his apartment eati g chips not doing anything to me it was like - alright, exactly . not that i necessarily have the same read now but at the time it felt like a marked contrast 2 the breaking bad arc.
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the problem with the netflix sabrina show is that it doesn’t have a talking cat i thought was a real cat
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Man I fucking hated Breaking Bad. Except for the big fat guy.
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Mad Men and Better Call Saul were both much better shows than Breaking Bad, which I didn’t hate but will probably never think about again
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I never actually watched breaking bad so I feel I can’t judge it properly, but I am glad the era of “check out how fucked up this guy is” prestige TV seems to have ended
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right, and Matthew Weiner at least came up in the church of David Chase so it makes sense that he kind of knew what he was doing
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whereas vince gilligan was the guy who wrote funny x files episodes that weren’t quite as funny as the darin morgan episodes
breaking bad worked best as a black comedy and whenever the show forgot this fact, when it worshipped walter white’s supervillainy, it screwed up
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The best part of the show is when he throws the fucking pizza and it lands on the roof. That’s just…cinema
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the best part about pizza roof was vince gilligan had to ask people to stop driving to the breaking bad house and throwing pizzas on the roof
i watched both breaking bad and mad men exactly once because literally no one would ever shut up about it and most of the stuff went right through me except for pizza roof, tentacle porn, office dance number, fly chasing
im glad i did though beucase it seems to be weirdly formative media for peopel who grew up with it so there are SO MANY BREAKING BAD MEMES
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walter white gets really annoying in the last season but vince gilligan understands being a solid citizen sucks ass and criminality is cool
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[old man from mad men voice] the octopus is pleasuring the fisherman’s wife
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I like Breaking Bad and I wouldn’t really say that I got out of it that Walter is Cool and Normal and Aspirational. I know all the sigmachads idolize being a dark puppet master, and that’s where the popular culture idea of Walter comes from, but. He’s pretty dumb. His plans only really work because of heavy luck or other people fixing the problem for him, when they work at all. His inherent arrogance (You’re goddamn right) locks him into his eventual death. He’s the antagonist, albeit not the “perspective villain”.
Jesse is the sympathetic, holds-the-show-together protagonist for me, and for much of it is antagonized and abused by Walter. He can’t keep getting away with it!!!
I only watched the first season of Better Call Saul and it’s better, especially because Odenkirk is so good at riding that line between comedy and drama, but also fundamentally the same story of a man’s arrogance.
I know pop culture has turned it into endless memes and weird character cult around Walter that makes it difficult to watch now, but having seen it twice, I think it’s very good with compellingly novel character relationships. Not to say that you should like it, or that anyone is wrong. I think all the points here are reasonable. Just how I feel about it after the second viewing.
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I watched Breaking Bad with my dad and it took him so long to grasp that Walter White really was a terrible person. He got past watching Jane die with some “well that was a bad thing but I get why he did so” rationalization and I think it took until Walt literally poisoned a child (which I predicted an ep or so beforehand which he thought I was way off on) for him to finally grasp how wicked he is. I really think it is just hard for some people to grasp that the protagonist of a show can be the villain too.
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there’s lots of fans of The Thick Of It who think the peter capaldi character is good at his job. people seem to have trouble distinguishing characters acting purposeful and talking about how good they are at something they are from like an evaluation of how that actually plays out, but thankfully this only applies to TV and doesn’t carry over into any other area of real life.
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I’ve watched Breaking Bad exclusively through 3 minute clips youtube and facebook shove at mez
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