My 50 Favorite Television Shows of the Decade: 2010-2019

There was a problem facing television as a medium in the 2010s, and if you've been online or reading my year-end lists then you know what I'm talking about: there's too much damn TV.  It's been an outright epidemic over the last 10 years, with new shows and delivery systems for those shows popping up at a rapid rate, far past anyone's ability to keep up with it all.  Somebody once aptly described a TV critic's role as being more like a book critic's nowadays -- there's too much for one person to consume, so you have to make peace with that and curate your experience by finding a niche.

Unfortunately, the influx of TV also led to more bad shows.  The rise of streaming and binge-watching has caused series to indulge in being nothing more than formless pieces of content.  Sometimes it can feel like every writer who knows how to construct seasons, episodes, and even scenes died near the end of the previous decade.  But the sheer magnitude of television in this decade means that there was still alot to love about television.  This list chronicles the best of the best from the 2010s.

The rules: These eligibility rules are slightly more complicated than the ones for the other two lists, so read carefully.  In order for a show to be eligible for this list, it has to have aired more than half of its total episodes within this decade.  Also, only those episodes that aired in this decade are taken into consideration when placing and ranking that show.  For example: 30 Rock is eligible for consideration because 72 of its 138 episodes aired after January 1, 2010 -- that's 52% for all the mathematicians out there -- but the only episodes that determine if it can make the top 50 are Season 4 Episode 9 through Season 7 Episode 13 (the episodes that aired in the 2010s).  Also, only continuing series are eligible for the top 50, while miniseries get their own mini list.

Pilot Talk 2015: Better Call Saul

Every TV season, networks bring out a new crop of shows, in hopes that they'll be the next big hit.  Pilot Talk is devoted to figuring out whether these shows are worth your time based on the first episode.

Better Call Saul seemed like a bad, bad idea.  TV spinoffs and prequels have a gigantic precedent of being disasters that you're better off avoiding.  That's not to say that it's impossible for one to be good, but for every Angel, there are about 100 Joeys.  It also just seemed like an unnecessary idea.  Breaking Bad was an excellent show -- one of my favorites of all time -- but after five seasons, I didn't need to be in that world anymore.  I was especially skeptical of the Better Call Saul's ability to sustain a character like Saul, who was a fun bit player on Breaking Bad, but didn't feel layered enough to be anything more than that.  Ultimately, this show felt like a way for AMC to continue cashing in on the 10 million people who tuned in to the Breaking Bad finale.

There shouldn't have been too much concern, because at the end of the day, the show is in good hands.  Breaking Bad showrunner Vince Gilligan co-wrote the pilot with high-level Breaking Bad writer Peter Gould, Michelle MacLaren directed the second episode, and multiple Breaking Bad writers round out the rest of the show's staff.  Even smaller aspects, like the editing and the score, are done by the same people who did it on Breaking Bad (Kelley Dixon and Dave Porter, respectively).  And you can tell from the cold open of the Better Call Saul pilot that it's just back to business for the crew.  It's too good to spoil, but it stands up there with the best Breaking Bad had to offer, and that show was known for its iconic and artistic cold opens.

It's not just the beginning of the episode either -- the whole pilot immediately reminds you of the Gilligan qualities that you missed so much.  Better Call Saul has got style to burn.  Vince Gilligan directs the first episode excellently, settling us into the drudgery of Jimmy McGill's (Bob Odenkirk) sad little life.  Indoor locations are shot with wide, oblong angles to really sell their drabness.  It's clear that Jimmy is imprisoned by his life's mundanity and mediocrity.  And it's just nice to be reintroduced to the world of Albuquerque that we loved so much in Breaking Bad, that bright, dry suburban malaise.

But it also does enough to distinguish itself from its sequel.  As I mentioned before, I was skeptical of the show's ability to promote Saul to a leading role, but Bob Odenkirk, with the help of Gilligan and Gould's writing, is able to unearth Saul's soul in a way previously unimaginable.  Jimmy McGill is a different man than Saul Goodman, not just in name but in sensibility.  Better Call Saul, at least so far, also feels more languid and deliberate than Breaking Bad.  Even at its slowest, the latter always had a ticking clock danger buried underneath the surface.  Saul doesn't have that, it just ambles by with its wry charm.  There's not even a very clear arc yet, but the individual moments are so entertaining that it's not hard to sink into the show's laconic vibes.

