Breaking Bad was a TV series that was created by Vince Gilligan and has amassed a huge fan base over the years!
So let’s dive into some trivia and facts about this TV series that is one of the greatest ever made!
- Breaking Bad is an American neo-Western crime drama television series
- It was created and produced by Vince Gilligan
- The show originally aired on AMC for five seasons
- From January 20, 2008, to September 29, 2013
- Set and filmed in Albuquerque, New Mexico
- The series tells the story of Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a struggling and depressed high school chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with stage-3 lung cancer
- Together with his former student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), White turns to a life of crime by producing and selling crystallized methamphetamine to secure his family’s financial future before he dies
- While navigating the dangers of the criminal underworld
- The title comes from the Southern colloquialism “breaking bad”
- It means to “raise hell” or turn to a life of crime
- Gilligan characterized the series as showing Walter’s transformation from a soft-spoken Mr. Chips into Scarface
- Among the show’s co-stars are Anna Gunn and RJ Mitte as Walter’s wife Skyler and son Walter, Jr., and Betsy Brandt and Dean Norris as Skyler’s sister Marie Schrader and her husband Hank, a DEA agent
- Others include Bob Odenkirk as the sleazy lawyer Saul Goodman, Jonathan Banks as private investigator and fixer Mike Ehrmantraut, and Giancarlo Esposito as the drug kingpin Gus Fring
- The final season introduces Jesse Plemons as the criminally-ambitious Todd Alquist, and Laura Fraser as Lydia Rodarte-Quayle, a business executive secretly managing Walter’s global meth sales for her company
- Breaking Bad is widely regarded as one of the greatest television series of all time
- By the time the series finale aired, it was among the most-watched cable shows on American television
- The show received numerous awards
- Including 16 Primetime Emmy Awards, eight Satellite Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, two Peabody Awards, two Critics’ Choice Awards and four Television Critics Association Awards
- For his leading performance, Cranston won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series four times
- While Aaron Paul won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series three times
- Anna Gunn won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series twice
- In 2013, Breaking Bad entered the Guinness World Records as the most critically acclaimed show of all time
- A spin-off prequel series, Better Call Saul, starring Bob Odenkirk and Jonathan Banks, debuted on February 8, 2015, on AMC
- A sequel film, El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, starring Aaron Paul will be released on Netflix and in select theaters on October 11, 2019
- Breaking Bad was created by Vince Gilligan, who spent several years writing the Fox series The X-Files
- Gilligan wanted to create a series in which the protagonist became the antagonist
- Gilligan believed the concept of showing the full drastic transformation of a character across the run of a television show was a risky concept
- And would be difficult to pitch without other powerful factors to support it, such as strong cinematography and acting
- The concept emerged as Gilligan talked with his fellow X-Files writer Thomas Schnauz regarding their current unemployment
- They joked that the solution was for them to put a “meth lab in the back of an RV and [drive] around the country cooking meth and making money”
- After writing the concept for the show and pilot, Gilligan pitched it to Sony Pictures Television
- They became very interested in supporting it
- Sony arranged for meetings with the various cable networks
- Showtime passed on this
- As they had already started broadcasting Weeds
- A show with similarities to the premise of Breaking Bad
- His producers convinced him that the show was different enough to still be successful
- Gilligan later stated that he would not have gone forward with the idea had he known about Weeds earlier
- Other networks like HBO and TNT also passed on the idea
- But eventually FX took interest and began initial discussions on producing the pilot
- At the same time, FX had also started development of Dirt
- A female-centric crime-based drama series
- And with three existing male-centric shows already on the network, FX passed up Breaking Bad for Dirt
- One of Gilligan’s agents spoke to Jeremy Elice, the director of original programming for AMC
- He was looking for more original shows to add alongside their upcoming Mad Men
- Elice was intrigued
- Soon a meeting was set up between Gilligan, Elice, and two programming executives
- Gilligan was not optimistic about this meeting, fearing they would just put him off
- But instead all three showed great interest
- And the meeting ended up establishing how AMC would acquire the rights from FX
- And set the pilot into production
- It took about a year following this meeting before Sony had set up the rights with AMC and production could start
- Breaking Bad received widespread critical acclaim
- It has been praised by many critics as one of the greatest television shows of all time
- On the review aggregator website Metacritic, the first season scored 73 out of 100
- The second 84 out of 100
- The third 89 out of 100
- The fourth 96 out of 100
- And the fifth 99 out of 100
- The American Film Institute listed Breaking Bad as one of the top ten television series of 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013
- In 2013, TV Guide ranked it as the ninth greatest TV series of all time
- By its end, the series was among the most-watched cable shows on American television
- With audience numbers doubling from the fourth season to the fifth
- A 2015 Hollywood Reporter survey of 2,800 actors, producers, directors, and other industry people named Breaking Bad as their #2 favorite show
- In 2016, Rolling Stone ranked it third on its list of 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time
- Breaking Bad premiered on the same night as a critical game in the 2008 NFL playoffs
- An intentional decision by AMC hoping to capture the adult male viewership immediately following the planned end of the game
- However, the game ran into overtime, cutting into the show’s timeslot in most of America
- As a result, the pilot had only about 1.4 million viewers
- Coupled with the ongoing writers strike, the first season did not draw as large of a viewership as they were expected
- However, with subsequent seasons, viewership increased
- Avoiding the usual trend of downward viewership that most serialized shows had
- Ratings further increased by the fourth season as, prior to airing, the previous seasons had been added to Netflix
- Boosting interest in the show
- Breaking Bad is considered the first such show to have a renewed burst of interest due to the show being made available on Netflix
- The second half of the final season saw record viewership
- With the series finale reaching over 10.3 million viewers
- The series received numerous awards and nominations
- Including 16 Primetime Emmy Awards and 58 nominations
- Including winning for Outstanding Drama Series in 2013 and 2014
- It also won two Peabody Awards
- One in 2008 and one in 2013
- In 2015, series creator Vince Gilligan publicly requested fans of the series to stop reenacting a scene in which Walter angrily throws a pizza on his roof after his wife refuses to let him inside
- This came after complaints from the home’s real-life owner
- Cranston reprised his role of the character in a commercial for Esurance which aired during Super Bowl XLIX
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