A spoiler-rich post on television’s best drama follows below the fold:
There are times when the amount of praise heaped on “The Sopranos” and its imitators by critics and bloggers and book-writers (and, yes, Times columnists as well) might almost make you imagine that David Chase had invented the idea of the anti-hero somewhere in the late 1990s, and that before Tony Soprano and Al Swearengen and Don Draper came along nobody had ever imagined that a flawed, “difficult,” sinful, or even depraved person might make a great dramatic protagonist. But of course actually the golden age of cable TV relies on one of the oldest twists in the storyteller’s book: Sin, temptation, and corruption are some of the easiest dramatic materials to work with, villains and anti-heroes are often the easiest character to write, and the plot where a good man goes bad or a pillar of virtue is undone by hidden flaws is one of the most dependable narratives in fiction. Bad guys don’t just get the best lines in dumb action movies: They get the best lines in Shakespeare and Milton, Dickens and Cormac McCarthy. And good guys, good characters, good people, can easily seem simpering or sentimental or one-dimensional by comparison: It’s a rare production of “King Lear” in which the upright Edgar seems more vivid than his wicked brother Edmund, and a rare reader who finishes “Gone With the Wind” feeling tired of the selfish Scarlett, and wishing instead for another hundred pages with the saintly Melanie Wilkes.
Which is why when I think about the artistic distinctiveness of AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” currently sprinting toward its final-season finish line, I don’t find myself dwelling as much on Walter White, the show’s murderous anti-hero, or the two characters (his partner Jesse and his wife Skyler, respectively a fan favorite and the target of a depressing amount of misogynistic, “bad fan” hate) whose moral trajectories have been bent most decisively and disastrously by his own. Yes, Bryan Cranston is remarkable in the leading role, and yes, the show is in many ways the best “Sopranos”-style study in evil and damnation to come along since Chase’s masterwork cut to black. But, especially after this weekend’s devastating next-to-next-to-last episode — which I suspect represents the real climax of the story, with only falling action to come — it’s worth pointing out that one of the show’s most impressive and important achievements has been the construction of a compelling, interesting, entertaining good person, capable of competing with Walter White, the anti-hero, for the audience’s attention and interest and affection.
That person is Hank Schrader, Walt’s D.E.A. brother-in-law, who (I said there would be spoilers) breathed his last in Sunday’s episode, taken down by the clutch of neo-Nazi gangsters who seem to be emerging as the real winners from Walt’s long descent into criminality. Hank was introduced in the first season as the jerkish, bullying foil to a put-upon, underappreciated protagonist who back then had the audience’s sympathies. But over time the apparent foil been gradually revealed as, if not the show’s hero, then at least it’s (if you will) anti-anti-hero: A better husband than Walt, a better father (figure) to Walt’s children, and the only man in law enforcement capable of consistently putting his brother-in-law’s twisted genius to the test. In the course of the show, as Walt has sunk to ever-lower depths of turpitude, his brother-in-law has been given the classic hero’s arc: The repeated testing, physical and moral and physical again; the near-successes in which the prize is plucked away the last moment; the temporary falls from grace; the persistent brushes with despair. And he has followed this arc without either turning into a plaster saint (the flawed, crude, bullying character of Season 1 is still recognizable in the Hank of Season 5) or doing anything bad enough to make him an anti-hero in his own right. (His one huge moral lapse, the beating of Jesse Pinkman in Season 3, took place under extenuating circumstances and was followed by Hank taking full responsibility and accepting his potential dismissal from the D.E.A. without a fight.)
This willingness to let a major character be genuinely heroic — again, not flawless or entirely saintly, but heroic all the same — is something you don’t see on a lot of the “Sopranos” imitators that now crowd the cable landscape, where the pursuit of grittiness increasingly means making everyone an adulterer, everyone a crook, and writing characters who tend to converge in corruption, until it’s anti-heroes all the way down. And it’s very easy to imagine a version of “Breaking Bad” in which Hank wasn’t allowed to occupy a steady moral center — a version in which he was on the take from the cartel, for instance, or a version in which he was a good cop but a lousy philanderer of a husband, like Jimmy McNulty on “The Wire” or countless other examples on lesser shows.
But the fact that he lived and died essentially uncorrupted, having chased an evil man without entering deeply into that same evil himself, has been crucial to the distinctiveness of “Breaking Bad,” and to its dramatic success. It’s not only that having a good man on Walt’s tail has given the audience a moral stake in events, a sense of personal interest that’s increasingly slipped away in the grim, “isn’t everybody just awful” later seasons of a show like “Mad Men.” It’s also that in the lived reality of human beings, everyday heroism and moral decency aren’t actually as rare — or as easily crushed by the world’s Tywin Lannisters — as you would think from turning on a lot of prestige television these days. And so having a good man on Walt’s tail has actually made “Breaking Bad” more realistic than shows that deliberately write virtue and heroism out of their storylines entirely.
It’s true that on the surface, the fact that Hank has been killed with two episodes left seems like it undercuts the idea that he was ultimately Walt’s anti-anti-heroic equal, and lends support to the various recappers who have claimed that a better, brighter, less arrogant D.E.A. agent wouldn’t have underestimated his brother-in-law’s capabilities, and would have figured out that Walt was the elusive meth-cooking mastermind long ago. (That idea is intuitive if you don’t have the audience’s semi-omniscient perspective on the show’s action, but if you do it’s clear that the relationship has actually been a huge advantage for Walt, who would have been caught much earlier if hadn’t used his inside knowledge of Hank’s work and family life to repeatedly sabotage the investigation.)
But Hank’s death is radically different from the various killings Walt has orchestrated during his rise to power. It’s one the anti-hero doesn’t actually want, that he sets in motion and then can’t prevent, and that ultimately undoes his empire, his family and his very self as thoroughly and devastatingly (I mean, really: I’ve never felt the pity-and-terror combination as acutely I did watching Sunday’s episode) as being arraigned in a courthouse would have done.
Throughout the run of the show, we’ve waited for Walt’s sins to be brought home to him, and viewers have reasonably assumed that this would involve a death within the family that he’s convinced himself justifies all his crimes. They were right: He was undone by such a death. But the fact that the family member wasn’t his wife or one of his children but rather his fraternal antagonist highlights rather than diminishes Hank’s importance in the schematics of “Breaking Bad.” What undoes Walter White is more dramatically elemental, in a way, than even the death of his infant daughter would have been. His world collapses, inevitably and absolutely, when he kills the hero of his own story.
