[Avast! Here be spoilers.]
In his new book, Difficult Men: Behind The Scenes Of A Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos And The Wire To Mad Men And Breaking Bad, writer Brett Martin pays special attention to an early episode of The Sopranos that set the tone for following decade-plus of “quality television.”
One of the few network notes Sopranos creator David Chase received about his show came with its fifth episode, College, which had James Ganolfini’s Tony Soprano murdering a mob snitch with a makeshift garrote wire. According to Martin, HBO chairman Chris Albrecht worried that Chase risked losing the audience, the on-screen death forcing them into the realization that Tony Soprano was more than just a complicated mafia capo, but a stone-cold killer.
Chase held his ground. To his mind, in the world of The Sopranos – a world defined by the constantly rationalized moral compass of its sociopathic protagonist – Tony would be duty-bound to murder the rat. Anyone in the audience that bought into the internally consistent psychology of The Sopranos would have to buy this. Chase, of course, was right.
“Within a few years,” Martin writes, “the idea that a TV protagonist couldn’t kill somebody would seem as fusty and dated a convention as earlier generations not being able to share a bed or say the word pregnant.”
Certainly, TV is now (for better or worse) well beyond such moral hand-wringing. The opening to Low Winter Sun, AMC’s almost hilariously overwrought new series (“GOOD COP BAD COP SAME COP,” screams the tagline) scheduled in the cherry Sunday timeslot between Breaking Bad and the Breaking Bad recap show, has its conflicted cop antihero killing another officer before the show’s open credits, as if deliberately testing the premise that viewers will buy into the psychologies of even the worst people.
Between Deadwood’s Al Swearengen, The Wire’s Omar, Dexter’s Dexter and Mad Men’s Don Draper, we’re totally acclimatized to the moral compromises of TV’s difficult men. We no longer bristle when asked to identify with such reprehensible characters. We expect it. We willingly engage in the game of commiserating with these characters, forking over our sympathy, all gluttons for punishment.
This is why Breaking Bad – the best drama on TV, or at least my favourite – works, on a very basic level. Viewers are now accustomed to affording a certain level of sympathy to even an archly vile protagonist like Bryan Cranston’s Walter White. In many ways, Walter is worse than Tony Soprano, or even the serial-killing Dexter Morgan. Where these characters are in some respect victims of their own self-delusions, there’s never a sense that Walter himself buys into all the lavishly vindicating bullshit he baits his wife and partners with. He’s a masterful liar, but he’s not pathological.
As Walter White has followed his lobbed arch from hard-pressed hero to conflicted anti-hero to out-and-out villain, draining any semi-conscious viewer’s sympathy in the process, Breaking Bad has managed to fill that identification gap in the unlikeliest way: by offering Dean Norris’ Hank Schrader as its unlikely hero.
Introduced as an obnoxious, cackling douchebag (there’s no other word), Hank was the worst thing about Breaking Bad in its earliest seasons. He was an object of contempt, the model of the bullheaded high school jock who, want for any other suitable options, graduated to a career in law enforcement. He brews his own stupid beer, called “Schraderbrau.” He belittles his Mexican coworkers (and Mexicans in general). He’s mean to his wife. He likes Shania Twain. He’s less like Michael Chiklis in The Shield then a guy who saw Michael Chiklis in The Shield and deliberately styled himself accordingly.
As a foil, Hank was established as a brute force, simply too thick-headed to match wits with a prodigal criminal mastermind like his brother-in-law Walter. He embodied the ignorance and inefficacy of law enforcement that Walter’s sneaky (and, in time, not-so-sneaky) criminal enterprise would rely on. For its first few seasons, Hank was little more than broad, unfunny comic relief.
Watching last night’s season six (or season 5B or whatever) premiere, it’s hard to remember this, just as it’s hard to imagine that Walter White was once a hapless high school chemistry teacher, his early attempts at methamphetamine manufacturing leaving him marooned in the New Mexico desert in his tighty-whities. If Walter’s descent into evil – and at this point, after he almost murdered a kid to cement his power position, we can probably call Walter White “evil” and not just “complex” or “conflicted” – and its corresponding evacuation of viewer sympathy has been a bit basic, the game Breaking Bad creator and showrunner Vince Gilligan has been playing with Hank compensates with measured sophistication.
Through Breaking Bad’s five (or six) seasons, Hank has been completely transformed. Or rather, completely revealed, as a competent, diligent lawman, driven as much by his obsession as his professional intuition. In season three, Hank is left paraplegic after an encounter with two Mexican hitmen, rendering him sad and pitiable. In season four, he sinks into an even more crippling depression, taking up an interest in geology, a hobby more commonly associated with the geeks you can imagine him stuffing into lockers in high school.
Now, recovered and invigorated by his hunches regarding the identity of fried chicken magnate Gustavo Fring as a secret drug lord, and even more recently, by his realization that his brother-in-law is notorious meth cook Heisenberg, Hank assumes his rightful place as the program’s protagonist. And even then his greatest revelation as a law enforcement officer comes to him while he’s taking a shit.
As viewers, we were always wincingly contemptuous of Hank. Maybe it was because he always remained a half step (or more) behind us. Now, the bulk of the show’s tension derives less from wondering about Walter’s next move – we’re all too familiar with his stately criminal machinations – than with guessing at Hank’s. Who could have predicted him clocking Walter in the face, effectively giving away his own power position while cathartically cutting down the great Heisenberg’s put-on smugness? For the remaining seven episodes of Breaking Bad, it’s Hank we’ll be watching, Hank who must operate (or appear to operate) within the law, Hank who actually has something to lose.
More than making Hank compelling, the sympathy Gilligan and Co. have gradually supplied him cuts the bitter taste of Breaking Bad’s more abiding nihilism. Unlike the bulk of post-Sopranos “difficult men” TV, this is a show that affords compassion not just for virtuoso schemers, philanderers, sociopathic villains, cowboys and mobsters and other types more commonly configured as anti-heroes, but for characters even less identifiable to many viewers: the hopped-up meth heads with their ornate premises for Star Trek episodes, the skeezy stoners in skull-embossed hoodies with tacky tribal wrist tattoos, the archetype of the gratingly smart-alecky, home-brewing uncle.
Through Hank – and also Jesse, maybe the centre of the show’s expanding reservoirs of morality – Breaking Bad has accomplished something more difficult than retaining viewers after a main character relishes in offing someone. It has managed to provoke sympathy for the douchebags.
