E! wrote:"We start off running from day one—it literally starts off right where we left it"

(i.e., with Jesse shooting Gale)

, Emmy-winning star Aaron Paul told us when we visited the set in Albuquerque this spring. "I cannot wait to see or hear people's reactions for the first episode because they are going to lose it, in the best way possible." Star Bryan Cranston agrees: "The first, premiere episode is very shocking—it's like, 'Whoa! Oh my God!' And then it struggles with tension all the way through, and then the last episode is going to be another shocking episode." Prepare yourself for "a much darker roller-coaster ride" this season, warns Aaron: "It's the most intense thing we have done thus far." We can't imagine how Breaking Bad could possibly get any darker or more intense, but we're ready to "lose it" along with you when the fourth season premieres July 17 on AMC.

THR wrote:'Breaking Bad': Dark Side of the Dream
One of television’s greatest dramas goes unflinchingly into the continued transformation of its lead character from likable to something beyond despicable. It’s one of the most fearless and selfless gambits ever hatched in the name of enduring art.

The AMC drama returns Sunday and continues to push Bryan Cranston's Walter White into a black hole; brilliance intact.

There are so many levels of genius in AMC’s Breaking Bad that you can lose track – and focus – trying to highlight the ones that really make a difference.

But it’s actually not that difficult. Series creator and showrunner Vince Gilligan is the genius and the difference in Breaking Bad.

Yes, Bryan Cranston has won best lead actor three times in a row; fellow actor Aaron Paul should have won just as many (he’s been nominated twice and won supporting actor once); Anna Gunn is long overdue. The writing is extraordinary. No series on television has better visuals than Breaking Bad – the cinematography is stunning. In the same conversation, no series on television uses color quite like this one and the sound is a minimalist’s artistic triumph.

But then there’s Gilligan. Oh, he can aw-shucks you to death with his Virginia sweetness and impeccable manners but the man has deliberately and with full-understanding of the ramifications taunted the television gods with his sacrilegious intent – to take a loveable, sympathetic character and make him morally bankrupt and awful right in front of the disbelieving eyes of the audience.

Audacious doesn’t even begin to cover what this man is doing. Gilligan is attempting (and has succeeded over the course of three brilliant seasons) a kind of confrontational transformation that should, using conventional logic, alienate his core audience and not only slay the golden goose but light it on fire as well. You don’t take your main character and make him unlikable. You just don’t. Nobody does that. Nobody has ever really done that to this extent.

Yes, you can talk about Tony Soprano all you want. But he was a bad seed when we met him (relatable anxiety problems or not) and he was ultimately, at his worst, no more than a mere antihero. You weren’t supposed to like him, but you did. It was a problem that Sopranos creator David Chase took very seriously and wanted, right around Season 3, to rectify by making Tony more unlikable. But he didn’t succeed. In the end, people still loved Tony.

When Breaking Bad ends, it appears to be Gilligan’s plan that no one with a conscience will like Cranston’s character, Walter White, one tiny bit. Gilligan has said that what he’s doing is turning Mr. Chips into Scarface. It’s his go-to analogy. Never mind that such an evolution is counter-intuitive in television’s storytelling framework and virtually inconceivable in the world of network television (nor is it a rousingly accepted course of action in the cable world either).

Make no mistake about it – the episodes in Breaking Bad from the pilot onward have been little hour-long anathemas about hero (now villain) Walter White.

Who does that? Apparently Gilligan does and that’s why he needs to be singled out for his brass-balled determination not to change course as the acclaim (and Emmy hardware) pile up. In a world where shows go on well past their sell-by date (mostly for profit, partly to keep basking in the light shone on a hit), Breaking Bad is keeping to Gilligan’s plan and going over a cliff.

Honestly, you can’t laude Gilligan (and in some sense all of the actors and writers and even AMC) enough for this steadfast ode to art. Walter White broke bad in Season 1, but as we enter Season 4 it’s been such a hellish transformation (and impressive as hell), that everyone should go back and watch that first batch of seven strike-shortened episodes just to remember what it felt like to have sympathy for the man.

Recently Gilligan has stated that he can’t see Breaking Bad going past five seasons. He’s said that getting Walt out of his head will be a good thing – a necessary break. And it’s pretty clear why as Season 4 opens up on July 17. Things are bleak. The repercussion of individual actions has been a key theme in the series, but viewers will truly be able to feel the weight of it in Season 4. Lives are being destroyed. What started as a noble, if flawed, lark by Walt – to leave his struggling family some money after discovering he had inoperable lung cancer – went sideways very fast. Each tiny moral shift begat something more unlawful or evil, something that was harder to rationalize or write off as collateral damage.

Season 3 ended with a cliffhanger of sorts – Jesse (Paul) forced to save his and Walt’s life by rushing over and sticking a gun in the face of Gale (David Costabile) and deciding whether to kill him or not.

But whether or not Jesse pulls the trigger is neither a cliffhanger nor a spoiler if you understand the fundamentals of Breaking Bad. Of course he does. This is not a series about rainbows and unicorns.

