Seriality and Sustainability in Breaking Bad
In the popular and critical commentary on the so-called “prestige” television series –
Deadwood, Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad and others – critics often draw upon a vocabulary
of sustainability to describe everything from a show’s narrative dynamics to its prospects of
remaining on the air. The critic Alan Sepinwall, for instance, comments that The X-Files “was
able to borrow the bizarre atmosphere of Twin Peaks and make it more sustainable”(15-6);
Robert Harvilla, writing in The Ringer, wonders whether the spate of plot twists in the
second season of Mr. Robot will prove to be “unsustainable” in the long run; Avi Santo writes
that HBO’s emphasis on creative freedom has “raised concern over the sustainability of its
most popular programs” (41). That last example brings to mind a different, but related term:
“Peak TV,” which has recently displaced the earlier designation “Golden Age” to define the
cultural moment of television programming we’re in. The meaning of “Peak TV” varies
somewhat, but in general it seems to suggest that this is a period of maximum output, where
it’s becoming almost impossible for most viewers to keep up with all of the worthwhile
things to watch, and, as a corollary, where financial pressures, increasingly fractured
audiences, over-production, proliferation of streaming services and platforms, or some
combination of all these, will soon bring about some kind of falling off of interest, or
attenuation in quality.1 Thus although “Golden Age” and “Peak TV” both define a
significant cultural phenomenon and anticipate its inevitable end, the latter emphasizes the
technological parameters and economic pressures of that moment, the market forces that
both build and destroy. The term “Peak TV” is derived, of course, from the discourse of
“Peak Oil,” the concern that we have reached, or are about to reach, the upper limit of
petroleum production, after which the world’s insatiable demand for oil will have to reckon
with ever-diminishing reserves.2 Like Peak Oil, Peak TV is about supply and demand,
production and overproduction; in other words, about sustainability.
Now, I would hasten to add that, on some level, such language means very little, ecocritically speaking. As Stacy Alaimo has argued, the discourse of “sustainability” may have
first arisen in direct opposition to mainstream, growth-oriented economic orthodoxy, but it
is now commonly applied to “economies, national debts, personal debts, the housing market,
food systems, the Euro and all manner of more trivial matters” in ways that “do not in any
way critique the capitalist ideals of unfettered expansion” (2012: 559). That is, to talk about a
television series being sustainable or unsustainable is to traffic in compromised terms that
have lost most of their bite. While that is no doubt true, I also want to argue here that there
nevertheless remains a residue or trace of critical power in this vocabulary, and, further, that
the serial narrative format contains unique expressive possibilities for dramatizing the logic
of environmental crisis. When The Wire creator David Simon argues that “TV is about
sustaining the franchise. Not all of it. There’s some very good stuff out there. But a lot of it
is about sustaining the franchise. You know, looking for the hit,” he is critiquing the
imperative for endless narrative reproducibility, which demands stability, continuity, stasis,
and thus necessarily limits the kinds of things about the world that can be represented
(Paskin, 2012). That is to say, such a narrative imperative presupposes and depends upon the
idea of the endless reproducibility of the social world itself. Anyone who has seen The Wire
knows that, in it, Simon takes direct aim at such assumptions, and at the various institutions
(criminal, educational, political) that strive to sustain themselves at the expense of other
things like community, family, “real police work,” and the actual physical condition of the
city of Baltimore. Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, draws a similar contrast to make a
similar point:
2
I want the actions the characters take on Breaking Bad to always have
consequences. I guess that in itself was a reaction to years and years of
television, watching TV shows in which the characters would have some lifechanging event where they kill someone or they get wounded and the next
week they’re basically back on their feet and there’s no emotional
repercussions […] That’s because television has to maintain a sort of a stasis
and keep the characters more or less in one spot from week to week to allow
for continuity, so the viewer can tune in and tune out as they choose. That’s
just what television does, and it’s not a bad thing or a good thing. It’s just a
structural conceit (2011: VanDerWerff)
For Gilligan, this sense of stasis, the demand for limitless episodic iterability, means that the
ramifications of serious events often go entirely ignored, or unexpressed. He is talking here
about ramifications of a personal or moral variety, but, as I hope to show in what follows,
his approach has implications for representing ramifications of a material or ecological
variety as well.
My contention is that Breaking Bad puts questions of what we might call narrative
sustainability – questions like: can this plot be kept up? is this premise one that will continue
to hold interest over many seasons? – to work in the service of a trenchant and
environmentally minded critique of consumer capitalism. Breaking Bad’s eco-politics, I argue,
emerges less through overt expressions of alarm or outrage about environmental ruin, and
more through an unsustainable narrative logic that grinds against the twinned motivating
fantasies of unlimited economic growth and techno-scientific mastery. This essay is roughly
divided into two parts: in the first, I argue that the series quietly but insistently raises
questions of waste, toxicity, contamination, and unsustainable economic growth, through
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both its dialogue and its visual rhetoric. In the second, I move on to discuss how these issues
find expression through serial structure itself, and specifically in the relationship between the
different narrative units: the episode, on the one hand, and the season or series on the other.
My aim is to show that this is a text that, while it may not wear its environmental politics on
its sleeve, or seem at first glance particularly “green,” nevertheless offers, through its very
form and narrative logic, one of the most incisive critiques of our own unsustainable cultural
and economic order.
Sustainability and Exponential Growth
Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad, explicitly introduces the language of
sustainability early in the first season, when his partner Jesse Pinkman delivers the week’s
profits, and they fall short of expectations:
Walter: Help me understand the math, ok? I gave you one pound, correct?
