Is it safe to say Breaking Bad > The Wire?

[SoleByThePound]

I'd take Breaking Bad over The Wire every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

 

[extraordinary swag]

Breaking Bad is incredible and has more dramatic elements like pacing and tension setting music but it has PLENTY of dead air and crazy boring episodes, I'll wait til it's over before saying it's clearly better than The Wire

the last season of the Wire was disappointing because of the newspaper aspect but season 1-4 were great, especially season 4

 

[spottieottie305]

Let me start off by saying that I've seen the Wire in it's entirety and am currently the middle of season 4 of Breaking Bad. To answer the original question, the answer is no and its not even close. Most of the time I would address a question like this as a matter of opinion, but in this case I just can't.

The Wire is close to perfect when it comes to character development and plot. Like someone already has said, the show was solely plot driven and allowed the writers ultimate freedom. There was absolutely no allegiance to character and ultimately the strength of The Wire is that you NEVER knew what was going to happen. Even the most popular character could die at any moment. So when a character ended up dead it felt as if someone you knew had died. You genuinely cared for the characters. Add on the fact that every season added a whole new dimension to the same overall plot.



[COLOR=#red]Breaking Bad [/COLOR]seems a bit shallow to me in terms of character motivation and direction. I felt the first couple of seasons of Breaking Bad didn't do a good job demonstrating how Walter White would be "forced" into a life a crime.

From my understanding the show's main theme is that Walter White would sacrifice and do anything for his family. So he ultimately decided to cook to provide for his family at all costs. Sounds good enough , but the show lost me when it was revealed that he knew a multimillionaire and was too prideful to accept charity. That never sat well with me. From that point on I never bought into Walter White's character. I didn't like him at all,

After watching 4 seasons of the show I still don't like any of the characters. For a character driven show, none of the characters are likeable. Maybe except for Walter Jr s.k.a. Flynn. On the other hand, The Wire made you LOVE the grimiest of the grimy becasue their motivations were so genuine and made sense.



In the end I like [COLOR=#red]Breaking Bad[/COLOR] becasue its a well made show. It leaves you in suspense and is entertaining... but The Wire is truly a masterpiece. I feel that most who say they don't like The Wire are people who can't or are not willing to fully invest into what the show really is.

 

[spottieottie305]

The fact that BB isn't even completed and is being compared to what a lot of people think is the best show ever says something major to me.

Terrible argument. It just shows you that people are always trying to compare things. Just like how everyone is constantly debating about Kobe, Jordan, or LeBron.

If anything it illustrates how good The Wire was becasue it is being used as the benchmark and has been off the air for nearly 5 years.

 

[lil black jean jacket]

Haven't watched either yet.

 

[ham city]

I've tried to get into BB for the last year. It's taken me almost a full 365 calendar days to get through season 1 which I just finished last week.

I had to literally force myself to sit through one season of BB.

NOTHING draws me or pulls me back to the show except for the thought that maybe I'm missing something and that the show will get better.

It has painfully weak characters. Walt does nothing for me, I actively hate his wife, everybody else I either actively dislike or just don't give a damn about.

I just don't see it.

 

[miamin2]

You hate his wife now, god forbid you make it to s5. She's terrible now

 

[deleted]

Terrible argument. It just shows you that people are always trying to compare things. Just like how everyone is constantly debating about Kobe, Jordan, or LeBron.
If anything it illustrates how good The Wire was becasue it is being used as the benchmark and has been off the air for nearly 5 years.

Both shows tell stories and we have yet to see the end of Breaking Bad's story. Yet some people who have seen The Wire in it's entirety still say that BB is the better show. How does that NOT speak well on Breaking Bad?

You stating that the characters on BB are unlikable is a much more flawed point because you're insinuating that it's not intentional on the part of the writers. Walter White has been in the process of transforming into a power hungry "bad guy" since the beginning. It's the ENTIRE premise of the show. That's why it's called Breaking Bad after all.