Still, there's an inevitable case of prequel-itis that this suffers from at times.  Jonathan Banks pops up a few times in the pilot, reprising his role as Mike, and feels extremely unnecessary to what's happening.  Surely, he'll tie into the story more as it moves along, but right now it feels like a cheap nod, their way of saying "hey look, another guy from Breaking Bad!"  An additional from Breaking Bad pops up at the very end of the pilot, and though he plays a bigger part than Mike, it still feels a little too cute.  All of the fanservice is easier to swallow because Gilligan and company have some terrific original creations too, most notably Saul's brother Chuck (Michael McKean), who seems to suffer from some strange aversion to electromagnetic waves.  McKean has been a wonderful character actor for decades -- including his recurring role on The X-Files, the show where Vince Gilligan cut his teeth -- and he's fantastic here as well.

AMC opted for a two-night premiere, airing the pilot Sunday after The Walking Dead in order to generate bigger lead-in numbers, and then showing the second episode on Monday night in its regular timeslot.  This process benefited the show not just because the first episode ends in a way that'll make any fan salivate for the next episode, but also because this second episode does an even better job of assuaging the fears one might have had going into this series.  "Mijo" is where the themes of Better Call Saul really start to take shape.  Where Breaking Bad was about a good man who slowly traded away his humanity for money and power, Saul is about a man who has done bad things in the past (as evidenced by his Slippin' Jimmy story) but is desperately trying to do the right thing.  I honestly wasn't expecting how emotional I got at certain points of "Mijo."  That's not to say that Breaking Bad was a cold show, but the pathos comes from a softer and ultimately different place on this one.

So after two episodes, I've gone from highly skeptical to fully onboard.  "Uno" and "Mijo" didn't light the world on fire, but they reassure any doubters that this is a team of people who know how to construct television.  Is Better Call Saul necessary?  No.  But it's nice to have it anyway.

Pilot grade: B
Second episode grade: B+

My Emmy wish list ballot

I follow award shows, but I've never been one to get emotionally invested in them.  If a good show wins an award, it doesn't validate my tastes, and if a bad show wins something, I don't consider it a crime against humanity.  The Emmys are a weird beast -- the nominations are based on a very specific kind of buzz, and once the voters decide they like something, they tend to nominate that thing over and over again.  After a while of paying attention to them, you eventually start to realize that The Emmys are a pointless endeavor.  So what better way to celebrate a pointless award show than by making my own pointless nominations?

This year's awards will be honoring television that aired from June 1, 2013 to May 31, 2014.  That means, for example, that the season of Orange Is the New Black that's eligible is only the first season.  In formulating these wish list nominations, I took this very meaningless thing seriously by following the rules and going by the official ballot of eligibility in each category.

Now before getting into my nomination choices, let me just explain one thing that confuses most people: The Hanging Episodes Rule.  Obviously, there are many shows whose season runs right through the cutoff date.  For instance, Game of Thrones season four began in the eligibility window (April 6th) and ended outside of the window (June 15th).  The Hanging Episodes rule states that if half of the episodes in a season fall within the eligibility window, then the entire season is eligible, and any episode that hasn't aired at the time of nominations will be made available to voters.  Thus, all of Game of Thrones is fair game.

So is everybody up to speed on all things Emmy now?  Okay, let's dive into my personal picks (NOTE: the choices in each category are ordered from favorite to least favorite)...

Is Hannibal vs. The Americans the new Breaking Bad vs. Mad Men?

During the years that they were both on the air in the same calendar year, Breaking Bad and Mad Men were the two shows that battled it out for the unofficial title of Best Show on Television.  For the most part, there was very little question about the two shows' superior quality.  Both had a hand in ushering in the era during which AMC was seen as the new powerhouse network, an era that seems to have ended just as quickly as it came.  But even though many TV fanatics could agree that these were the two best shows on television, they were split on which one was actually the best show on television.  One's preference served to define them in some way: were you the kind of person who had a stronger response to Mad Men's sleek literary style or Breaking Bad's pulpy morality tale?