You and I split two thousand dollars per ounce. One thousand dollars each.
One pound, that’s sixteen ounces. Sixteen ounces should net to me sixteen
thousand dollars. Sixteen. Not fifteen.
Jesse: Something came up.
W: Something came up?
J: One of my guys got held up by a couple of junkies, lost an ounce. But it’s
cool, ok? Skinny Pete’s cool.
W: Oho. So you’re saying that your guy got robbed, or rather you got robbed,
but it doesn’t matter.
J: Dude it’s called breakage, ok? Like K-Mart, shit breaks.
W: And you’re thinking this is acceptable.
J: It’s the cost of business, yo. You’re sweating me over a grand?
W: Hey look I’m just the chemist; I’m not the street guy, yo. But it seems to
me that what you call “breakage” is just you making a fool of yourself. I’ve
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got another technical term for you. Non-sustainable business model. (2009:
“Breakage”)
Walter here is using the attenuated version of the language of sustainability Alaimo critiques,
but what’s interesting to me is the relationship between that term and the one Jesse
introduces, which also happens to be the title of the episode: “breakage.” One way to frame
that relationship is as a contrast between the business model and, for lack of a better term,
the “real” world; between, on the one hand, the abstract equations of Walter’s blackboard,
where sixteen is sixteen, and inputs always equal outputs, and, on the other, the material
world Jesse inhabits, where the actual transactions take place, and waste, disorder,
unpredictability, and risk are unavoidable products of any transaction. The term “breakage”
stands for what we might term the “entropy principle” at work in the series: the idea that
every act of exchange necessarily involves the production of some amount of disorder or
waste in the system that must be attended to later, usually at great expense. There is no plan,
no scheme, no clever device, no technological fix that can avoid this reality. Crucially,
though, Walter doesn’t simply ignore breakage, he seeks to control or instrumentalize it. He
tells Jesse: “What happens when word gets out and it’s open season on these clowns you’ve
hired? Once everyone knows that Jesse Pinkman, drug lord, can be robbed with impunity? You
think Tuco had breakage? I guess it’s true, he did. He broke bones. He broke the skulls of
anyone who tried to rip him off” (2009: “Breakage”). If Jesse thinks disorder is a fact of life
that must be patiently endured, Walter believes it should be offloaded, turned elsewhere and
upon others. In his hands, the noun “breakage” becomes the transitive verb “broke,” and is
refashioned as a kind of weapon. Walter’s approach here, and throughout, is defined by a
lethal dialectic between abstraction and violence: when he discovers the inevitable mismatch
between clean, abstract model and messy external circumstances, his solution is not to
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question his model (x=x), but to manipulate external circumstances, violently or otherwise,
until they correspond to it.
Thus when Walter invokes the language of sustainability his comment both conjures
environmental discourse, and reveals the way that discourse has been compromised by the
expropriation of its key terms. For him, a “sustainable” business is not one that attempts to
understand and work within the limiting conditions of a given environment, but one that
seeks to control that environment and alter those conditions in the name of endless
profitability. It should come as little surprise, then, that his lecture to Jesse about a
“sustainable business model” is followed two episodes later by the demand that their new
business achieve “exponential growth.” This demand is repeated several times over the
course of the series, and, since it’s a familiar term from conventional economic discourse,
may not seem all that unusual or striking. But it seems to me Breaking Bad aims its critique at
the rot lurking within the conventional and the taken-for-granted; its target is both the mildmannered suburban dad, and the economic orthodoxy he spouts.3 It is precisely Walter’s
complacent use of terms like “exponential growth” and his other appeals to economic
orthodoxy (which I’ll discuss in a moment) that we are meant to question.
As environmentally minded economists going back to John Ruskin and John Stuart
Mill have pointed out, there is a fundamental incompatibility between a growth-based
economic order, and a sustainable economic order.4 Put simply, we live in a world of limited
resources that has a finite capacity to absorb waste, where entropy or “breakage” is the rule
not the exception. Exponential growth is, by definition, unsustainable.5 As the economist
Herman Daly writes:
Entropy would not be so limiting if environmental sources and sinks were
infinite, but both are finite. […] The ordered structures of the economic
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subsystem are maintained at the expense of creating a more-than-offsetting
amount of disorder in the rest of the system. (1997: 33)
For Daly, the dominant economic paradigm sweeps such limits out of sight, reducing the
environment to an “externality,” and treating commodities as infinitely fungible abstractions
that move in a self-contained, cyclical system of exchange.6 This, he argues, is the destructive
blindness at the heart of conventional, growth-oriented economic orthodoxy, the monstrous
effects of which are becoming increasingly visible in the form of superstorms, coastal
erosion and flooding, and rising sea levels (among many other things). When Walter
instructs Jesse to, “corner the market, then raise the price. Simple economics” (2009: “Negro
Y Azul”) or when he jabs at a map of Albuquerque and says “Here, here, here, and here
what does that look like to you? Opportunities. Golden ones, that’s what that looks like. It’s
an entire city full of buyers. Now why aren’t we exploiting that?” (2009: “Negro Y Azul”) his
glibness suggests the kind of reductive bracketing of real-world pressures and limits that
ecologically minded economists have been describing since at least the nineteenth century.