 

[AZwildcats]

When Breaking Bad goes on its break until summer 2013 I'll start the Wire. heard nothing but great things about it

 

[coolnclutch]

Gimme Jersey Shore

 

[lil black jean jacket]

Gimme Jersey Shore

gimme K-Town

 

[mrkittles20]

I love both shows, have re watched them in their entirety multiple times and have them in my top five all time. I can honestly say that I believe Breaking Bad is a better show than the Wire. Breaking Bad lays things out in such a way that you can't help but muse over every little detail. Not since Lost do I speculate over minute details like I do with BB.

For instance : Just this past episode on BB, Walt kind of downplays the murder of a child and proceeds to whistle a song while he worked. The song title was "Lily of the Valley" which is the plant he used to try and kill someone in a previous season. Then there are the colors that each character wears throughout the entire show. It's these small details that just make me happy to witness television on this scale. I don't enjoy dumbed down television that requires no intelligence to understand or follow.

I love the Wire and its crusade to educate its viewers on issues that no one really talked about or understood. Each season had a different theme and you could tell the writers wanted to do their best to respect what they were doing.

 

[jtplatnum]

why does one have to be better than the other? can't they just exist as two great shows?

seems like every single show that ppl are referencing in this thread all follow the same formula...word to chuck klosterman who wrote a whole article on OPs question here: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6763000/bad-decisions cliffs at the bottom.


Though some may disagree (and I'm sure some will, because some always do), there doesn't seem to be much debate over what have been the four best television shows of the past 10 years. It seems like an easy question to answer, particularly since it's become increasingly difficult to write about the state of TV (or even the state of popular culture) without tangentially mentioning one of the following four programs — The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and/or Breaking Bad. The four fit together so nicely: Two from HBO that are defunct, two from AMC that are on-going, and all of which use nonlinear narratives with only minor experimentation. There have been bushels of quality television during the past decade, but these four shows have been the best1 (and by a relatively wide margin). Taste is subjective, but the critical consensus surrounding these four dramas is so widespread that it feels like an objective truth; it's become so accepted that this entire paragraph is a remarkably mundane argument to make in public. I'm basically writing, "The greatness of these great shows is defined by their greatness." There's no conflict in stating that good things are good.

Until, of course, you try to suggest that one of these shows is somehow better than the other three. Then it becomes a ******g bloodbath.

Because TV is so simultaneously personal (it exists inside your home) and so utterly universal (it exists inside everyone's home), people care about it with an atypical brand of conversational ferocity — they take it more personally than other forms of art, and they immediately feel comfortable speaking from a position of expertise. They develop loyalties to certain characters and feel offended when those loyalties are disparaged. This is what makes arguing about these particular shows so intense and satisfying — even though most serious TV watchers enjoy (or at least appreciate) all four, they habitually feel a greater internal obligation to advocate the superiority of whichever title they love most. As a result, you hear people making damning, melodramatic criticisms of TV shows they ostensibly like. You hear a lot of sentences that begin, "I love Mad Men, but …" or "The first two seasons of The Sopranos were great, but …" And whatever follows that "but" is inevitably crazy and hyperspecific. This is especially true among people who prefer The Wire. There's never been a more obstinate fan base than that of The Wire; it's a secular cult that refuses to accept any argument that doesn't classify The Wire as the greatest artistic endeavor in television history. It's almost as if these people secretly believe this show actually happened, and that criticizing the storyline is like mocking an episode of Frontline. This was not a documentary about Baltimore: Wallace is not alive and playing high school football in Texas, Stringer Bell was not reincarnated as a Pennsylvania paper salesman, and you are not qualified to lecture on inner-city education because you own Season 4 on DVD. The citizens on that show were nonexistent composites, and the events you watched did not occur. As a society, we must learn to accept this.

