Breaking Bad vs. The Wire
BREAKING DOWN BREAKING BAD
Breaking Down Breaking Bad
“We see things not as they are, but as we are.” — Variously Ascribed
I know this review is five years too late but I can’t stop thinking about Breaking Bad. I just finished it and I was absolutely blown away.
Spoiler Alert: There really aren’t any spoilers here. F’real, I actually don’t ruin anything.
Breaking The Bad Wire.
1. INTRO
I’ll compare Breaking Bad to The Wire.
Oh, and please do not say, “You can’t compare Breaking Bad and The Wire. They’re different.” Yeah, I know they’re different. By definition, anything that isn’t exactly the same thing is different. But they’re both TV dramas about drugs and crime, launching on cable in the same decade. So, yeah, you can compare ’em.
Also, The Wire is the only other competition for the G.O.A.T. As such, it’s the lens through which I view all television dramas. The Wire is the standard, like the gold standard or the standard of beauty. Helen of Troy in 1230 BCE or Heidi Klum in 1998 or Harsha Satyal in 2018.
I guess I just like Hs. Ha. So, let’s talk Heisenberg and Hamsterdam.
On a 1–10 Scale, they’re both 10s. For me, a 10 needs to exist. It’s not some theoretically perfect program. In the words of Dave Matthews Band, it’s “The Best of What’s Around.” A 10 is a TV show or a film or a conversation or a meal or any experience that is life-changing… stays with you… affects your POV… changes the way you think, talk, and see the world.
And with that, like a good enzyme, let’s break it down…
2. SEASONS
They both have five seasons:
Breaking Bad: 8 + 9 + 10 + 8 + 10 = 45
The Wire: 9 + 7 + 10 + 9 + 8 = 43
Winner: Breaking Bad.
But I feel The Wire is greater than the sum of its parts…
3. SUCCESS
“You think I give a damn about a Grammy? Half of you critics can’t even stomach me, let alone stand me.” — Eminem
Critical Success can be argued but the standard is The Emmys.
Breaking Bad: 58 Nominations for 16 Awards.
The Wire: 2 Nominations for 0 Awards.
Commercial Success: Well, how would we measure this? DVD Sales? That’s tough since Breaking Bad came later, as we were moving into streaming. Advertising Spend during airtime? The Wire was on HBO, which doesn’t have commercials. A hunch tells me Breaking Bad was far more lucrative. And the Emmy total is such a blowout that we can clearly draw a conclusion here.
If The Wire is the Wu-Tang Clan, then Breaking Bad is Eminem. 1 Nom & 0 Wins vs. 43 Noms & 15 Wins.
Winner: Breaking Bad.
4. TIME
All things being equal, I tend to reward the one that comes earlier. What’s better — Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm? (Why not use a Seinfeld comparison? Both Bryan Cranston (Walter White) and Anna Gunn (Walter’s Wife) appear in Seinfeld.) To me, they’re close, but Seinfeld came first and therefore the risks it took remain unbelievably impressive. “A show about nothing” has now become a punchline, but back then, it was revolutionary.
In the Seinfeld vs. Curb argument, I also tend to view the total amount of content they’ve given us. Seinfeld is 180 episodes of 22 minutes each, for a total of 66 hours. Curb is 90 episodes of 30 minutes each — 45 hours.
The Wire is 60 hours long. Breaking Bad is 47 hours long*. Of course, one could make the argument that Breaking Bad is more efficient because it accomplishes just as much as The Wire does — it’s a 10 and it only took 78% of the time to get there. But I lean towards the “more content” side. (Is that surprising? I mean, have you seen the length of my posts?)
Winner: The Wire.
5. THEME
In school, we learned that Theme really was another way of saying “Why” the creator made the work.
When I met Bill Prady, the show runner of The Big Bang Theory, he told me that every TV show has a central question.
Seinfeld: Is the minutiae of life really just life?
Curb Your Enthusiasm: How honest can you be in society?
The Cosby Show: Will love keep us together?
Roseanne: Will hate keep us together?
Breaking Bad: How far is a person willing to go?
The Wire: How does an entire city just fail?
Breaking Bad shows the breakdown of the human condition. But many books and shows have portrayed myriad character deteriorations, so we know a person can walk down a path of corruption; as such, it’s nothing we don’t already know. It was incredible to watch to what extent Walter White (WW) would go, but The Wire depicts how an entire American city disintegrates. After watching The Wire, we see just HOW that all goes down, which is not at all intuitive. The Wire is a singular show; there’s nothing else like it.
That leads me to SCOPE and SCALE. The ambition in The Wire knows no equal. It focuses on a different aspect of a US metropolis so by the end you have a holistic, almost omniscient, viewpoint.
Season 1: The Streets
Season 2: The Docks
Season 3: The Politics
Season 4: The Schools
Season 5: The Media
Why David Simon wrote The Wire is so that people can get a true understanding of drugs and crime. After watching The Wire, you feel you could speak intelligently about what we can do about the drug and crime problems in America. Public officials can study it and shape policy. It’s that important.