But, crucially, “breakage” is not simply something Walter fails to manage; it is
something he produces through his very efforts to manage it. This is illustrated perhaps most
vividly in one of the series’ defining symbolic events: the midair collision of two passenger
jets over Albuquerque in the second season. The sequence that produces this disaster is
circuitous but clearly traceable to Walter’s attempts to eliminate disorder and risk from his
operation. Briefly: he allows Jesse’s girlfriend to die, which throws the woman’s father into a
state of grief, which affects his job as an air-traffic controller, which leads to the crash. Like
“spontaneous combustion” in Dickens’s Bleak House, this event is offered not so much as a
plausible consequence of certain behaviors, but a spectacular symbolic eruption of the text’s
central moral dynamics into the frame of the narrative. On one level, since the crash cannot
7
be used as evidence against him, it represents the perverse success of Walter’s plan to
offload “breakage” onto others and into the environment at large. But, in an additional,
deliberately fanciful, turn of events, debris lands upon his own house, serving as a reminder
both that there are vast, unpredictable and unmanageable forces at work in this system, and
that he is subject to them too, because he remains a part of it.
Although, chronologically, the crash occurs at the very end of the second season, the
aftermath is shown to us through brief, mysterious flash-forwards all season long. On first
viewing, these scenes make little sense – it’s not clear until the finale what kind of event
produced the glimpses of damage we see. The mise en scène – the stark, overexposed, blackand-white shots of the White house and yard; the images of a hot-pink teddy bear glowing
unnaturally, almost radioactively, like some parody of vitality; the fragmentary, view-fromnowhere shots of men in hazmat suits picking through a debris field; the fishbowl sounds of
human breath through a respirator – all of this suggests not merely disaster, but a specifically
toxic event of unknown magnitude. Inexplicable upon first viewing, and uncontained by the
linear chronology of the main plot, these images are obviously related to Walter’s operation,
and yet remain disconnected from the events of any given episode until the end; instead,
they hang for the entire season like some extraneous matter beyond the bounds of the
comprehensible narrative world, imbued with an aura of grim inevitability, and approached
only by means of a protective yellow suit and artificial breathing apparatus. Because the
crash site is allowed to remain suggestive of environmental contamination of mysterious
origin and undefined dimensions, it functions for almost the entire season as a quasiexpressionist commentary on the toxic nature of Walter’s business. This kind of unexplained
flashfoward is, I would add, a visual technique Breaking Bad frequently draws on over the
course of its six seasons. The images of swirling smoke and debris that serve as the cold-
8
open to “Crazy Handful of Nothing” in the first season; the shots of the derelict, vandalized
White family home that kick off the premiere episode of the final season: when we first see
these bewildering, chaotic landscapes, we don’t yet know how exactly they came to be that
way, but nevertheless understand they represent the inevitable issue of Walter’s method,
means, and logic.
The visual interest in toxicity is later reinforced elsewhere as well. In the third-season
episode “Fly,” which also takes as its subject the repercussions of the decision that led to the
crash, Walter pursues a “contaminant” in his lab – a rogue housefly – to the point of
hopelessness and exhaustion. “It’s all contaminated,” he finally admits, referring not only to
the state of the laboratory itself, but his entire enterprise (2010: “Fly”). And near the end of
the final season, he attempts to save the enormous pile of money he has accumulated by
burying it in large plastic drums deep in the desert. Here we have a generic staple – buried
fortune, a remote locale, a modern-day treasure map in the form of GPS coordinates – given
a distinctly eco-conscious twist. For the iconography of sealed drums and desert
containment has a deep political and cultural history in this region, calling to mind the
methods of toxic waste storage often employed in New Mexico, Utah, and other Southwest
states burdened with “nuclear sacrifice zones.”7 As the episode’s title “To’hajiilee” makes
conspicuous, the burial site is located in a Native American reservation, a region that has
historically been a prime candidate for nuclear testing and waste disposal (such territory is
not subject to the same kinds of federal health and environmental regulations as the rest of
the country). I should add that Breaking Bad does not emphasize this environmental history,
but in the unmarked storage drums that do not stay safely buried, it offers a potent sign of
how profit and poison, money and waste, are the indissociable issue of the ideology of
exponential growth. It is notable here that, for six seasons, money has reliably worked as the
9
means through which Walter managed the problems his operation has created. Here, for the
first time, it fails to work – he tries to bribe the men holding his brother-in-law captive, but
they execute him. As Walter discovers in these final episodes, money can no longer clean up
the damage it has caused because, on some level, it is itself the toxic material.
Breaking Bad also subtly and persistently builds a network of references to energy use,
waste, and resource consumption that, taken together, suggest the exhaustion and threat
lurking beneath apparent suburban plentitude. Some of references are verbal, like brief
discussions of “water-powered cars” (2010: “Sunset”), or hydrogen fuel on Mars (2009:
“Phoenix”), or “unlimited supplies” of hot water (2009: “Over”), or “toxic waste” leaking
from an old boiler (2009: “Over”), or the Exxon-Valdez oil spill (2009: “Better Call Saul”).
Other references are visual, made through the use of dialectical montage, with scenes
punctuated with arresting images of expended energy forms: lit matches extinguished in a
swimming pool (2008: “Pilot”); cigarettes crushed in ashtrays (2010: “Abiquiu”); shots of the
sun sinking (2009: “Over”) and atomic bomb blasts (2009: “Negro y Azul”). That last
example opens a scene in which Jesse, adopting Walter’s terms and pedantic manner, makes
a speech to his lieutenants about achieving “exponential growth,” and serves as an ironic
comment on their false sense of power and control. Jesse’s speech, it’s also worth noting, is
set in the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque, a venue that
quietly reminds us of the region’s history in the development of atomic energy.