Which is not to say The Wire wasn't brilliant, because it was. Of the four shows I've mentioned, The Wire absolutely exhibited the finest writing; Mad Men has the most fascinating collection of character types, and The Sopranos was the most fully realized (and, it's important to note, essentially invented this rarified tier of televised drama). But I've slowly come to the conclusion that Breaking Bad is the best of the four, or at least the one I like the most.2 And I've been trying to figure out why I feel this way. It's shot in the most visually creative style, but that's not enough to set it apart; the acting is probably the best of the four, but not by a lot (and since good acting can sometimes cover deeper problems with direction and storytelling, I tend not to give it much weight). I suspect Breaking Bad will be the least remembered of these four shows and will probably be the least influential over time. Yet there's one profound difference between this series and the other three, and it has to do with its handling of morality: Breaking Bad is the only one built on the uncomfortable premise that there's an irrefutable difference between what's right and what's wrong, and it's the only one where the characters have real control over how they choose to live.

Certainly, all of these series grapple with morality — more than anything else,3 it's the reason they're better than the shows around them. But the first three examples all create realities where individual agency is detached. Mad Men is set in the 1960s, so every action the characters make is not really a reflection on who they are; they're mostly a commentary on the era. Don Draper is a bad husband, but "that's just how it was in those days." Characters can do or say whatever they want without remorse, because almost all their decisions can be excused (or at least explained) by the circumstances of the period. Roger Sterling's depravity is a form of retrospective entertainment, so very little is at stake.4 The people on this show need to be irresponsible for the sake of plausibility, so we can't really hold them accountable for what they do.

Now, The Sopranos and The Wire were set in the present, so the actions of their casts are harder to rationalize away — but both shows had fixed worldviews, so that process is still possible. Every important person on The Sopranos was involved with organized crime, and its protagonist was a (likeable) transgressor who regularly murdered for money — subsequently, there were never any unresolved questions over Tony Soprano's "goodness." When Tony did something nice, he did it in spite of the fact that (we all know) he's fundamentally bad (otherwise he couldn't exist as the person he was). The Sopranos was compelling because we were continually watching innately bad people operate within a world not unlike our own — this, in one sentence, was the crux of the series. Meanwhile, The Wire was more nuanced: In The Wire, everyone is simultaneously good and bad. The cops are fighting crime, but they're all specifically or abstractly corrupt; the drug dealers are violent criminals, but they're less hypocritical and hold themselves to a higher ethical standard. There were sporadic exceptions to this rule, but those minor exceptions only served to accentuate its overall relativist take on human nature: Nobody is totally positive and nobody is totally negative, and our inherently flawed assessment of those qualities hinges on where we come from and what we want to believe. And this, of course, is closer to how life actually is (which is why The Wire felt so realistic). It's a more sophisticated way to depict the world. However — from a fictional, narrative perspective — it ends up making the message a little less meaningful.5 If nothing is totally false, everything is partially true; depending on the perspective and the circumstance, no action is unacceptable. The conditions matter more than the participants. As we drift further and further from its 2008 finale, it increasingly feels like the ultimate takeaway from The Wire was more political6 than philosophical. Which is not exactly a criticism, because that's an accomplishment, too … it's just that it turns the plot of The Wire into a delivery mechanism for David Simon's polemic worldview (which makes its value dependent on how much the audience is predisposed to agree with him).

This is where Breaking Bad diverges from the other three entities. Breaking Bad is not a situation in which the characters' morality is static or contradictory or colored by the time frame; instead, it suggests that morality is continually a personal choice. When the show began, that didn't seem to be the case: It seemed like this was going to be the story of a man (Walter White, portrayed by Bryan Cranston) forced to become a criminal because he was dying of cancer. That's the elevator pitch. But that's completely unrelated to what the show has become. The central question on Breaking Bad is this: What makes a man "bad" — his actions, his motives, or his conscious decision to be a bad person? Judging from the trajectory of its first three seasons, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan believes the answer is option No. 3. So what we see in Breaking Bad is a person who started as one type of human and decides to become something different. And because this is television — because we were introduced to this man in a way that made him impossible to dislike, and because we experience TV through whichever character we understand the most — the audience is placed in the curious position of continuing to root for an individual who's no longer good. And this is not a case like J.R. Ewing or Al Swearengen, where a character's over-the-top evilness immediately defined his charm; this is a series in which the main character has actively become evil, but we still want him to succeed. At this point, Walter White could do anything and I would continue to support his cause. In fact, his evolution has been so deft that I feel weird describing his persona as "evil," even though I can't justify why it would be incorrect to do so.7 Gilligan detailed this process in a recent interview with Newsweek: "Television is historically good at keeping its characters in a self-imposed stasis8 so that shows can go on for years or even decades. When I realized this, the logical next step was to think, how can I do a show in which the fundamental drive is toward change?"