Now that Breaking Bad is over and Mad Men is entering its final season in a week, there's a void that's been left at the core of the television landscape.  Justified is near the end of a weak season, True Detective's quality doesn't quite match its pedigree and praise, and Enlightened was cancelled just as it was making a case for its place atop the TV Parthenon.  The two shows that appear to be the common response to the "what's the best show currently on television?" question are Hannibal and The Americans.  It's a pairing that doesn't seem to be as battle-ready as Mad Men and Breaking Bad were.  Those two had the benefit of being on the same network, centered around anti-heroes, and indebted to different aspects of The Sopranos.

At first glance, The Americans couldn't be more different from Hannibal.  One is a network drama while the other one is on cable.  One is about a serial killer, the other is about a pair of Russian spies in the 1980s.  But the coupling of the two brings out some interesting parallels.  Both were a part of the wave of great new television shows in 2013 -- a wave that included other potential contenders for the Best on TV title like The Returned, Rectify, and Orange is the New Black -- and while I admired them during their first seasons (The Americans ended up at #20 on my best of 2013 list, Hannibal at #12), I could never cross into the territory of fully loving them like many others did.  The Americans and Hannibal each had a cool vibe -- the latter in its clinical process, the former with its tight control and restraint -- that held me at a distance.  Yet in both shows, I saw something that implied those first seasons were only setup for when we got to the true fireworks factory in their second seasons.

Breaking Bad and Mad Men both had assured debut years, only to blow those respective seasons out of the water with their sophomore efforts.  If the parallels were to hold, it would only be fitting for Hannibal and The Americans to do the same.  And for the past 6 weeks, they've done just that, completely surpassing any kind of expectations that I had at the start of the year.  I predicted that The Americans would have a gigantic leap in quality in 2014 in my write-up for the show at the end of 2013, but if I'm being honest with myself, that was more of a wish than a guarantee.  It has had a leap though, mostly because the stakes feel so much higher this year.  Even in the first season, the show was always as much about a marriage as it was about spies (if not more so), and so far season 2 has stressed that point even more, after Philip and Elizabeth find the dead bodies of their two comrades and the couple's daughter when a mission goes wrong in the premiere.  The reminder of how much their duty is putting their family in danger is one that has hung heavily over these first six episodes, informing every decision they make, without it ever feeling heavy-handed.

Like Hannibal, The Americans is about the push and pull between its two main characters, and the marriage between Philip and Elizabeth is more layered and complex than ever.  Season 2 has delved deeper into the idea of roles and the way they factor into these people's lives.  It's about how their roles as spies and their roles as partners bleed into one another in ways both intentional and not.  This year, every character is crumbling under the weight of their own deception.  To match the complicated emotions running through the characters, the plot is even knottier this year.  You'll often have to watch each episode twice to get it, but you when you do get a grasp of it, you realize it's some crackerjack spy storytelling.  It's dizzying to see how many threads showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields are tugging at, crossing and looping them around each other masterfully.  The lid is kept so tight on the show that when it finally comes off and the plot intersects with the relationship drama, it's thrilling, devastating stuff.

Meanwhile, Hannibal may not be as concerned with the concrete logic of its A to B plotting, but season 2 has had a similar ramp up in story.  This season opened on a scene showing Jack Crawford and Hannibal Lecter coming to blows at some point in the future, but instead of it feeling like a spoiler, it was just an indication of how the events would be proceeding this year.  The plot has moved way faster than you'd expect, with Hannibal's body count increasing and his sphere of influence increasing faster.  Season 1 ended with a reverse of what we've come to expect from this story: with Hannibal free and Will Graham behind bars.  You'd think that imprisoning the lead would handcuff the show, since so much of its hook last year was the complicated relationship between these two broken men.  But the battle between the two of them has only become more intense this year.  Being locked behind bars has caused Will to think of more cunning measures to prove his innocence, making desperate attempts to show that the guilt lies on Hannibal's head instead.

For Will, being trapped in his own head is far worse than being stuck in a cell, and the visual manifestations of his psychoses have only increased to reflect the darkness invading him.  If season 1 coasted along on its oblique dreamlike logic, then season 2 of Hannibal is pure nightmare theater.  The show's visuals are by far the most stunning on television, generating just as many chills from a simple framing choice as they do from an elaborate crime scene tableau.  This year, the sounds have stepped up to match the sights, with the score becoming more eerie and intrusive with each new episode.  Together, all of the show's technical elements serve to key the audience into the parts of the characters' inner psyche that they may not even be aware of.  Like the show's titular cannibalistic serial killer, Hannibal is equally concerned with the artistry surrounding its story.