These visual and verbal references to energy consumption both echo and extend the
show’s more overt interest in the dynamics of the methamphetamine trade, because they
play upon the familiar analogy between fossil fuels and illegal drugs. The former, after all, is
popularly described an addictive substance from which our society must break its harmful
“dependency.”8 This nexus between drugs and energy is forged in subtle ways – through the
10
use of the museum setting; through Jesse’s description of a meth high: “just a little gas in the
tank and suddenly everything is interesting” (2010: “Abiquiu”); and through the moment in
the third season when his car runs out of fuel and he actually exchanges meth for gasoline
(2010: “Green Light”). But this analogy is more elaborately imagined as well, perhaps
nowhere more clearly than in the second-season episode “4 Days Out” (2009) in which
Walter and Jesse drive the “gas guzzling” RV into the desert for an epic, weekend-long meth
cook. As they prepare to return home, they discover the battery has died, stranding them in a
remote part of the desert. This mishap suddenly turns all the commodities they ordinarily
take for granted – food, water, oil, and electricity – into dangerously scarce resources. As
they work through a number of contrivances to start the engine, the objective of the episode
itself undergoes a telling transformation: from manufacturing drugs to manufacturing energy.
Correspondingly, the desert itself changes from a conveniently deserted staging ground to a
decisive environment hostile to unaccommodated human existence.9 The heavy immobility
of the RV not only upends the pair’s plans, it provides a striking visual contrast to the many
shots of suburban freeways streaming endlessly with cars.10
“4 Days Out” thus makes pointed use of the show’s Albuquerque setting to
juxtapose a resource-intensive lifestyle with the environment of scarcity encircling it.
Although this part of the American southwest has for decades appeared to many as an “adult
playground to be enjoyed without consequences” (2011:19), as Andrew Ross argues, the
region simply cannot function as a habitat for such a large, high-consumption population
without a complex energy-intensive infrastructure and a continuous flow of resources from
elsewhere. The demographic boom “the Sunbelt” has experienced since World War II
powerfully expresses, again, in Ross’s words, “the national appetite for unrestrained growth”
(ibid.: 15) as well as the ways in which the fantasy of expansionary American capitalism
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eventually must confront the natural limits of an environment. As James Meek argues,
Breaking Bad draws a pointed visual contrast between the “man-made desert” (2013: 8) of
suburban Albuquerque and the vibrant, non-human sparseness of the actual desert. But this
contrast, I would argue, also lends the show something of a pre-apocalyptic quality, where
the thin bubble of comfort is shown to be leaning precariously on the serrated edge of a
wasteland. Interrupting their preparations to supply the addicts of Albuquerque with
methamphetamines, the unexpected energy crisis in “4 Days Out” reveals a state of
dependency that characterizes the region as a whole. In this way, the metaphorical nexus
between the structures of drug and energy addiction helps connect Walter’s seemingly sui
generis story of going rogue to the destructive “habits” of ordinary life, as the pursuit of a
never-ending flow of money, cars, energy, or drugs is undermined by the ever-present threat
of scarcity and collapse.
Unsustainable Narratives
As I mentioned above, Walter’s obsessive pursuit of a “contaminant” in his
laboratory in the celebrated third-season episode “Fly” functions as an allegory of sorts for
his operation as a whole, in which he continually strives, and fails, to clear a space that
contains no contaminants, no disorder, no unpredictability. When he admits near the end
that “it’s all contaminated,” it’s a rare moment of self-knowledge, where the character
articulates a reading of the symbols in his own story (2010: “Fly”). But the tension between
containment and contamination that the fly symbolizes and that “Fly” thematizes, is, I want
to argue, also worked out on the level of narrative organization. That is, over the course of
its run, the series tracks the different forms of disorder that spill over from episode to
season, and from season to series. Consider Walter’s elimination of the drug lord Tuco
Salamanca, an act that neutralizes a lethal threat and seemingly brings the first season’s plot
12
to a close.11 But the third season opens with Tuco’s identical twin cousins arriving from
Mexico to avenge him, and follows them as they cut an even more destructive swath of
violence through the community, and pose an even more serious threat to Walter and his
operation. They are yet another unforeseen reaction he has produced through his efforts to
contain the damage his operation has caused, one that exceeds the bounds of the “closure”
seemingly arrived at the end of the previous season. They arrive without warning, and in that
sudden novelty and strangeness suggest the wider system of forces and geographic spaces
with which the operation is intimately connected, but which have, until now, remained
beyond the bounds of Walter’s imagination. Their twinship, moreover, suggests a
multiplicative process in which the “solution” to one problem only begets two more, just as
their mute, expressionless ferocity invites us to read them more as embodied principles of
disorder a la Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men than as “realistic”
characters. The system then widens further, and the violent agents multiply yet again, as
Walter’s efforts to eliminate these threats leads him to Gus Fring, his region-wide network of
thugs, pushers, and hit men, and the Mexican drug cartel that begins crossing into New
Mexico with greater firepower and in larger numbers. Embedded in this multiplicative
narrative economy is a nightmare version of the desire for “exponential growth” driving
Walter’s business plans.
The other nightmare version of exponential growth, of course, is cancer, which both
sets the plot in motion, and serves as a metaphor for the unsustainable logic of the narrative
itself. Like Walter’s business, cancer lays waste to the very environment upon which it
depends, creating the need for even more desperate and (and often destructive) remedies.
