[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen a show has you literally shaking from the tension, you know you’re watching something good. Breaking Bad has caused the shakes more than any show in recent memory.

The show, which started out as a simple drama about a cancer-stricken high school chemistry teacher who turns to cooking meth to pay the bills, has evolved into so much more than an exploration of a good man gone bad. This past season of Breaking Bad, the fourth, with its slow boil storytelling, constant threat of death for the main characters and uncanny ability to pull all disparate narrative threads together into one overwhelming situation of helplessness has demonstrated that the show may just be the quintessential exploration of pride, moral degradation and crime on television.

When it started back in 2008, Breaking Bad was good and dark but you had no idea that it would get from where it was to where it is today. When Bryan Cranston’s Walter White first graced the television screen, the memory of Cranston’s Hal on Malcolm in the Middle was still fresh and Walt still seemed like a variation on the television archetype of the suburban dad itching for change.

Breaking Bad belongs alongside shows like Lost, M*A*S*H and The Wire in the conversation regarding the best dramas to ever appear on television.

Now look at where Walt is. His pride and his need for a sense of control are omnipresent. There is still a hint of the former placid Walt in Cranston’s performance, mostly because narrative components like his family and his medical condition are still in play in Season Four, but for the most part Walt is a completely changed man. All his worst attributes — his intellectual arrogance, his callousness, his hubris — are on full display. Showrunner Vince Gilligan made good on his promise to turn his sympathetic hero from Season One into a full-fledged villain. It’s not just that Walt’s negative attributes are now on display when previously they were hidden. After the Season Four finale, it’s that they seem to be the only attributes of Walt that are left.

The fact that the transition from cancer-stricken chemistry teacher to ruthless meth cook is so seamless and believable is a testament to just how good Breaking Bad is.

Cranston is peerless when it comes to acting on television, except perhaps by his co-star Aaron Paul. As Jesse Pinkman, Walt’s former student and meth partner, Paul has risen to the challenge of expanding a character that could easily have been a one-note drug dealer. Jesse started out as a typical yo-boy, with his baggy pants, street lingo and propensity to pepper sentences with the word “bitch.” Now, Jesse is the tortured soul of Breaking Bad, its moral centre and its whipping boy.

If people think Walt’s luck is bad with his terminal cancer diagnosis and constant threat of death from one drug boss or another, they need to take a look at Jesse’s luck. Everything goes wrong for him. His luck is so bad that some fans of the show have begun to redub Murphy’s Law “Pinkman’s Law” when referring to the show. Most of Walt’s actions, cancer aside, were the result of conscious decisions and the responsibility for his circumstances lies squarely with him. Jesse, on the other hand, deserves nothing of what he is dealt and only in Season Four does he start to take control of his own destiny.

The interaction between Cranston and Paul is the greatest joy of the show. Like Michael Emerson and Terry O’Quinn on Lost, Cranston and Paul have amazing chemistry and any scene containing Walt and Jesse automatically becomes a highlight.

One such excruciatingly tense scene between Walt and Jesse is in the penultimate episode of Season Four, “End Times,” and showcases more emotional twists and tension in five minutes than most shows can muster in an entire season. What makes the scene so remarkable is that the actors make every radical emotional transition believable. From one beat to the next, they turn from desperation to helplessness to acceptance to anger, and because they’re so committed to the performance, the emotional energy transfers off the screen and into the viewer.

However, Breaking Bad is not just a show that is carried by its performances. It may contain the two best actors on television, but the writing supplies them with the best material to work with. Breaking Bad never seems trite or boring or unrealistic. It may work slowly and have huge climaxes, but these are never forced through preposterous twists and narrative convenience. Every action is borne out of the characters’ emotions, which are so deftly explored that even improbable narrative twists are believable because they are the result of the characters’ poor decisions.

It will be interesting to see where the show is headed in Season Five and to find out how much lower Walt can morally sink. There are still sixteen episodes in the series to go and a lot is bound to happen in them, but even without the knowledge of its complete run, Breaking Bad has established itself as one of the great dramas. It continues to surprise and astound, and its characters will be given their rightful place in the hall of fame of antiheroes.

Breaking Bad belongs alongside shows like Lost, M*A*S*H and The Wire in the conversation regarding the best dramas to ever appear on television. Twenty years from now people will look back and say, “When Breaking Bad was on AMC, those were the golden days of television.”

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Photo: AMC