Winner: The Wire.
6. TONE
“Something like that — a guy getting hit on the head with a rock or something — tickled the pants off Ackley.” — Holden Caulfield
Neither program fits neatly into a genre. Breaking Bad is so different from anything that came before it, even despite the fact that it came after The Wire. That’s amazing — to fish from the same pond and still come up with a catch.
The Wire broke the door down, though. David Simon macheted through the forest; there was no path there. And I don’t know if we would’ve seen Breaking Bad without The Wire. I don’t mean Breaking Creator Vince Gilligan copied Wire Creator David Simon. Not at all. But some of the reason The Wire is Emmy-less is that it was so far ahead of its time, audiences and even critics didn’t know how to take it.
When people say The Wire was “real,” this is part of what they mean: The Wire hired actors but it also hired real criminals and real bartenders — nothing is realer than that. If you visited Baltimore, you could actually meet some of the real characters. Can you say that about any other show? Well, besides Real Housewives of Atlanta?
The Wire felt real but oftentimes real life is really boring. Hence the scenes where a couple of cops are sitting on a stakeout and just shooting the breeze. The Wire unfolded a lot more slowly and had its moments where you felt you could stop paying attention and fall asleep. I don’t think I tuned out once during Breaking Bad. It’s masterful storytelling all the way, from the pants’ flying in the first scene of the first episode all the way through the crazy series ending.
Both shows are more filmic than TV-like. We often forget that films are motion pictures — pictures in motion. And no show in history used better imagery than Breaking Bad. It’s a beautiful spectacle to watch. And that’s saying something because I’m not a cinematography guy at all: Dr. Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia are majestic epics that lulled me to sleep.
At the same time, the genius of The Wire is that it uses no devices: there are no cliffhangers, no flashbacks, and as far as I can remember, no overly dramatic music and no slow motion sequences. Most of the huge moments occurred in the penultimate episode of each season, with each season finale being more of a denouement. Again — more real. But sometimes more boring. The Wire showed great respect for its audience, allowing us to make a lot of the connections ourselves. And that’s why it sometimes felt like homework. The Wire is a jazz concert; Breaking Bad is a rock concert.
So far, it feels like a tie. I guess we have to look at the writing. They’re both amazingly well-written. Which one is funnier? They have their moments, but neither one is hilarious — and I have a pretty dark sense of humor. (Though Breaking Bad does have Bob Odenkirk.)
When I first wrote this section, I wrote that Breaking Bad is more clever and The Wire is more wise. Therefore, it ended in a draw. But upon further review, I no longer believe that’s true; The Wire is both more clever and more wise. They’re both quotable but check out this list — this is where The Wire pulls ahead. After all, there’s the line and there’s the delivery of the line.
(For our wedding, since it was the merger of a comedian and a pharmacist, we placed jokes inside prescription bottles. And when it came time to scour Mean Girls and Clueless quotes, it turned out that Mean Girls quotes were more about how they were said; Clueless quotes stood alone as timeless quips.
Cher: “Searching for a boy in high school is as useless as searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie.”
Cher: “I want to do something for humanity.” Josh: “How about sterilization?”
Josh: “If I ever saw you do anything that wasn’t ninety percent selfish, I’d die of shock.” Cher: “Oh, that’d be reason enough for me.”
And if your analysis of Breaking Bad vs. The Wire doesn’t devolve into a Mean Girls vs. Clueless comparison, what kind of analyst are you?)
Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul’s deliveries are tough to top. But quotes from The Wire both sound and read profoundly insightful.
Breaking Bad Quotes
“You clearly don’t know who you’re talking to, so let me clue you in. I am not in danger, Skyler. I AM the danger. A guy opens his door and gets shot, and you think that of me? No. I AM THE ONE WHO KNOCKS.” — WW
“Just because you shot Jesse James don’t make you Jesse James.” — Mike Ehrmantraut
“Everyone sounds like Meryl Streep with a gun to their head.” — Mike Ehrmantraut
“I’m not in the meth business. I’m in the empire business.” — WW
Walter: “Say my name.” Declan: “Heisenberg.” Walter: “You’re goddam right.”
“If that’s true — if you don’t know who I am — then maybe your best course is to tread lightly.” — WW
The Wire Quotes
“You come at the king, you best not miss.” — Omar Little
Carver: “You can’t even call this sh!t a war.” Herc: “Why not?” Carver: “Wars end.”
Bodie: “He’s a cold motherf*cker.” Poot: “It’s a cold world, Bodie.” Bodie: “Thought you said it was getting warmer, man.” Poot: “World going one way, people another.”