The abstract blueprints that would govern production and reproduction – whether business
model or DNA sequence – routinely suffer damage upon contact with the concrete
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conditions of a material world defined by contingency, randomness, and entropy. In this
way, the moral, the ecological and the medical are united in a dense, shifting, mutually
imbricated metaphorical system that expresses the complex interchange between psyche,
body, and environment. As Gilligan remarks:
Walter White is a guy who suffers from cancer but also in a very real yet
metaphorical sense, he is the cancer of the show. He is a cancer on his
family, and these decisions he makes as a person, these decisions to cook
meth and be a criminal and do the things he does, are having a very clearly,
very long-term adverse effect on everyone around him […] He’s the engine
who drives their lives. (2011: VanDerWerff)
The phrase “very real but metaphorical sense” nicely captures the zone of symbolic realism
in which the narrative dwells. The urge for growth inside Walter – both the cancer itself, and
the oft-repeated demand for “exponential growth” – produces a widening radius of chaos,
explosions, corpses, dead bystanders, poisoned children, and debris fields, as if the disorder
within the man spills beyond him to become disorder without. In this way, the logic of
metastasis connects Walter’s body and mind to the economic fantasies he entertains, and the
disordered, contaminated environment he produces.12 Most insidiously, the money in
Walter’s grasp continues to grow with each passing season – from a few thousand in the
early episodes, to eighty million by the last – as the potential payoff and the exorbitant costs
escalate in a mutually reinforcing spiral. Narratively and symbolically, the series tracks the
rapid proliferation of various forms of moral and physical disorder that emerge from the
operation – what we might call tropes of unsustainable growth.
Through a network of references to depletion and addiction, as well as through a
narrative logic through which a “fix” for the present moment always generates more long14
lasting and dire complications, Breaking Bad presents a complex double vision of applied
scientific knowledge as it is put in the service of the profit motive. The short-term power his
scientific expertise produces prevents him from recognizing both the chaos it also produces,
and the self-undermining direction of the pattern as a whole. As Ulrich Beck argues, the
“expansion and heightening of the intention of control ultimately ends up producing the
opposite,” and thus further risks “arise precisely from the triumph of the instrumentally
rational order” (ibid.: 9). The paradoxical dynamic Beck delineates – where the local triumphs
of instrumental rationality always sow the seeds of an even larger defeat – is central to the
logic of Breaking Bad. “Now that we’re in control,” he tells Jesse, incredibly, in the fifth
season, “no one else gets hurt.” To which Jesse replies: “You keep saying that and it’s
bullshit every time.” (2012: “Say My Name”). The enmeshment of success and failure that
Beck identifies as fundamental to much Western scientific discourse becomes, in Breaking
Bad, a narrative principle: it is the dialectical interplay between complication and solution
that produces, over the course of the entire series, increasingly extreme versions of both. A
narrow scientism masquerading as “science” and motivated by the promise of unending
profit and total security, is fatally undermined by its own narrowness, by the persistent
inability to grasp the ecological dimensions of behavior, and the chaotic complexity of a
world that resists any attempts to achieve comprehensive control.13
Thus although Walter and other characters talk of exponential growth, the show
itself insists that no matter how profitable the plan, no matter how well executed, and no
matter how ingeniously it is underwritten by specialized scientific knowledge, costs will
always eventually outpace revenues. And “costs” in this case means not just the up-front
expenses of obtaining raw materials or equipment, but the measures that must be taken to
cover their tracks from police and family, dodge reprisals from rival drug dealers, and
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manage all the new risks and consequences produced by their actions. The process is cheap,
but the cleanup is expensive. At one point in the second season, after Jesse complains that,
“I’ve already lost more than I’ve made,” Walter replies:
You want to know how much I’ve got left? After completing my first round
of treatment and financing the world’s most expensive alibi? Huh? Zero –
zip – nothing. I’ve got nothing to show for all of this. Nothing for my family,
which, as you might remember, was the whole damned point. (2009:
“Breakage”)
Walter’s consistent failure to reckon with the chaotic totality of consequences undermines
whatever “gains” he has elsewhere made. At the beginning of the final season, he admits
that, after an entire year of scheming, concealing, fleeing, hiding, poisoning, bombing, and
killing, he is still, incredibly, “forty thousand dollars in the hole. Does that seem like an
acceptable stopping point to you?” (2012: “Live Free or Die”). This dynamic, in which all
the profits from the meth trade must be used to manage the fallout from the meth trade,
runs through the entire series, and creates a futile one-step-forward, two-steps-back narrative
logic.
That the various, unexpected expenditures come in such strange forms (faking a
mysterious illness; paying for someone to go to prison; footing another’s tax bill to keep the
IRS away) would seem only to emphasize the excessive unpredictability of the world and the
futility of trying to control it. But Walter mistakes the strangeness of these events for the
unlikelihood of their reoccurrence. Each catastrophe is treated a necessary part of what he
calls the “learning curve,” and thereby folded into a teleological narrative of increasing
mastery, rather than taken as a sign that his premises are flawed: “perhaps I was overly
ambitious,” he muses, “it’s not going to happen that way any more” (2009: “Breakage”). In
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the fifth season, he tells Jesse that since their main rival has been eliminated, their operation
is about to become “self-sufficient,” a rough synonym for “sustainable” with the added
suggestion of total autonomy (2012: “Buyout”). The latest obstacle always becomes the final
obstacle, and thus the idea that the plan will work on the next go round survives six seasons’
worth of disconfirming evidence.
