Time Jumps Revealing Character Insights

I don’t think it’s a very big stretch to say that Breaking Bad is one of the best TV shows currently on the air. Critics and audiences love it, two groups which have been known to disagree to disastrous results – The Black Donnelly’s anybody? Breaking Bad manages to be technically excellent without giving up an inch of audience engagement to what some might see as overly ‘artsy’ elements. But what is it exactly that keeps people coming back every week? What makes us all so willing to plug back in to a show that we’ve watched at least once before?

I think that the wild and free sort of timeline style is definitely a huge contributing factor to the love of the show. The writers obviously rely heavily on the element of suspense to drive the plot forward but take it in an interesting direction by making the question not “where are we going next” but rather “when are we going next.” After that first shift in the pilot episode, it’s clear that this show isn’t going to be just a run of the mill ‘good guy falls in with a bad crowd and hijinks ensue’ sort of plot. When the first episode ends, we see the characters one way. When the second begins, we see them a hop, skip, and a jump away from where we last left off in the slice of ending we are given, just one tasty bit of where their development is going, and then we’re put back where we left off. From there we can see the things that cause them to develop in to the person we saw at the 'end' of the episode.

It’s rough and it’s a bit dirty sometimes, but the jumping around really makes the show work. The grittiness is what the viewers want not because it’s new and spectacular, but because it’s real. We see real character progression in each episode and people can relate to that, can find a piece of themselves in how the characters on screen react to situations, even if they themselves would never end up selling drugs to provide for their family (or maybe they would, who knows, this is a no judgement blog).