Breaking Bad - Season 1-4 [DVD] [2017]

Breaking Bad, like The Wire, is damn fine TV. But, where the Wire tried to show us everything that’s wrong with modern America, by showing us everything that’s wrong with modern America, Breaking Bad goes exactly the other way. In its protagonist, Walter White, we find the contradictions of modern America distilled down to a single man: he does all the wrong things for the right reasons. When he finds out he’s sick, he argues convincingly that he does not want to be well because being well felt to him like sickness and sickness feels like being alive.Somewhere along the spectacular descent of Walter White from "contributor to a Nobel Prize in Chemistry" to a pitiless feud with the drug cartels, he asks himself "at what point did it all go wrong?" The act that precipitates the question is characteristic of the depth of the show. They build a whole episode out of Walt’s obsession with tracking down and killing a single fly that threatens the purity of the ‘product’. The fly – tiny, irritating, but surprisingly durable – is what went wrong. What went wrong was Walt’s conscience: he had one. It is characteristic of Walt's inability to see himself, or the situation he finds himself in, that he focuses instead on the point where the whole enterprise turns back on him or someone like him, when the kind of guy he could share a beer with becomes the victim rather than those at the bottom of the food chain, the desperate consumers of the chemically sublime crystal meth he produces. In the end, that news comes to him out of the clear blue sky. Walt is smart enough that he should have seen it already. Instead he wastes his intelligence on micromanaging the focus of his conscience, from his family, to his partner, to his employer. By such careful accommodations Walt ensures that he doesn’t burn up in the descent, but the effect is pyrotechnic anyway. He does it so well we cheer him on the way down.Clues to where it might have gone wrong can be found in the starting point. The Nobel Prize is never mentioned - the camera tracks briefly over it in the first episode – but, for Walt, life has never quite equalled the promise. He contributes to a Nobel Prize, but doesn't win it. The company he helped build has brought riches, fame (and the girl) to the other founding partner, but not to him. Even teaching high-school chemistry, a task he relishes in a way that makes you wish he'd been your chemistry teacher, hasn’t quite worked out the way he’d hoped. It doesn't pay the bills and his students look down on him; literally, when they find him washing hubcaps at his second job in a car wash run by a man in possession of the second greatest set of eyebrows in western civilization.Walt has always been the also ran, the runner up but it’s hard to say at first whether this was just bad luck or some flaw in his character. It might be considered a very bad flaw that the comfortable life he has isn’t enough for him, but then again, when all around you have more, even only slightly more, who doesn’t feel left behind? Luck, as it happens, plays a decisive role when Walt finds out he has lung cancer: the kind where you don’t get better.Ordinarily one might consider lung cancer to be bad luck, but for Walt it might not be. It doesn’t just make him feel alive; Walt realizes – as if for the first time – that he is alive. In an exquisitely awkward scene in which Walt’s family pass round a cushion that confers on them the right to speak honestly about Walt’s cancer and what treatment Walt should take, we see how Walt sees himself. He sits silent, smothered, beneath the accumulating weight of other people’s thoughts and feelings, the family argues and bickers over what’s right for Walt till he can’t take it anymore. He grabs the cushion and delivers a speech that to the family – and maybe to Walt himself – is about dying right, dying with dignity and without threat of financial ruin. He makes it sound like a noble choice. To us, Walt’s choice to die gives him the only means he has found to be alive. And those means are not noble at all.

I ultimately feel a bit silly chiming in with my two cents about the brilliance of this groundbreaking show, especially giving the fact that the world have already seemed to universally embrace it for the powerhouse that it is.Nonetheless, my sole reason for doing so is simply to try and hopefully help assure a few of the doubters (as I myself once were) whom might be out there, to relinquish their various hang-ups (whatever they might be) and get firmly on board the greatness that is this particular television show.My favorite drama series were and still are "The Wire", "Deadwood" and "The Shield" and after their respected departures from the television screen I had a hard time envisioning another show coming along to challenge them for the crown.Sure shows like "Dexter", "Damages" and "Californication" were all respectable and entertaining in their own right but I still found them a bit shallow, sensationalistic and more than willing to offer up consistency and common sense in their respective narrative for basic shock value and unpredictability, which always seemed to compromise the overall arc of any given season and made suspension of disbelief very difficult indeed.Hearing the rumbles that "Breaking Bad" caused with its stellar reviews and Emmy wins for Cranston and Paul, I nonetheless still feared that the show might be on the verge of trivializing serious themes such as healthcare, cancer and the drug trade for the sake of a few crass laughs (Mostly due to the cover art of season one depicting a distraught Walter White clutching a gun while standing on a desert highway in merely a limegreen shirt and his tighty whities)Well... what a fool I was for waiting over four years to take a chance on this transcendent treasure chest of a show over such a minor concern, which coincidentally and quite ironicly do humour more flawless then any drama series ever created.Unsentimental, subversively funny and grimly brutal "Breaking Bad" is unlike any show I've ever seen before and since.Other TV favorites at the moment includes "Justified", "The Walking Dead" and "Boardwalk Empire" all are great and compelling shows but they pale somewhat in comparison to Vince Gilligan's twisted creation, the undisputed king of the home-bound flat screen... Ladies and gentlemen, get creaking.On your set...Mark...Break Bad!!!I hope you you enjoyed this little write-up (wasn't much of a review, more of a recommendation really) and more importently love the show as much as I did.Cheers.

I started watching this online and got to half-way through series 2 and decided that I wanted the box set as it is so good and would wait until it arrived before watching any more - not an easy thing to do! Happy to say it arrived today and I can't wait to watch it, as I've really enjoyed what I've seen so far. Brilliantly acted and the setting is great. The only disconcerting thing is that Walt looks like my dad did at that age! But I suppose that adds a little more fascination for me!Thought I'd leave a comment on each season as I watch it:Season 1:Exciting, gets you hooked from the start as you learn a little about each character that is introduced. Really like the way they start each episode by showing something near the end and then show you how they got there.Season 2:Much darker than the first season. Some people have commented that this season isn't as good as the rest but I've found it very intense and absorbing as you get to see the darker side of Walt and Jesse.Season 3:A couple of odd episodes in this one - especially the one called The Fly! As always though the acting is incredible and the season finale is hand over mouth exciting!Season 4:I found this equally as good as the first, with the last three episodes being very tense ... and the last camera shot of the last episode is an OMG moment!

I purchased this for my Father for Christmas. He loved the entire series. Definitely was a great gift & I'd recommend it for others

Une étoile de moins parce que tout est en anglais, pas de sous-titres français. Seulement saison 3 en français et anglais.

Me ha encantado toda la serie. No me enganché en el capítulo 1 pero sí en el 2, y de ahí en adelante siempre genial.

È una serie che da tempo io e i miei volevamovedere ma non riuscivo a trovarla poi finalmente hanno fatto il cofanetto di tutte le stagioni e allora ...famiglia accontentata

Amazon devrait être plus clair et préciser que ces DVD ne sont pas en français, ce n'est pas évident et plusieurs personnes se sont trompées.