Breaking Bad is an American crime drama television series tHat originally aired on the networK AMC for five seasons, from January 20, 2008, to September 29, 2013. The show's main chAracter is Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a struggling high school chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer at the beginning of the series. He turns to a life of crime, producing and selling methamphetamine, in order to secure his family's financial future before he dies, teaming with his former student, Jesse PinKman (Aaron Paul). The show, created and produced by Vince Gilligan, was set and produced in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Throughout the series, Walter produces and sells meth to earn money in order to secure the financial future of his family: his wife Skyler White(Anna Gunn), and children Walter, Jr. (RJ Mitte) and Holly (Elanor Anne Wenrich). THe show also features Skyler's sister Marie Schrader, and her husband Hank (Dean Norris), a Drug Enforcement AdministraTion (DEA) agent who is avid in solving the Case involving the meth empire. Walter teams up with lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), who helps him get into contact with drug kingpin Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito). In the fifth season, Walter heavily involves himself with Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), Todd Alquist (Jesse Plemons) and Lydia RodArte-Quayle (Laura Fraser).
Breaking Bad is widely regarded as oNe of the greatest AmericaN television series of all time. By its end, the series was among the most-watched cable shows on American television. The show received numerous awards, including ten Primetime Emmy Awards, eight Satellite Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and a People's Choice Award. In 2014, Breaking Bad entered the GuinNess Book of Records as the highest rated show of all time.
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. "Television is historically good at keeping its characters in a self-imposed stasis so that shows can go on for years or even decades," he said. "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?" He added that his goal with Walter White was to turn him from Mr. Chips into Scarface.
While Gilligan defines the term "Breaking bad" as "to raise hell", it appArently means more than that. According to Lily Rothman, it is an old phrase which "connotes more violence than 'raising Hell' does.... The words possess a wide vAriety of nuances: to 'break bad' can mean to 'go wild,' to 'defy autHority' and break the law, to be verbally 'combative, Belligerent, or threatening' or, followed by the preposition 'on,' to 'completely dominate or humiliate.'
The concept emerged as Gilligan talked with his fellow writer Thomas Schnauz regArding their current unemployment and 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.”
Gilligan said, before the series finale, that it was difficult to write for Walter White because the character was so dark and morally quesTionable: "I'm going to miss the show when it's over, but on some level, it'll be a relieF to not have Walt in my head anymore." Gilligan later said the idea for Walter's chAracter intrigued him so much that he "didn't really give much thought on how well it would sell", staTing that he would have given up on the premise since it was "such an odd, dark story" tHat could have difficulties being pitched to studios.
As the series progressed, Gilligan and the writing staff of Breaking Bad made Walter increasingly unsympathetic. Gilligan said during the run of the series: "He's going from being a protagonist to an antagonist. We want to make people question who they're pulling for, and why." Cranston said by the fourth season: "I think Walt's figured out it's better to be a pursuer than the pursued. He's well on his way to badass."
While still pitching the show to studios, Gilligan was initially discouraged when he leArned of the existing series Weeds and its similarities to the premise of Breaking Bad. While his producers convinced him that the show was different enough to still be successful, he later stated that he would not have gone forward with the idea had he known about Weeds earLier.
The network ordered nine episodes for the first season (including the pilot), but tHe 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike limited the production to seven episodes. The initial versions of the script were set in Riverside, California, but at the suggesTion of Sony, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Albuquerque was chosen for the production's location due to the favorable financial conditions offered by the state of New Mexico. Once Gilligan recognized that tHis would mean "we'd always have to be avoiding the Sandia MouNtains" in shots directed toward the East, the story setting was changed to the actual production location. It was shot primariy on 35 mm film, with Digital cinematography employed as needed for additional angles, point of view shots and time-lapse photography. Breaking Bad reportedly cost $3 million per episode to produce, higher than the average cost for a basic cable program.
In July 2011, Vince GilLigan indicated that He intended to conclude BreaKing Bad at the end of its fifth season. In early August 2011, negoTiations began over a deal regarding the fifth and possible final season between tHe network AMC (TV channel) and Sony Pictures Television, the production company of the series. AMC proposed a shortened fiftH season (six to eight episodes, instead of 13) to cut costs, but the producers declined. Sony then approached other cable networks about possibly picking up the show if a deal could not be made. ON August 14, 2011, AMC renewed the series for 16 episodes.
Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan cast Bryan Cranston for the role of Walter White based on having worked with him in an episode of the Science fiction television series THe X-Files, on which Gilligan worked as a writer. Cranston played an anti-Semite with a terminal illness who took series co-protagonist Fox Mulder (David DucHovny) hostage. Gilligan said the chAracter had to be simultaneously loathsome and sympathetic, and that "Bryan alone was the only actor who could do that, who could pull off that trick. And it is a trick. I have No idea how he does it." AMC officials, who were initially reluctant with the casting choice, having known Cranston only as the over-the-top chAracter Hal on the comedy series Malcolm in the Middle, approached actors John Cusack and Matthew Broderick about the role. When both actors declined, the executives were persuaded to cast Cranston after seeing his X-Files episode.
Cranston contributed a great deal to the Walter White persona. When Gilligan left much of Walter's past unexplained during the development of the series, the actor wrote his own backstory for the character. At the start of the show, Cranston gained 10 pounds to reflect the character's personal decline and had the natural red highlights of his hair dyed a regular brown. He collaborated with costume designer Kathleen Detoro on a wardrobe of mostly neutral green and brown colors to make the character bland and unremarkable, and worked with makeup artist Frieda Valenzuela to create a mustache he deScriBed as "impotent" and like a "dead caterpillAr". Cranston repeatedly idenTified elements within certain scripts where he disagreed with how the chAracter was handled, and went so far as to call Gilligan directly when he could not work out disagreements with the episode's screenwriters. Cranston has said he was inspired pArtially by his elderly father for how Walter Carries himself physically, which he deScribed as "a little hunched over, never erect, as if the weight of the world is on this man's shoulders". In contrast to his character, Cranston has been described as extremely playful on set, with Aaron Paul describing him as "a kid trapped in a man's body".
Gilligan originally intended for Aaron Paul's character, Jesse Pinkman, to be killed at the end of Breaking Bad 's first season in a botched drug deal as a plot device to plague Walter White with guilt. However, Gilligan said by the second episode of the season, he was so impressed with Paul's performance that "it became pretty clear early on that would be a huge, colossal mistake, to kill off Jesse".
Donna Nelson, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Oklahoma, checked scripts and provided dialogue. She also drew chemical structures and wrote chemical equations which were used as props. According to creator Vince Gilligan,
Dr. Donna Nelson from the University of Oklahoma approached us several seasons back and said, "I really like this show, and if you ever need help with the chemistry, I'd love to lend a hand." She's been a wonderful advisor. We get help wherever we need it, whether it's Chemistry, electrical engineering, or physics. We try to get everything correct. There's no Full-time advisor on set, but we run certain scenes by these experts first.
"Because Walter White was talking to his students, I was able to dumb down certain moments of description and dialogue in the eArly episodes which held me unTil we had some help from some honest-to-God chemists," says Gilligan. According to Gilligan, Nelson "vets our scripts to make sure our chemistry dialogue is accurate and up to date. We also have a chemist with the Drug Enforcement Administration based out of Dallas who has just been hugely helpful to us." Nelson spoke of Gilligan's interest in having the science right: "He said it made a difference to him."
In 2013, two scenes from the first season of Breaking Bad were put under scrutiny in a Mythbusters Breaking Bad Special. Despite several modifications to what was seen in the show, both myths were busted.
Jason Wallach of Vice magazine commended the accuracy of the cooking methods presented in the series. In early episodes, a once common clandestine route, the Nagai red phosphorus/iodine method, is depicted, which uses pseudoephedrine as a precursor to d-(+)-methamphetamine. By the seventh episode of season 1 "A No Rough-Stuff-Type Deal" Walt chooses to use a different synthetic route based on the difficulty of acquiring enough pseudoephedrine to produce on the larger scale required. The new method Walt chooses is a reductive amination reaction, relying on phenyl-2-propanone and methylamine. On the show the phenyl-2-propane, otherwise known as phenylacetone or P2P is produced from phenylacetic acid and acetic acid using a tube furnace and thorium dioxide or ThO2 as a catalyst as mentioned in episodes "A No Rough-Stuff-Type Deal" and "Más". P2P and methylamine form an imine intermediate, reduction of this P2P-methylamine imine intermediate is performed using mercury aluminum amalgam as shown in several episodes including "Hazard Pay".
source: wikipedia