In that same Newsweek article, the writer suggests Walter White's on-going metamorphosis is what makes Breaking Bad great. But that doesn't go far enough. It's not just that watching White's transformation is interesting; what's interesting is that this transformation involves the fundamental core of who he supposedly is, and that this (wholly constructed) core is an extension of his own free will. The difference between White in the middle of Season 1 and White in the debut of Season 4 is not the product of his era or his upbringing or his social environment. It's a product of his own consciousness. He changed himself. At some point, he decided to become bad, and that's what matters.

There's a scene in Breaking Bad's first season in which Walter White's ******* lab assistant Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) tells Walter he just can't "break bad," and — when you first hear this snippet of dialogue — you assume what Jesse means is that you can't go from being a law-abiding chemistry teacher to an underground meth cooker. It seems like he's telling White that he can't start breaking the law after living a life in which laws were always obeyed, and that a criminal lifestyle is not something you can join like a club. His advice seems pragmatic, and it almost feels like an artless way to shoehorn the show's title into the script. But this, it turns out, was not Jesse's point at all. What he was arguing was that someone can't "decide" to morph from a good person into a bad person, because there's a firewall within our personalities that makes this impossible. He was arguing that Walter's nature would stop him from being bad, and that Walter would fail if tried to complete this conversion. But Jesse was wrong. He was wrong, because goodness and badness are simply complicated choices, no different than anything else.


Cliffs: Breaking bad is the greatest show of all time.

 

[stringer bell 32]

The correct answer is The Wire

thanks for playing

 

[flyerthandelta]

Sounds like trolling The Wire >>>>>>>>Breaking Bad

 

[Humbled]

I'm on the 3rd season of BB and its ******g amazing so far, still have yet to watch The Wire though. Thats next on the list

 

[mrkittles20]

I wonder how many people that prefer the Wire to Breaking Bad also think that Paid in Full or State Property should have gotten at least one Oscar in 2002.

 

[-Red-]

I wonder how many people that prefer the Wire to Breaking Bad also think that Paid in Full or State Property should have gotten at least one Oscar in 2002.

You can't be serious. Do you understand how universally acclaimed The Wire is?

 

[stringer bell 32]

I wonder how many people that prefer the Wire to Breaking Bad also think that Paid in Full or State Property should have gotten at least one Oscar in 2002.

 

[celticsfan9783]

I wonder how many people that prefer the Wire to Breaking Bad also think that Paid in Full or State Property should have gotten at least one Oscar in 2002.

 

[mrkittles20]

I LOVE the Wire. Usually watch it all the way through every 18 months or so. Have turned multiple people onto the show, lending them the series on DVD. I defend the Wire all the time and think that some of the characters should be set among the greatest characters ever seen on television. I just question the people that are saying the Wire > Breaking Bad with little to no explanation as to why. Honestly, I don't think one is necessarily better than the other. They are both stellar programs with entirely different agendas.

 

[MambaMentality824]

I love Breaking Bad and haven't finished the Wire yet but in a couple years, Game of Thrones >>> Everything.

Come at me bros

 

[deleted]

I love Breaking Bad and haven't finished the Wire yet but in a couple years, Game of Thrones >>> Everything.
Come at me bros

Game of Thrones is so damn good.

 

[and1play5]

I've seen both, The Wire is def better...not to say that bb isn't great either. But that unpredictability factor in the The Wire, Sopranos, Boardwalk & GOT>>>>>>Breaking Bad. I'm not slighting BB at all mind you, I'm way too addicted to that show. The Wire had amazing character development

 

[shogun]

I love Breaking Bad and haven't finished the Wire yet but in a couple years, Game of Thrones >>> Everything.

Come at me bros

I'm a GOT fanboy but they would benefit from better direction and writing of the episodes. It could actually be better than it already is.