Sustainability is thus not simply about the viability of Walter’s business plans, but
about the relationship between those plans and the stories in which he embeds them. Those
stories are psychologically “sustaining,” because to believe that the latest iteration of the plan
will finally fix everything is to imagine that the anxiety, labor, duplicity, expense, moral
compromise, and violence will all at last be made worth it: “I – we – have suffered and bled –
literally – for this business,” Walter exclaims when Jesse suggests they quit, “and I will not
throw it away for nothing” (2012: “Buyout”). But such stories are also sustaining insofar as
they are inter-articulated with a self-aggrandizing moral rhetoric that allows Walter to
continue arguing for his own decency despite the many heinous things he has done. “What
happened happened for the best, you hear me?” he tells Jesse, “I wouldn’t change a thing.
You and I working together, having each other’s back […] it’s what saved our lives. I want
you to think about that as we go forward” (2012: “Madrigal”). Their history of deceit and
violence, spun into a story of loyalty, offers lessons for the future: the expert teacher has his
pupil forever on the learning curve. At some point, tending to the narrative becomes more
important than tending to the reality that narrative claims to describes; or, as Walter puts it
in Season 6: “the story comes first.” (2013: “Blood Money”). And that’s the case even when
the divide between story and reality is unmistakably apparent, even when the person being
duped is the person doing the telling. As their lawyer Saul Goodman remarks: “If you’re
committed enough you can make any story work. I once convinced a woman I was Kevin
17
Costner, and it worked because I believed it” (2010: “Abiuqui”). Or consider the drug
kingpin Gus Fring’s final moments in season four, in which we see him, in profile, calmly
exiting a room in which there has just been a massive explosion, adjusting his tie with
uncanny poise. It’s an extraordinarily shocking visual, since, for a moment, it seems as if the
aura of indestructibility and control Fring has cultivated has actually made him impervious to
violence. The camera then pivots to reveal that half of his head and face have been
destroyed in the blast, and once we see that, he immediately falls dead to the floor. The
sequence has a strange kind of hyper-realism to it – like Wile E. Coyote suddenly noticing
his feet are running on thin air. It suggests both the almost magical “sustaining” power of
fictions of control, as well as their inability, ultimately, to keep material reality at bay. (2011:
“Face Off”).
These self-concealing narratives of order swirl most potently – and therefore most
insidiously – around the mythos of the nuclear family. “Everything I have done,” Walter tells
Skyler late in season 5, “I have done for this family” (2012: “Fifty-One”). Self-cast as the
archetypal male provider, Walter can justify any behavior, any act of violence or spasm of
self-indulgence; indeed, his subscription to this narrative is so strong that it keeps him from
recognizing how the very family he would provide for is manifestly disintegrating as a direct
result of his efforts to provide for it. By the fourth season, his business has not only
estranged him from Skyler and broken up the household; it has put everyone under the
threat of death. Thus a conflict emerges between the ability to sustain a narrative – to
marshal the verbal and imaginative “resources” to justify, occlude, euphemize, rationalize,
and whitewash destructive behaviors – and the ability to sustain the world that narrative
purportedly describes, but that those behaviors actively undermine. What is especially
complex about this unsustainable narrative dynamic is that two different time scales are
18
always at play at once. As we have seen, Walter’s resourcefulness works in the short-term,
insofar as it allows him to manipulate people and processes, to bluff his way out of danger,
and to justify extreme actions to meet the needs of the moment. But in the long term, the
temporary success of such actions only prevents him from recognizing certain obvious facts,
including the larger pattern of moral and material degradation he produces.
The interplay between these two time frames corresponds roughly to the relationship
between the operative narrative units in Breaking Bad: the episode and the season. The
former often hinges upon ingenious “devices” (both narrative and chemical) that can address
some immediately pressing problem, while the latter surveys the cascading damage brought
about by the constant recourse to such remedies. To resolve the complications in one kind
of storyline, even more intractable and dangerous complications must be offloaded into the
other. The series as a whole thus grows darker and more disturbing as patchwork remedies
are episodically applied and overall conditions steadily deteriorate. This dynamic is brilliantly
encapsulated in the fifth-season episode “Dead Freight” (2012), in which, over the course of
a single episode, Walter and company devise, prepare for, and successfully execute an
audacious plan to steal precursor chemicals from a train. The extreme implausibility of this
heist narrative, including the seemingly tidy resolution, is puzzling at first, but in the last few
frames of the episode, we see that such implausibility is precisely the point. For just as the
men are celebrating their success and the episode seems about to fade to black, a boy rides
up on a dirt bike and spots them (his presence in the desert, incidentally, was indicated in yet
another inexplicable flash-forward, in the opening sequence of the episode). His appearance
is a sudden rip in the fabric of a plan they had managed to hold together in so many other,
much more vulnerable, places; by having everything work out just the way they’d planned
for so long, it’s as if the team accrues a debt to probability that has to be discharged. A
19
member of the crew reacts by impulsively shooting the boy, which initiates, in the following
episodes, another chain of actions, decisions, plans, unforeseen consequences, and acts of
violence. There is no clearer example of Gilligan and his writers playing with the
conventions of television, turning the thematic and material problem of containment and
spillage (a plot centered on siphoning 1000 gallons of methylamine out of a tanker) into
structuring narrative principles. Here the show-runners take the closing seconds of what
otherwise seemed like a perfectly designed and executed plot, and turn them into a catalyst
for all more storylines that will define what happens for the remainder of the series.
Despite the short-term function they serve, Walter’s own narratives are unsustainable
because they work to undermine the very conditions that allow them to continue being told.
The dynamic is a vivid example of what Lauren Berlant terms “cruel optimism,” a condition
in which “something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing […] the object that
draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially” (2011: 1).
