McNulty, Bunk, Lester, Kima, Prez, Herc…when season 5 wrapped, the messy but dedicated surveillance cops (plus sidekick Bubbles) in David Simon’s crime opus proved harder to say goodbye to than one of those dingy Baltimore dive bars. ![]() Walter has done everything he was supposed to do: working two jobs, paying his bills and sharing his chemistry knowledge with generations of bored teens, but a cancer diagnosis still leaving him needing to pick between the ruin of family or that of his soul. But while Breaking Bad is, of course, a morality tale – a Faust riff – its political edge is sharp enough to cut yourself on. Their arc heads only one way, but backdropped by a parched New Mexico desert that slowly fills up with shallow graves, it’s an extraordinary ride, balancing light and darkness with enough dexterity and dark humour (the bath tub! The fly!) to provide respite from the moral decay. Terminally ill chemistry teacher Walter White (the revelatory Bryan Cranston) and druggy deadbeat Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul, its tragic soul) are creator Vince Gilligan’s cooly calculating yin and sketchy, insecure yang as they slowly build a meth empire. ‘You know the business, and I know the chemistry.’ And so begins the unholiest of on-screen partnerships and, for our bag of non-sequential bills, the greatest TV show in the history of the medium. □ The best TV and streaming shows of 2023 (so far) So don’t touch that dial – these are the greatest TV shows of all-time. Even then, it proved to be an exhausting task. Chiselling them down to a neat hundred is tough, so we elected to leave off talk shows, documentaries (worthy, of course, of a whole other top 100 list), variety shows and sketch comedy, focusing on scripted, episodic dramas, comedies and miniseries. ![]() And while this list is dominated by 21st century programs, there are hundreds of shows that deserve credit for pushing TV forward into its current golden age. Far from it: television has been popular since World War II, after all. The shift in perception is widely credited to the arrival of The Sopranos, which completely reinvented the notion of what a TV show could do, and the advent of streaming has made it so that hundreds of new shows are now continually flipping the script every few years, if not months.īut that doesn’t mean everything before 1999 is pure dross. ![]() Television is now the dominant medium in basically all of entertainment, to the degree that the only thing separating movies and TV is the screen you’re watching on. Was its poor reputation deserved? Certainly, the ratio of garbage to gold was high, and though it’s hard to quantify if it was worse than any other artistic medium, the fact that it was all being beamed directly into your living room made the dreck much harder to avoid. Edward R Murrow referred to it as ‘the opiate of the masses’, and Bruce Springsteen even wrote a song about the malaise of fruitless channel surfing. It was smeared as ‘the idiot box’, ‘the boob tube’. In the decades leading up to this point, TV was largely considered among the lowest forms of entertainment. It only took about 70 years, but television is finally getting some respect.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |