The Age of the Antihero
For a long time, television drama kept an unspoken promise. At the end of an episode, the characters return to where they started. Next week and the week after, the same detective sits at the same desk. Being able to start from any episode also meant that nobody ever changed.
What this band did was break that promise. The pitch for Breaking Bad is known by a single phrase — turning Mr. Chips into Scarface. A gentle teacher into a drug lord. In a later interview, Vince Gilligan confirmed in his own words that he had been saying it. The subject of the show, then, is not the crimes but the change itself. The moment it decided not to reset, television gave up “the same every week” and became one very long story.
Knowing where Gilligan came from makes another line visible. He was a writer on The X-Files: a different strangeness every week, while only the relationship between the two leads moved, a little at a time. The person who wrote that way went on to make a drama with change as its subject. The current of science fiction and fantasy joins the antihero band here. That said, this map has not yet reached any words of his about how The X-Files fed into it. So the line is not drawn at its darkest — it is drawn as a fact of his career.
In the same years, Mad Men did the same thing another way. The setting is an advertising agency in the 1960s. Since it is the era that moves, the characters can intend to stay the same and still be left behind. Its creator Matthew Weiner had been a writer on The Sopranos — a direct descendant of the HBO revolution, rewriting the twentieth century on a channel with advertisers.
And there is one more layer of the era at work here. While Breaking Bad was airing, more and more people caught up on streaming, and the audience swelled season by season. Streaming erased the weakness of a drama you cannot join partway. The story that does not reset became possible partly because it became possible to rewind. That is why a line runs from the lower right of this band into the streaming era.
None of this means that making characters worse is admirable. What this band left behind is the discovery that television is the place where you can watch a person changing for the longest time. A decade on, Korean serials and Japanese streaming dramas both stand on that discovery.
The myth, corrected
Breaking Bad was certified by Guinness as the single highest-rated television series ever, on a critics' score of 99
The Guinness World Record itself is real (Breaking Bad, season 5). But read the official entry and you find that five titles are tied at 99 on Metacritic's critic score, and Breaking Bad came out on top on a user rating of 9.6 out of 10. Reporting in 2013 led with the 99. Less a solitary first place, then, than one title stepping forward from a shared summit.