Berlant uses the concept of cruel optimism to describe not extreme behaviors like Walter’s,
but the slow wearing-away of everyday existence. As she puts it:
Cruel optimism […] grows from a perception about the reason people are not
Bartleby, do not prefer to interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose
to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used to. (ibid.: 28)
This seems very different from Walter’s condition, since his radical swerve from the norms
of ordinary life, misguided as it may be, does at least seem an attempt to interfere with various
forms of immiseration he experiences. Indeed, his rebellion against the mindless
reproduction of a stultifying existence is clearly part of what makes the character so
compelling in the early episodes. And yet, as the series continues, it is just as clear that his
rebellion is fatally incomplete because, unusual as it seems, it remains trapped within entirely
20
conventional patterns of thinking. Walter’s progressive scientism, his subscription to the
“simple economics” of exponential growth, his investment in the mythos of the nuclear
family and the patriarchal provider are all expressions of an unexamined, cruelly optimistic
telos. Because of this, his behavior represents not, as it first seems, a deviation from the moral
logic of everyday life, but a metastasizing version of it. The insidious dynamic at play in
Walter’s various narratives is that they are simultaneously self-defeating and self-reinforcing.
The worse things get – financially, morally, emotionally – the harder it becomes to ignore the
fact that his approach is fatally flawed; at the same time, the worse things get, the more acute
the need for a narrative that will endow his actions with meaning and allow him to believe it
has not all been for nothing.
The disjunction between Walter’s self-serving “I did it for the family” narrative and
the degraded reality that narrative both keeps at bay and helps bring into being, becomes
steadily more obvious and unbridgeable over the course of six seasons. One by one, his
associates and family members (Skyler, Jesse, Hank, Marie, Walter Jr.) notice, and respond to
his fiction-making with their own counter narratives. “You’re not hurting anyone but my
family…” Walter pleads with Jesse, who is about to set fire to his money, “[the money is]
not for me – it’s for my children.” “Oh you’re going to talk about kids?” Jesse replies,
“You’re seriously going to go there?” and reminds Walter of his history of violence against
children (2013: “Blood Money”). The first half of the final season centers on the
proliferation of these counter narratives among Walter’s friends and family, and his futile
attempts to shore up his own crumbling story. But after these attempts fail, the final few
episodes hinge on Walter’s own process of abandoning his cruelly optimistic, unsustainable
narrative, and coming to see his behavior for what it is. There have been glimpses of this
awareness before – in his aforementioned confession at the end of “Fly,” “it’s all
21
contaminated” – but the denouement over the last three episodes leads us to the clearest
articulation of it, the powerful moment in the finale when he admits who he is to his wife.
He begins with a familiar refrain: “All the things that I did, you need to understand – ”
which Skyler, tired of this story, interrupts: “If I have to hear one more time, that you did
this for the family –” To which Walter replies: “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it.
And I was really – I was alive” (2013: “Felina”). The power of narrative to manage, conceal,
and obfuscate has, in the episodes leading up to this moment, repeatedly comes into direct
conflict with the brute, unavoidable reality of Walter’s degraded circumstances.
Breaking Bad is considerably less invested in realism than, say, The Wire is: it traffics in
symbols, expressionistic visuals, and almost fantastically implausible events: the fly in the lab,
the airline crash, the pink teddy bear, Gus Fring’s strange death scene, among many other
examples. And yet, ultimately, the show is fundamentally grounded in a kind of realism
insofar as it insists – and eventually forces its protagonist to understand – that reality can be
bent, manipulated, and fictionalized only so far. Just as the show’s jarring violations of linear
chronology all eventually find their place in a comprehensible cause-effect pattern, so too do
Walter’s various fantasies and flights from reality finally succumb to the forces of necessity
and entropy. In “To’hajiilee” when Walter’s brother-in-law Hank is executed in front of him,
the camera focuses not on the actual victim, but on Walter, who drops in slow motion – first
to his knees, then over onto his side – as if he is the one who has been shot. Here we have
something like a symbolic version of what has happened, internally, to the character; that is,
in some sense, the self that has persisted believing in his own ability to neutralize whatever
disorder threatens him or his family has at last suffered a fatal blow. But that symbolism is
itself only made possible by, only finds its significance in, the material and undeniable fact of
an actual death.
22
Although Hank’s death is a narrative pivot point, the show prepares us for the
dissolution of Walter’s unsustainable narrative by way of the radically changing mise en scene –
specifically, through the changes visited upon the White family home itself. Over the course
of the season, the house is invaded by multiple hostile parties, doused with gasoline,
threatened with arson, vandalized, and abandoned. The destroyed house functions on two
levels here: in one sense, it is, like Hank’s body: incontrovertible evidence of the failure of
Walter’s family-first narrative. In the season-opening flash-forward we watch him wordlessly
tour the wreckage, grimly resigned (we later learn) to the coming end. But on another level, it
also is the breakdown of the set of the television show Breaking Bad, the sign of its demise as
a coherent fictional world. Through its six seasons, the series’ locations have continued to
expand and change in stride with the extreme metamorphosis of Walter and his business:
from middle-class suburbia to the hallways of the DEA, to the headquarters of drug dealers,
to a state-of- the-art meth-lab under an industrial laundry on the outskirts of town, to the
hacienda of a drug kingpin in Mexico, to the headquarters of a multinational in Germany.