“They f*ck up, they get beat. We f*ck up, they give us pensions.” — Det. Ellis Carver
“F*ck ‘right.’ It ain’t about right; it’s about money. Now you think Ronald McDonald gonna go down in that basement and say, ‘Hey, Mr. Nugget, you the bomb. We sellin’ chicken faster than you can tear the bone out. So I’m gonna write my clowny-ass name on this fat-ass check for you’?” — D’Angelo Barksdale
“Man, money ain’t got no owners. Only spenders.” — Omar Little
Winner: The Wire.
7. PLOT
In acting class, we learned that audiences grant you one “give.” Meaning that if you go see Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, you can’t really complain that it’s not realistic for kids to get shrunk. It’s literally the title of the movie. You grant them that give. But everything within that framework still has to follow these adjusted rules. If they make friends with an ant, that’s cool. But if halfway through the movie, the kids can suddenly fly, then we can reasonable bitch that this just isn’t making any sense.
There were a number of coincidences in Breaking Bad that felt farfetched. Maybe not impossible but more than a little convenient. The Wire didn’t seem to take those kinds of shortcuts and liberties with its plot lines. I’m trying to stick to my original thoughts here, but I did read something on Reddit that stuck out: The Wire fit the story to reality and Breaking Bad fit reality to the story.
However, just because the story is or feels more real doesn’t necessarily make it better. Oftentimes, works are Based on a True Story, but the modifications make for better tales.
In his monumental book, On Writing, Stephen King talks about (well, “writes about”) how the way he sees stories is that they already exist; we just have to find them. His process is a discovery. He says the stories are buried and it’s the job of the writer to slowly exhume them — to gradually pull the stories out of the ground and show them to the reader. That’s what The Wire felt like.
One of the most common questions people have for writers is, “When did you know the ending — from the beginning or at some point along the way?”
On various podcasts, Vince Gilligan confesses to not knowing how it would all end. And yet, he wrote arguably the greatest ending in TV history. The way he ties up all loose ends is spectacular. (It’s the opposite of Lost, which CollegeHumor #owned). He uses what he calls Organic and Inorganic Storytelling… with the former being letting the characters guide you and the latter being the opposite. He blends those styles well (and ya gotta love that he uses chemistry terms to describe ’em).
The Season Three endings of LOST, The Wire, and Breaking Bad are all peaks for each show. The difference between Breaking Bad and the other two is that Breaking Bad manages somehow to peak again at the very end. LOST and The Wire never quite reach the same height for the rest of their seasons.
Winner: Breaking Bad.
8. CHARACTERS
In life and in art, we often must choose between going a mile deep or a mile wide. Breaking Bad goes a mile deep into Jesse and into Walter’s family. But The Wire somehow manages to do both — a mile deep and a mile wide. There are a plethora of characters and you get to know so many so well.
HBO shows, better than any others, engender empathy for their characters in a way that is truly mystifying. You’ll hate somebody at the beginning of a season and grow to love them by the end. Perhaps no one exemplified this more than Frank Sobotka in Season Two of The Wire. And what about Bodie, who does something despicable in Season One but for whom you feel so much compassion in the subsequent seasons? And gee whiz, what about Prez (Officer Pryzbylewski)? The monologue in which he questions whether he’s a racist and asks, ~“How do you know something like that about yourself?” I mean, that’s about as philosophical and personal and gritty and uncomfortable as it gets.
In Breaking Bad, I felt more intensely about each character as time passed but I didn’t go night-to-day or day-to-night on anybody.
In keeping with the promise of no specific spoilers, I’ll just say this: the deaths in The Wire hit me much harder, primarily because there were so many of them. Many of the main characters died. Only a couple of series regulars die in Breaking Bad; most of the deaths were… I refrain from saying “bad guys,” as WW is clearly a bad guy, but let’s just say… people you wanted to see get killed.
Finally, the diversity in The Wire is astounding. Several/many strong characters who are gay or female or black. In Breaking Bad, they get major points for a non-able-bodied main character, but other than that, it’s pretty darned Caucasian. I mean, Walter’s family is literally the Whites.
Winner: The Wire.
9. PERFORMANCES
Whenever I evaluate a video, whether it’s a show, standup special, or a sketch, I look at four things:
Concept: Is it a novel idea?
Writing: Is the monologue/dialogue solid?
Acting: Is it well-executed?
Production: Does it look good?
We’ve reviewed three of those here. The remaining one is acting. Bryan Cranston turns in what is widely regarded as the greatest television performance in history; Aaron Paul crushes it as Walter’s sidekick, Jesse, as do several others. But I don’t think you can sell short Omar Little, Stringer Bell, Jimmy McNulty, Wallace, Tommy Carcetti, Bunk Moreland, D’Angelo Barksdale, Cedric Daniels, Kima Greggs, Brother Mouzone, and the list goes on and on.
Winner: Tie.
10. SCORE
The Wire wins 4–3.
Q.E.D.
Rajiv Satyal is a standup comedian who loves writing TL;DR columns in his spare time.