What’s important here – as always – is the toll. As Walt moves from Mr. Chips to Scarface, what’s the emotional fallout? Certainly there’s no better barometer than Jesse. He was never, ever, cut-out for the drug business, even though he was making cheap meth when we first met him in Season 1. Once “Mr. White,” Jesse’s former chemistry teacher, began to do the cooking and press for success so that he could provide for his pregnant wife Skyler (Gunn) and son Walt Jr. (RJ Mitre) – who has cerebral palsy – there was always something more dangerous in the desperation.

Along the way, Walt has done some very bad things – perhaps the worst coming when he failed to intercede when Jesse’s girlfriend, Jane (Krysten Ritter) was choking on her own heroin-induced vomit. The blowback from that was, of course, epic (it seems no bad or good deed goes unpunished in this series). For Jesse, it was emotionally catastrophic -- Gilligan and the Breaking Bad writers let the impact linger, refusing to move on as if everything was fine.

Nothing is ever fine in Breaking Bad. And if Jesse – who was far sweeter than his outward swagger in Season 1 ever let on – fell apart at Jane’s death, how do you think he’s going to handle shooting Gale in the face?

And that’s really where we, as viewers, are in Season 4 – a crossroads so far from the first one we met that we’re numb to any others that pop up. Breaking Bad has never let its characters forget that once you make a bad decision the odds are you’re only going to make it worse with subsequent actions. It's one thing to break bad, quite another to continue breaking without an ability to reverse course. This is where Gilligan and his writing team have brought the series -- past astonishment at acts you can't imagine doing, to acceptance of what you've done and what you're still capable of doing. That acceptance -- that looking in the mirror with honesty -- is more existential angst than most people can handle.

No wonder Gilligan is talking openly about this series ending after Season 5. He plotted this course. He decided to take a good man and make him bad – to turn a sad sack into a dark force. You can only tell the truth about that journey for so long until it eats into your soul.

Breaking Bad is unquestionably one of the greatest dramas in TV history. What it should be rewarded and applauded for is the wonton willingness to throw that success away in the service of the story. The decision to do that is Gilligan’s – and he hasn’t flinched yet.

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Breaking Bad finally returned last night, picking up right where it left off 13 (!) months ago, with Jesse aiming a gun at poor Gale's head and, despite some perceived ambiguity regarding the season finale's final camera angle, most assuredly not missing. On Friday, we spoke with series mastermind Vince Gilligan, who discussed the season premiere's bloody events in vivid detail, so if you didn't watch the show and still intend to, by God, please stop reading. We're serious about this: "Spoiler alert" doesn't even begin to do it justice.

(No, seriously — scram.)

OK, here we go. You've been warned.


OK, first off: Holy shit. Although that isn’t really a question. But this episode really puts the lie to the notion that a season premiere is meant to gently ease people back into a show after a long layoff. The Sopranos would have probably let Jesse get away and spend a couple weeks teasing a potential confrontation with Gus. You gave it about 24 minutes.
The pace is always something that my writers and I spend a lot of time talking about. Most shows are designed to be open-ended and theoretically could go on forever, but this is designed to take a guy from his beginning point to his end point and transform him from a good guy into a bad guy. You’re on a finite continuum when you're telling a story like that, and even as the writer of the show, you can't always be certain at what point on that continuum you happen to be. We kind of blindly feel our way through it. A good rule of thumb seems to me is to have a lot of fun, interesting plot twists and have a lot of story to tell but tell it as slowly as you can, so you don't shoot your wad too soon. I can’t say that all the episodes will move quite this fast — some will be ripping along, others slow down and take a moment to let the audience catch their breath.

The centerpiece of the episode, obviously, is the scene in the lab when Gus pays a visit. Did you always intend for that to be this long, excruciatingly quiet thing, or was that just how Giancarlo Esposito played it? He went 10 minutes without saying a word or changing his expression.
We always had the idea that for the third act of the episode, we would make a real meal of that scene when Gus faces off with Walt for the first time after everything that happened at the end of season three, to just milk the hell out of that thing and have the audience on the edge of their seats. Our episodes are generally 50 pages long — about one page per minute — and when I wrote this one, it was only 43 pages long, which concerned me. There’s a difference between drawing something out and padding it to the point of being boring, of stretching to the breaking point but not actually breaking. On the page, it's not just, "Gus comes downstairs and undresses." You try to describe what everybody's thinking, what everybody's feeling. You try to make it novelistic. There's a little novelist in all of us television writers.

So you were able to trust that Esposito would be able to make something like calmly taking off his jacket and glasses sufficiently terrifying.
It's amazing. You'd be surprised how little I talked to Giancarlo about how he played that part. Certainly the director, Adam Bernstein, talked with him, but this is a man with amazing instincts. There are very few actors who can go toe-to-toe with Bryan Cranston, but Giancarlo Esposito is a guy who can do that. I'd known that for years, before I even met him, watching him in so many wonderful movies, and seeing the fine range he possesses and the skill he possesses. It's interesting — he's such an effusive personality in real life. He's such a wonderful guy, he's got a smile for everyone, and he is so the opposite of Gus Fring. But I had ample reason to be confident.