Through it all, the White family home has remained the visual and thematic constant, the
pivot point around which all the rest revolves. The stable, secure home is not just central to
Walter’s own narrative, it is also the locus classicus of the television family drama, and the key
signifier of middle-class order and prosperity. Like the White family home, the series Breaking
Bad is itself destroyed by the very forces that made it possible in the first place. That is, as
Simon and Gilligan made clear in the passages I quoted in the opening, the imperative of a
conventional television is, in Simon’s words “to sustain the franchise” – that is, to sustain
itself. What makes Breaking Bad so interesting – and indeed so exhilarating – is the speed and
ruthlessness with which it undermines the very foundational premises that make it possible,
the disregard it seems to have for the need to sustain itself. As the writer Alec Nevala-Lee
23
notes, Breaking Bad “is all but unique among important television shows in that its underlying
conception changed radically after its first season, as the writers began to honestly examine
the story’s implications.” The narrative proceeds by establishing some kind of tensely
equilibrated set of relationships, fatally disrupting that equilibrium, and then building
something even more insecure upon whatever remains. The problem of sustainability thus
appears not only as a central theme of Breaking Bad, it defines its narrative architectonics, and
its lifespan as a series. I would note here that the term “to break,” in television writer
parlance, means something like “to work out the plot” (Gilligan, for example, remarked that
season 3 “was the hardest season we’ve had yet to break. It was mind-numbingly hard to try
to play this game”). But we can see how Breaking Bad plays with the paradoxical doubleness
of that term, since “breaking” the show eventually and inevitably leads to a broken show.
Unlike, say, The Sopranos, Mad Men, or even The Wire, all of which could have continued for
an indefinite number of future seasons, Breaking Bad tethers itself to the self-undermining
logic of the profit motive and follows it to its own unavoidable terminus.
I would argue that this, ultimately, is Breaking Bad’s most innovative and powerful use
of serial structure: it plays the limited scope of the individual episode against the more
expansive horizon of the series, showing how the actions that successfully manage crises in
the former produce chaotic aftereffects that dramatically change the course, integrity, and
continued viability of the latter. This ingenious interplay of time scales formally dramatizes
one of the most insidious difficulties in addressing our current sustainability crisis: the urgent
demands of the moment must be addressed, and yet addressing them threatens to only
further destabilize the system, and create other, more unmanageable, long-term emergencies.
Science is, of course, at the heart of this lethal spiral, since (like Walter White) our own
established social and political order consistently refuses to even entertain questions about
24
our “growth-based” economic orthodoxy, and thus reaches reflexively for scientific fixes to
address problems that science has caused in the first place. In an interview, Gilligan refers to
Walter White as the “engine” of the series; like an engine, he both generates momentum and
consumes the fuel needed to continue. The brilliance of Breaking Bad lies, in part, in its
willingness to represent this “fuel cycle” as an irreversible one that brings the show itself to
its inevitable end.
1
Writing in Slate.com, Willa Paskin notes that the term was coined by John Landgraf, and
defines the problem in these terms: “Nearly 400 original series aired in 2015, and that
number will get higher in 2016. From Landgraf’s perspective, this volume is keeping
audiences from finding good series they would enjoy, and this is unsustainable on the
network end of things.”
2
For an informative, influential discussion of Peak Oil, see Kenneth Deffeyes’s Hubbert’s
Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008.
3
Curtis Marez, writing in the Critical Inquiry blog argues, the series presents a “cognitive map
for popular thinking about political economy” (2013). Marez’s focus is on racial coding in
the representation of capitalist practices – how Breaking Bad tells the story of how Walter
gradually displaces and incorporates his Latino rivals. But I would argue the show also
presents a self-conscious critique of popular thinking about conventional economic wisdom,
terminology and tropes, and that is nowhere more evident than in the repeated demands to
achieve “exponential growth.”
25
4
See Ruskin’s Unto this Last and Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, Book IV, Chapter VI.
5
For more on exponential growth and natural limits, see Meadows 2014: 37-49 esp.
6
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen writes: “[T]here is the general practice of representing the
material side of the economic process by a closed system, that is, by a mathematical model in
which the continuous inflow of low entropy from the environment is completely ignored.
But even this symptom of modern econometrics was preceded by a more common one: the
notion that the economic process is wholly circular […] no other conception could be further
from a correct interpretation of the facts. Even if only the physical facet of the economic
process is taken into consideration, this process is not circular, but unidirectional. As far as
this facet alone is concerned, the economic process consists of a continuous transformation
of low entropy into high entropy, that is, into irrevocable waste, or, with a topical term, into
pollution” (1971: 281, emphasis his).
7
See, for example, Joseph Masco, “Mutant Ecologies: Radioactive Life in Post-Cold War
New Mexico.” Cultural Anthropology 19.4 (2004): 517-550.
8
See, for example, Tamminem (2006) and Eberhart (2007).
9
Such a transformation of the “environment” - from a blank canvas upon which human
development occurs to a complex material system in which humans are inextricably
enmeshed - is brilliantly theorized by Stacy Alaimo in Bodily Natures, (2012: 1-20).
10
For example, see the first-season episode “…And the Bag’s in the River” (2008).
11
Tuco is killed in the second season, but only because the first was interrupted by a writer’s
strike. The first two episodes of the second season complete the Tuco storyline even if the
repercussions of that storyline are felt for the rest of the series.
12
In this way, Breaking Bad belongs to what Heather Houser has brilliantly defined as “eco-
sickness fiction,” a mode that “do[es] not seek to narrate the etiologies of environmental
26
illnesses such as cancer or infertility” but uses illness as a complex homology for the
imbrication of humans and their environments (2014: 381-2).
13
For a discussion of the science/scientism division, see Wood 2012: 12-3; Slovic 2012: 181-
3; Beck 1994: 30.
27
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