So if these two programs are the new titans that will be battling it out for televisual supremacy, then which one is the Mad Men and which one is the Breaking Bad?  There's not a one-to-one translation, really.  There's something to the sophistication and emotional temperature of The Americans that is strongly reminiscent of Mad Men, but its tightly constructed plot is very Breaking Bad.  Hannibal's got a more immediately hooky premise in the way that Breaking Bad did, but its favoring of atmosphere over plot recalls Mad Men.  In the end, The Americans is more like Mad Men and Breaking Bad is more like Hannibal, which makes the battle even more interesting, since I like Mad Men more than Breaking Bad but Hannibal more than The Americans right now.

Mad Men and Breaking Bad both had second seasons that are some of the best television seasons of last 10 years, and while neither The Americans nor Hannibal have quite reached that level halfway through, they're not far off from the trajectory.  Together, all four shows are an example of the anti-sophomore slump -- the "sophomore skyrocket," if you will.  The internet has a need to pit shows against each other for no real reason, so the latter two are just next up in the queue now that the former two are on their way out.  So is Hannibal vs. The Americans the new Breaking Bad vs. Mad Men?  Sure, why not?

My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2013

Are you sick of hearing about whether or not we're in the golden age of television?  There has been alot of hand-wringing about that lately, spurred on by the fact that 2013 was an unequivocally great year for TV, the best that I've seen since I started following the medium closely.  Not only was the year remarkable for its depth of quality, but also for its breadth.  Good television has been popping up from every corner, with networks like Sundance making their debut in original programming and online sources like Hulu and Netflix expanding their market.  One of the shows in end of the year discussion, Borgen, released episodes on LinkTV -- whatever that is!  It's interesting to think that a little over a decade ago, most of the talked about TV shows came from the big four networks (CBS, Fox, NBC, and ABC) and HBO.  Now I literally get anxiety thinking about all of the great television coming from so many different places that I'll never get around to watching.  (For how much TV I already watch, see the full list linked to at the bottom of this post.)

Television lists are harder than music and film lists to do, because the main television season is spread out over two calendar years, with many shows starting their seasons in September and not ending until April or May.  This is becoming less of an issue, as summer is seen as a television ghetto less and less every year, and cable shows tend to air their entire seasons in a single calendar year.  Nevertheless, for each television show, the only episodes eligible for ranking purposes are the ones that aired in 2013.  That seems like an obvious thing, but it always throws some people.  This can sometimes work to a show's advantage.  For example, Parenthood was very high on my list last year because it aired all of its best material (the end of season 3 at the beginning of year, the beginning of season 4 in the fall) in 2012.  On the other hand, New Girl was never going to land in my top 20 this year, but it ended up being way further down on my full list because its third season has been so terrible, it's tarnished the quality of the back half of season 2 that aired at the beginning of the year.  Is all of that clear?  Okay, good.

For all of my talk about the breadth of the television landscape, my top 20 consists of a small cluster of networks, but there are still some unexpected ones.  The list heavily favors cable to network, with 16 belonging to the former and 2 belonging to the latter (and 2 coming from internet-only sources).  My top 20 is also low on straight comedies, consisting of mostly dramas and shows that are listed as "comedy" but are mostly dramatic.  This is mainly because of how good this year was for drama, but it also was a very weak year for comedy, particular network comedies.  So enough analysis of the list, let's move on to the actual thing...

And Then We Came to the End: The Final Season of Breaking Bad

Final seasons are very hard to do.  When you have a show that has run for a few seasons, all of that accumulation of story leads to threads that feel like they need to be tied up.  With so many different masters to serve, results are often mixed at best.  One way to do it is The Sopranos way.  Its final season is one that largely abandons traditional plot in favor of drifting in a fog of overwhelming malaise, giving off the feeling that everything is coming to an end not with a bang, but a whimper.  Yet it could only get away with this because it was a show that never really cared about plot in the first place, preferring to deal in anticlimaxes and slow deflation.  The final season of The Sopranos will come up alot in this post, not only because it was split into two parts much in the way that Breaking Bad's was, but also because by bucking the usual trends of what we expect from a final season of television, it manages to be a major success.