At first viewing, slashing Victor’s throat seems strictly like Gus making a brutal point to Jesse and Walt, but Victor wasn’t totally undeserving of punishment.
The audience has every bit as valid an opinion as I do, but for what it's worth, I think what happened was that Victor made two mistakes: He let himself get seen at the house, and we can tell from the early going that that seems to worry Mike. The other thing is, it's a bit of an affront to Gus that Victor added insult to injury by thinking he could cook Walt's formula. This is a guy, we learned from the teaser, who wants the best. He doesn't want just some well-intentioned schmo who's not a chemist cooking the formula.

There’s that maxim that if you show a gun in the first act, you’d better fire it by the third. You double down with that idea, not only opening the episode with a close-up of the box cutter, but by naming the episode “Box Cutter.”
It just sounded like a cool title, but in hindsight, perhaps it's that I had some concern that it was a long build within the episode and it did not start off with a bang. Perhaps I was thinking on some level, "We'd better let the audience know that there's something at the end of this."

The episode ends with Walt and Jesse wearing, without explanation, matching Kenny Rogers T-shirts.
I really mean it when I say that I love for the audience to come up with their own answers. If we leave out a step — how we got from point A to point C if we leave out step B — the audience's take on it is every bit as valid as mine. Having said that, one man's opinion, this opinion being mine, what happened was that these guys get splattered with blood when Victor's throat is cut. As such, they can't go out into the world with human blood all over them. That would be very bad. That's something Mike would not want to see happen either, as much as he hates those two guys right now, as angry as he is for their hand they had in getting his friend Victor killed.

So Mike gets them matching Kenny Rogers T-shirts to mess with them.
I say yes. I think what happened was, he went down to Target or Wal-Mart or whatever and he grabbed the first things he saw, and he grabbed two identical shirts and two pairs of white jeans and he got the hell out of there, and he threw them at them, and he said, "Get the fuck out of here."

Even though Walt is pretty passionate in his defense of Jesse, that warmth doesn’t seem particularly reciprocal. It’s always jarring, after all this, to hear Jesse call him “Mr. White.”
This poor fella is a damaged soul at this point. He is a murderer now, and yet he's still not. He did what he did to save his friend and to save himself. He didn't want to do it, and he was forced into it. It's a terrible thing that is going to have repercussions for a long time to come.

You said earlier that you already know what the end point is for Walt. At what point do you feel the character passed the point where this was just about providing for his family and became someone who wasn’t going to come out of this, who wasn’t going to just be able to go back to teaching high school chemistry?
I've never been asked that before. And again, I know it sounds like I'm being falsely modest in saying it’s just my opinion. I don't think it's any less valid, but I don't know that it's any more valid. All that to say: Everyone speaks of the moment in Season 2, when Walt watched Jane, Jesse's girlfriend, die from a heroin overdose. I think Walt reached the point of no return was actually before that, as early as Season 1, and it might have been the moment in which he was offered financial salvation. He was offered some sort of deus ex machina salvation in the form of his former partner coming to him and saying, "Listen, Walt, I've heard about your situation, and I'd love to give you a job, and I'd love to pay your bills, and I'd love to give you a free hand here." And Walt, out of pride, would rather cook crystal meth than take the help.

I was about as proud of that moment as I was of any we've had since, and I'll tell you why: My first inclination for this show was that this was a good man — fundamentally good — who was doing a really stupid thing, cooking crystal meth, and was ignorant of how terrible this world was and would quickly be in over his head, and quickly forces beyond his control would make him continue cooking. Perhaps he'd be held in some sort of bondage by some kingpin and made to cook meth. It occurred to us early on, "You know what? We don't want to see that. No one wants to see that.” They want to see this guy, right or wrong, have the will to go forward in this thing. That's a much more interesting character than a character who is forced simply by dire straits.

It’s kind of like he’s been striving to not feel as emasculated as he was working in that car wash, but every turn towards sticking up for himself digs him into an even deeper, more helpless hole.
You're right. It's one step forward, two steps back. Walt's so self-deluded for the reasons that he does the things that he does. I think he absolutely loves his family. He wants the best for them, but there's also the question of what does he want and how does this make him happy or satisfy him on some level? This feeling of power and potency that has eluded him for years now. That's a good angle.

MentalFloss wrote:Breaking Bad‘s Super Intense Gus Was Big Bird’s Camp Counselor

On Breaking Bad Giancarlo Esposito plays Gus Fring, one of the scariest characters on television. But Joel Keller of New York Magazine scanned Esposito’s IMDb profile and noticed a curious credit from 1982:

On your IMDB profile there’s a series of bad guys and maybe some cops and other folks, and then at the very end, it shows you did Sesame Street for a year.

[Laughs] I did! I did the Electric Company theme song and I was Big Bird’s camp counselor, and I’m still trying to find that footage for my children.

big-bird-gus-breaking-bad[1].jpg

Sesame Street reruns from 1982 will never be the same.

Alexhead wrote:Massive spoilers if you haven't seen the episode...