This week, an all-Breaking Bad special issue!

We're coming to the end of Breaking Bad, and as with the end of any great show, the overblown assessments of its scope and importance continue to swell and snowball. Already, back in January, the London Review of Books ran this little bit of understated commentary:

"As the lies spread and thicken to involve his family, the props that support Walter's inner lie weaken and fall. His incremental journey to evil, intermittently comic, often horrific and often wonderfully strange, becomes, for him, a journey to a terrible truth. As the great personal justifications for his ever more bloody criminality — his cancer and the welfare of his family — become less meaningful, his essential wickedness, in the form of selfishness and malice, become clear even to him; he becomes an exemplar of the Nietzschean superfluous man, who believed himself to be good because his claws were blunt."

Television is quickly becoming the dominant medium, the common narrative well that we all draw from. And the television we're getting is superb, there's no doubt. But really? The Nietzschean superfluous man? Walter White? Breaking Bad is just not that profound a story. Unlike any of the other significant television dramas that have come out of HBO and AMC, it has remained, throughout its five seasons, quite simple. And especially in the character of Walter White. He lacks virtually any complexity at all.

Walter White has only two attributes: He wants to take care of his family and he is involved in the marketplace. In other words, he is exactly like everyone else in America. His need to take care of his family is a little more extreme maybe than for you and me, since he is in debt and has cancer. The market he chooses to enter — meth in the Southwest — is a little harsher than others. But ultimately the choices he faces are identical to those that anyone else involved in capitalism faces — survive or don't. The key moment of the entire show was when Walt had to decide whether to kill Krazy-8. He has a long list of reasons not to kill him, including "murder is wrong," but then he has one reason to do it: "He'll kill your entire family if you let him go." Basically the show has been that choice, which isn't much of a choice, over and over and over again. Even earlier this season, Walt was willing to go to jail, to endure personal collapse, to save his brother-in-law's life. He cursed out his wife to protect his wife and then disappeared, never to see them again, in order to save his family. Walt's current circumstance is as "retiree," in a stage of the meth business that apparently involves a wood stove in a single room in New Hampshire. It also probably involves dying.

Walt's psychological state never really changes, even over the course of five seasons. Walter never became evil. He became powerful. His position within the logistical chain of the marketplace changed. He didn't. Season five has played brilliantly off our moral and intellectual laziness. We have to hate the people in power because otherwise we might have to think about our own positions in the logistical chains of the various markets we inhabit. Who made your t-shirt, the one you are wearing right now? The chances are high that it was an underpaid worker, possibly even a child, in Bangladesh. Your phone? You want to find out how the rare earths that went into that phone were mined? Who picked the delicious tomato you will have on your chopped salad at lunch? Virtual slaves in Florida. And we'd better not discuss how you got to work this morning. Otherwise we might have to talk about oil production.

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You are not evil. You're just like Walter White: You need to wear something. You need a tomato. You need a phone. You need a ride. Therefore you enter the market. In Breaking Bad, a real question is whether meth or Madrigal, the fictional shipping conglomerate, is the true source of evil. The show never makes a case against the War on Drugs, not the way The Wire did. Because the drug is incidental. The problem is capitalism. We are quite used to blaming the people who happen to run things for the realities of the entire marketplace. After Walter blows up Gus Fring, and his wife asks him what happened, he says, "I won." He's as surprised as anybody, but if he's going to run the meth market of New Mexico, he's going to run it properly, which means he has to kill people. He deals with the situation exactly the same way he always has. The true face of evil in Breaking Bad is Todd — perfectly polite, perfectly engaged with his work, perfectly willing to do whatever is required of him, an ideal creature of the marketplace.

Inevitably with these long-running shows, the word "Shakespearean" gets trotted out. That comparison misses exactly what is so original about the show. Of all the brilliant shows in the golden age of television, Breaking Bad is the crudest. It is not, like The Sopranos, a portrait of the sentimentality of psychopaths. It's not, like The Wire, a variegated study of social forces and their interactions with the individual. Because Walt is so unchanging, Breaking Bad is a study of circumstances — what the situations we find ourselves in make us do. Circumstances, though not as profound as fates, are the stuff through which we actually live our lives. Which is exactly what makes Breaking Bad so compulsively watchable. It's so simple. It's totally identifiable. Walt is a creature of the world as it is. Unfortunately, so are we.

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Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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