Then there's the Breaking Bad way of doing a final season.  Breaking Bad is another show that benefits from having its construction be tailored in a way that suits a relatively mess-free conclusion.  Throughout its 5 season run, it remained so laser-focused that it never grew to an unwieldy size in the way that many other shows do.  It also wasn't a show that was very heavy on mythology, so there weren't any real notions of needing to "answer questions," like fans demanded of Lost and Battlestar Galactica.  By the time season 5b (which is what we'll use to denote the split halves of season 5, in true Sopranos fashion) rolled around, the show had mostly cleared all of the pieces off the board, leaving behind only the necessary players for the endgame.

That's an apt metaphor to make, since much of the beginning of 5b felt like an intricate game of chess between Hank and Walt.  Each of them are smart, prideful, determined men hellbent on winning, and watching them make moves to try to get a leg up on one another was a jolt to the early stages of the season.  It's some of the ballsiest storytelling that the show has ever done, making decisions in one episode where other shows would take four.  Though Hank tries to play a slow game when he first has the revelation that his brother-in-law is the infamous Heisenberg, Walt forces his hand, setting off the explosive confrontation between the two of them in Hank's garage.  From there, you them both lining up their pieces, with Hank trying to approach Skyler, Walt taping a confession that implicates Hank, and Hank getting Jesse on his side.  It's kind of crazy how far away all of that starts to feel, as it begins another passage around the time of Hank's death, both in terms of plot and tone.

I consider myself an agnostic person heavily leaning towards atheism, but for some reason, I really love shows that explore the idea of God in a very abstract sense, usually in the form of souls.  The Sopranos' final season was all about the loss of one's soul in a way.  The entire season was littered with moments of the show walking characters to the edge and asking them if they want to step back or dive into the black, and it's made all the more compelling because they're so unaware of this.  It's never explicitly said, but it's clear that there is a reckoning hovering just out of view.  Similarly, there is no mention of God in Breaking Bad, but it exists in a world that's clearly guided by the hand of some moral judge.  Just take a look at the plane crash at the end of season 2.  It's a moment that I don't love -- I feel like it goes out of its way just to make a thematic point -- but the point is one that reverberates throughout the series.  Actions have consequences, and the final season specifically hammered down on that idea.  The question was never whether Walt had lost his soul -- that's a given.  But would he ever become aware of it?  That very question is what makes "Ozymandias" such a magnificent episode -- it's the beginning of Walt truly understanding what he has wrought.  Hank is dead, Skyler and Walt Jr. consider him a monster, and even Holly doesn't recognize this man, calling for her mother after Walt absconds away with her.

The Albuquerque setting has always been one of the many things that makes Breaking Bad so unique, and season 5b seemed to utilize the desert setting more than any other season since the first.  It's not just for the sake of visual beauty either; it's because the whole half-season (or at least the back half of this half-season -- so many halves!) is all about erosion.  There's an argument to be made that "Ozymandias" is the true end of the show, and if that's so, then the last two episodes are the start of a new mode -- the denouement.  It's the first show that I've seen that truly devotes a large amount of time to the slow decline, the ending after the ending, instead of just allocating ten minutes to it (to reference The Sopranos again: that final season doesn't count because the entire show was about a slow decline).  I've seen some complaints about "Granite State" being uneven, and they're valid, but the solitary scenes of Walt in his New Hampshire cabin are so overpowering that they outweigh any of the busy work going on in Albuquerque.  Here we see a dying man with all of the time in the world to ruminate upon his failures and disappointments, his body fading in the same way his moral compass did so long ago.  It's no coincidence that the finale features numerous scenes of Walt being ghostlike, lurking in the background and watching the world function in the wake of his actions.  But it's not just Walt who faces erosion, everybody of significance gets chipped at during this final stretch: Jesse is enslaved; Marie loses her husband; and Skyler, most strikingly, sits alone in a dim house, a hollow version of herself.  Like the scene after the cold open in "Ozymandias," the episode that begins this meditative falling action, everything just slowly weathers away.

