BREAKING BAD vs MAD MEN

jere burns –- wynn duffy from justified

I'm so old I keep saying "Hey! It's the gigolo from Dear John!"

Krysten Ritter just died. Sad! Also, a plane exploded. Exciting!

Could I possibly ask that this thread revive stay /relatively/ spoiler free so I can participate a bit more?

― baking (soda), Wednesday, July 25, 2012 5:39 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Dude, you kinda crack me up sometimes.

so far for season 3 I'll say any scene with Odenkirk is gold and any scene with those two stupid hitmen is worthless

oh look they are slowly walking away from an exploding truck! I think I saw this in an action movie once

my wife also pointed out (correctly, imho) that this show is way worse with female characters than Mad Men or the Sopranos.

What, you didn't like that scene where Jane hit Jesse in the back of the head with a steak?

Apology Girl was okay but I don't think she was very well-drawn as a character. fairly one-dimensional, mostly a plot device to move Jesse from incompetent junkie to competent partner. I mean as soon as they started shooting up my first thought was "welp, guess she'll be dead in a few episodes"

there's just not a lot of depth given to the women - junkie, the mother who becomes a whore, high-strung shoplifter - that's about it.

who... who is 'the mother who becomes a whore'

a cliché archetype that's who

It's definitely a show about men, but I don't think it's "way worse" than the Sopranos or Mad Men.

Funny this, since it's written and directed by women.

any married woman who bangs her boss (and her unethical/books-cooking boss, at that) a couple weeks after having a baby counts as a whore in my whore book.

xp

to be clear I think it's way worse in this particular area

Funny this, since it's written and directed by women.

moreso than Mad Men...? I don't remember the gender split on the Sopranos crew as well but iirc it was primarily male.

any married woman who bangs her boss (and her unethical/books-cooking boss, at that) a couple weeks after having a baby counts as a whore in my whore book.

xp

― giallo pudding pops (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, July 31, 2012 4:34 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

lol.

hmm interesting whore definition

classic shakey

"any married woman who bangs her boss (and her unethical/books-cooking boss, at that) a couple weeks after having a baby counts as a whore in my whore book."

Dying at this.

itt I am a harsh judge of fictional marital infidelities

really disappointed in breaking bad for following that all-too-familiar arc of filing the difficult edges off your amc drama in a direct play for the wallets of soft-headed mindless consumer chicks who get wet for unethical/books-cooking bosses. fuck this gay earth. hope wilfred stays pure.

moreso than Mad Men...? I don't remember the gender split on the Sopranos crew as well but iirc it was primarily male.

I don't know anything about Mad Men.

well, a lot of women are involved in its writing/directing

shit meant this link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204908604574332284143366134.html#mod

I think I understood like a third of polyphonic's post. who's wilfred? gay? what?

to be fair I don't understand a third of my posts either.

"any married woman who bangs her boss (and her unethical/books-cooking boss, at that) a couple weeks after having a baby counts as a whore in my whore book."

I think more time might have passed than a couple of weeks.

yeah I dunno - he was already hitting on her before she delivered, and he was there in the delivery room, and then she didn't take any time off work she was back in the office like days later (this whole plot element seemed very WTF to me, speaking as a parent)

Well if it was a couple of weeks I think we should be praising her vaginal elasticity not damning her as a whore.

i think i prefer shakey's "i've never seen a pretty lesbian" book to his "new mother bangs boss and becomes whore" book

all part of a multi-volume opus

would read

shakey is wrong about everything in this thread except sopranos being better than everything else. that is correct

his new book is quite interesting tho

http://www.blogography.com/photos18/DumbassWhore.gif

I couldn't get through the first season of the Sopranos. Someday I'll try again.

Okay, I just finished season 4. I think Giancarlo Esposito has been elevated to the Mirren plateau.

I enjoy Breaking Bad, but you've got to be on crystal to pick it over Mad Men.

I enjoy Mad Men, but you've got to be a man who loves liquor and women to pick it over Breaking Bad.

...or perhaps a woman who loves liquor and women.

liquor and women are pretty great

for those of us who liek that sort of thing

http://images.nymag.com/images/2/daily/2010/09/20100910_blankenship-silo_250x250.png

Prime has added a disclaimer at the beginning to S3's blackface episode (I think this is the first time I've seen it; don't remember it when I rewatched on Netflix). Good--that's exactly how I'd handle it. Leave the scene in, add something at the beginning that prepares you if you haven't seen it, and provides a little historical context. Beyond general principles, if you took it out, you'd probably finish with a more favorable view of Roger than he deserves; that scene--a truly excruciating 60 seconds--is part of that character.

The one thing that did to come to mind--and don't read this as a slippery-slope argument against the disclaimer; I'm glad it's there--is that they probably need something similar in the episode where Joan is raped by her fiancée.

That reminds me that recently the Decades channel did a weekend marathon of the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts with every episode having a disclaimer explaining that the humor therein was accepted at the time but clearly offensive today.

I can see that...though from occasional look-in on some of those Comedy Central roasts, aren't the more recent ones even more offensive? I don't know--I fled pretty quickly.

(And speaking of roasts and excruciating, the Larry Sanders roast episode--brilliant--comes to mind.)

much like if we repolled Wire vs Sopranos, this result would change if we ran it again now

MM would win by at least 20 votes

At least, I would think. Neither series was close to finished when they did this. (Wouldn't be 118 votes...28-5 for Mad Men.)

S4 of Breaking Bad, third time through. Just sort of happened: my brother-in-law was just starting, watched a couple of episodes, had lots of time to kill over Christmas, kept going.

More later, but I've noticed an episode common to a few series: the dark-night-of-the-soul episode, where one or more characters (who may or may not be drunk or medicated) talk deep into the night as they work through some crisis. In Breaking Bad, it's S3's "The Fly," an episode I don't love--one of S3's weaker ones, I'd say--but didn't mind as much this time, mostly because of Walt's great speech where he tries to figure out the exact moment when he should have died. In Larry Sanders, it's "Arthur After Hours," the night Artie bumps Ryan O'Neal and ends up getting drunk and hanging out with the custodian. And, the most famous example, Mad Men's "The Suitcase," Don ducking the call from California about Anna Draper. There must be others--didn't think it warranted its own thread.

Bottle Episodes?

In the middle of my first Breaking Bad re-watch after binging the show in 2015. Just finished S4E2 I think.