Kelly Cresap

Among the edgiest of shows ever aired, Breaking Bad now faces an insidious new archenemy: being liked to death. On the one hand, people have settled for what’s impressive about the series while missing what’s unprecedented. On the other, they’ve been so dazzled by the show’s brilliance that they miss its flaws and its undertow. A Love-Hate Guide to ‘Breaking Bad’ shines a flashlight on places even the most obsessive fans have overlooked. It crosses the spectrum from loving to hating to provoke new ways into the series.

What would a novel with a Proustian inner life look like if it also threw itself into the political fray and took a more than passing interest in other tribes and the fate of civilization? What would postmodernism look like if its ironies and self-reflexivity were yoked to a form in which characters, settings, and dialogue had a full-bodied, nineteenth-century amplitude and in which ethical and social concerns were not sidelined? At issue is not only the compatibility of these literary modes—representing, in broad terms, realism, modernism, and postmodernism, the three great epistemes in fiction of the past two centuries—but also what kind of perception can arise when they are held in creative tension. The nature of this perception, it seems to me, would have wide-ranging implications in the fields of literature, philosophy, and social theory, among others.

He habitually adopted the guise of a fool in public, which made it all the harder to grasp what he was getting at with his pop paintings and deadpan films. By making his own apparent lack of competence and intelligence into an elaborate ruse, he became a figure without precedent: a man whose self-conscious naivete has had truly revolutionary impact.