As for the finale itself, I think it did a great job of delivering the goods to the various subsets of the show's fandom.  There's that clockwork sense that everything is connected, as its revealed that the return of Gretchen and Elliot into the picture is a way for Walt to finally get the money he's made to Walt Jr.  There's the scientific ingenuity from the first few seasons in the contraption that Walt builds to take out Uncle Jack and the neo-Nazis.  But of course, my favorite moments were the ruminative portions, like the final scene between Walt and Skyler.  For the last few episodes, we saw Walt cling to the idea of family, the excuse he uses to feel like it all wasn't for nothing, so to see him admit to himself what we knew all along -- that he mostly did everything because he liked it -- was a really powerful moment.  It's one of the many scenes in the finale that made me feel for these characters that I thought I stopped having an emotional connection to two seasons ago.  

Of course, the ending has led to a large amount of internet hyperbole and annoying, near-sighted "BEST EVER" proclamations.  So is Breaking Bad the best show of all time?  Well personally, I'm not really interested in these kinds of conversations.  They're so clouded by a recency bias, diminishing the art of television by not respecting its history in the same way that we do with film.  Forget The Wire, The Sopranos, or Deadwood; when people blindly anoint Breaking Bad as the best of all time, they usually do so without even putting shows like St. Elsewhere or Hill Street Blues into perspective.  In the same way that we wouldn't go around shouting that a film that came out this year is the best of all time, maybe we should take a while to reflect on a TV show before we determine its placement in the pantheon of great television.

Is this the best final season of all time?  Well, like I said, final seasons are hard to do, and this one was not without its flaws.  First, I've always thought that Todd and his neo-Nazi family connection was a bit too convenient, and having them be the villains of the season made sense thematically (showing the gate that Walt opened for the kind of ruthless people who thrive in this world), but never quite worked for me.  That, coupled with the incorporation of Lydia into the show, felt like protruding threads in a tightly wound narrative.  Speaking of tightly wound, there were times where I felt like 5b (and 5a, for that matter) leaned too heavily on plot and led to it feeling a bit engineered, and Breaking Bad was always at its best when it had gears turning, while also giving off the impression of loose improvisation.  This mechanical nature of the final season never felt more pronounced than in "To'hajiilee," where characters make decisions mostly because it feels like the plot demands it, rather than it being what they'd actually do.  It results in a terrific and tense ending, but one that's cheapened by the leaps needed to get there.  It's still an incredible season despite those small quibbles, but the fitful, moody nature of The Sopranos' final season will always be something I respond to more.

Is this the best series finale of all time then? It certainly deserves to be in the pantheon of great finales, along with The Shield, Cheers, and Six Feet Under (a big fat "ugh" to that show in general, but almost everyone can agree on the finale); but I wouldn't call it my favorite.  The final 20 minutes of the episode, which I've deliberately neglected to mention until now, have an inevitability that makes it feel a bit perfunctory as a result.  Plus, once again, I've got to give a shout out to The Sopranos.  Shortly after "Felina" ended last night, many people on Twitter were quick to start up a "Breaking Bad = closure" vs. "The Sopranos = open-ended" argument.  Whether they love it or hate it, everybody tends to reduce the Sopranos finale to its ending, but what they forget is that the rest of "Made in America" is so beautiful and mesmerizing, which is why it's still my favorite series finale.  But regardless, "Felina" was terrific stuff and I felt satisfied when the credits rolled.  Most importantly, it stayed true to the characters until the very end.  Walt may have had his moment where he gets to return to the place he felt the most "alive," and happy music plays in the background, but we know the real deal.  He's left a wake of destruction and all of his loved ones are either dead or irrevocably damaged.  Once and for all we understand that he is not the one to root for, and while Heisenberg might be a name that's talked about in hushed whispers for a while, eventually it will fade.  In the end, everything dissolves.

How Breaking Bad Subverts the Masculine Power Fantasy

The Sopranos is my favorite show of all time, but sometimes I hate the television landscape that it created.  Sure, it ushered in the golden age of television, paving the way for great shows like The Wire and Deadwood, but it also gave other creators the false impression that all they had to do was follow the template of The Sopranos and they'd have a high-quality drama on their hands.  Thus, for the last decade we've gotten so many shows centered around male antiheroes, despite the fact that The Sopranos was about so much more than that.  I'm sick, sick, sick of stories about male antiheroes.  When done well, you get a show like Mad Men, which is the closest successor we currently have to The Sopranos.  But when done wrong, you get a genre that I like to call "male fantasy" -- shows like Ray Donovan, Sons of Anarchy, House of Cards, etc.  These shows are all about men being "cool" and "awesome" and "dark," in a way that makes the men who watch them feel vicariously fulfilled.  Usually, these shows have weak female characters, to cater to the kind of men who prefer to think of women alternately as obstacles or sexual objects.  I don't want to make assumptions about what some Breaking Bad fans think the show is, but Walter White certainly thinks he's living in a male fantasy show, and that's what will ultimately be his downfall.

At its core, some of Breaking Bad has always been driven by the idea of frustrated masculinity.  It's about men who are trying to live up to the idea of manhood.  The impetus of Walter White's evolution has always been his desperate need to no longer feel weak.  Even before his diagnosis of cancer, he was a lowly bumbling chemistry teacher, a man without power.  But the writers subtly highlight that Walt's hubris and skewed sense of self was something that was always within him, and that getting cancer just gave him a reason to assert himself.  Throughout the course of the show, we've seen his efforts to gain power -- over both his own life and the lives of others -- but any shred of power he gains just makes him want more.  He's driven by the brutish, masculine concept of "winning," but he's chasing goalposts that continuously reset.

This sense of frustrated masculinity extends to Hank and Jesse, just in slightly different ways.  Hank's story is a series of events that shake his constitution: the shooting of Tuco early in season 2, the tortoise explosion later in that season, and the attack that left him incapacitated in season the middle of season 3.  As much as he wants to be the alpha male drug-busting cop, these moments take a toll that's both physical and mental.  The events of "One Minute" were the jumping off point for the arc that he'll follow until the end of the series -- the desire to catch whoever is at the center of all this destruction in his life.  Where Walt is a man thrust forward by his own ego, Hank is pulled by an obsession to get back in the saddle again (a term that brings forth the vision cowboys, another masculine ideal).  On the other hand, Jesse's frustrated masculinity seems to be the most reluctant.  Instead of being ruled by the idea of winning and losing, Pinkman is almost always driven by others.  Whenever he's asked to kill or do some otherwise criminal offense, it's usually because somebody else asks him to, almost as if he's trying to live up to the expectations placed upon him.

The difference that makes Breaking Bad fall outside of the realm of male fantasy lies in who we're supposed to root for.  While we're supposed to cheer on Ray Donovan as he apathetically bangs another impossibly hot chick who for some reason is attracted to him, or raise our fists when the Sons of Anarchy crew live to see another day, it became increasingly clear that we're not supposed to root for Walter White.  The best antihero shows have a level of self-awareness about their protagonist, and Breaking Bad is able to get away with all of the deplorable things that Walt does because it exists in a highly moral world.  None of us know exactly how Breaking Bad will end, but we're all pretty sure that Walt will get his comeuppance for all of his transgressions.  Actions have consequences, and anybody who's still on the Walter White train should hop off quickly, because it's going down and it's going down hard.  Essentially, the world of Breaking Bad has no room for anybody who's interested in the idea of male fantasy.

Another thing that elevates Breaking Bad past male fantasy is its female characters.  There are some people who think that Skyler is a terrible, useless character, but those people are simply incorrect.  Skyler has flaws, but they are no more outsized than any of the male characters' flaws.  Plus, unlike women in male fantasy shows, Skyler is three-dimensional and has her own agency.  Although we may not want to admit it, because her actions stand in the way of us getting a more wanton and insouciant show, she's the most pragmatic character in Breaking Bad's universe.  And while Marie isn't as important to the story as her sister is, she still has her own quirks and nuances, and provides great comic relief.  On Breaking Bad, the women are the sympathetic ones, often caught in the wake of the actions of men, and left to pick up the pieces.  The show would be a much less interesting and layered without them.

Breaking Bad may be a show full of violence, explosions, and meth cooking, but it's mostly about exploring the psychological makeup of these characters and the sliding scale of morality on which they function.  Whenever the show occasionally falters, as it did a few times in season 4 and the first half of season 5, it's when the writers rely too much on the "coolness factor" of the story, veering dangerously close to male fantasy territory.  The first of the final 8 episodes airs tomorrow night, and hopefully it remembers that the show is at its best when it's condemning the idea of masculine power, not when it's playing into it.