this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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In this household, Shit Cumdick is an Italian American hero, END OF STORY!
Actually, come to think of it, Tony Soprano is a great example of this. The show is literally about him going to therapy because he can’t face the fact that he’s a toxic POS and he’s still lionized by a ton of people. The guy cheats on his wife on the regular, murders his own supposed friends, and is constantly just doing all manner of shithead stuff, but the morons still love him.
This is how I feel about Breaking Bad. At first, you feel kind of bad for Walt and his situation, but that should quickly chang especially as the seasons go on and he reveals how much more of a piece of shit he really is. But I also distinctly remember as people watched the show in real-time how fans would idolize Walt. Really baffled me at the time.
This one I can actually kind of understand because the shift is gradual. Like, if you started watching in season 3, it would be quite obvious that he's a piece of shit, but if you start in season 1, the viewer establishes that he's a sympathetic character and it's hard to really identify a firm moment when he goes from being sympathetic to villain. It's like the old 'boiling water with a frog in it' analogy... The viewer (at least it was true for me) tries to justify his increasingly bad actions because he's been established as a "good guy" in the beginning until at some point they just have to step back and think, "Wow... he's actually an awful person." Then you watch the rest with a re-framed perspective.
I mean, that was the entire premise of the show, a good person who breaks bad. You are supposed to like him, and supposed to have complicated feelings about his character arc as he devolves deeper and deeper into the dark side. Of course there will be moments during the arc when you still root for him as the badass but that should all be gone by the end, when he’s just a bad guy who got a deserved end.
Eehhhhhh, yes and no. Part of why BB is so good is that Walt is believably bad. Part of it is the slow shift to full wannabe druglord, but another huge part of it is that he is a very flawed person, and shows it very quickly.
Within the first episode, he's very dismissive of Jesse and obviously avoidant with his wife. He lies about things all the time. He demeans Jesse a lot. He quickly demonstrates an inflated ego. His jealousy over the chemical company is very obvious from the start. I'm sure I could remember more.
He's a very not so good person even before all the stuff happens that pushes him further. Sure, he tries to be nice, but so do most bad people. The ones who don't try to be nice end up in trouble or dead.
He also doesn't go full bad in actuality. Sure, he pretends to, and still ends up doing all sorts of bad stuff, but he still wants to give the money to his family, doesn't like killing people/etc.
Basically all of that is to say... Walt's shift in BB is so believable because it's actually not that big of a character shift. Really, the story is a great example of why it's wise to not have a bunch of little bad character traits. lol Sure most bad people aren't going to become drug lords, but most people don't have Saul Goodman as their lawyer getting them off of every little thing.
Yeah I saw these things right away too. By the time he was giving his disabled son shots of tequila I already felt I knew where things were going and stopped watching lol
Yea, it was rough to watch the first time through. lol He's such an asshole from the start. Reminded me of some family members.
Walt coerces a former student into cooking meth with him, murders a dude, and then decides to commit suicide by cop in literally the first episode of the show.
You just THINK its a gradual slide because you like the guy and his life obviously sucks. The "gradual slide" is the audience watching him become better at being a criminal. His characters journey is actually a gradual realization that he is a complete piece of shit from day one until he does ONE thing that is entirely altruistic in the final episode of the series. Its not about a good person that goes bad, its about a bad person that goes good at the very end.
Jessie actually lays this out for the audience in the first episode:
"Nah, come on man. Some straight like you, giant stick up his ass, at like what, sixty, he's just gonna break bad?"
He is right. People don't just turn bad. Walk was a piece of shit before the first scene ever happened. The events of the show just give him a set of circumstances where it manifests in an unmistakably obvious way.
Skyler: If I have to hear one more time that you did this for the family...
Walter White: I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And... I was really... I was alive.
It is a gradual descent, but not so much that the viewer can be excused for not picking up on it. He kept going well after the point where he had made enough to take care of his family. He also could have accomplished his goal early by getting help from Gray Matter if he just swallowed his pride. And he was very willing to hurt or kill others as collateral damage, like Gale or Jesse's girlfriend's child.
Walt murders a guy and blackmails a former student into cooking meth for him in first episode and then rapes his wife in like the first or second episode of the second season. It always amazes me that people feel like it was somehow a subtle slide into "maybe this dude isn't a good guy?". The show is NOT subtle in its portrayal of the character.
I feel like everyone forgets about or just ignores that scene. I can recognize that Breaking Bad is a well-made show but I really struggled to keep watching after that
The show isn't really about a good person who turns bad. It is about a terrible person that unfailingly makes choices that benefit himself without any regard for the impacts to anyone else. The progression is simply that he is placed in increasingly extreme circumstances to demonstrate this behavior and the audience learns more about why he makes those decisions. He is NEVER portrayed as a good person at any point in the entire run of the show. You can count on one hand how many decent things he does, and almost all of them benefit him in some way.
The only genuinely altruistic thing he does in the entire show is the last thing he does in the final episode.
Oh, yeah, no, I get that. A "good" person would have stopped well before he got to the point where most of those things were even options. And I did eventually finish the show.
It's not only Breaking Bad, I just think there's so many other ways to show that a character is a horrible person without having to actually show something like that
That was the entire point of the show. The writers wanted to see if they could get people to root for a villain, if they knew why the villain was bad and if the shift was gradual enough. It’s literally the title; they wanted to break the concept of what people consider “bad”, and see if the audience would go along with it if they felt the reasons were justified.
That’s the thing though. From many peoples’ perspective, he wasn’t always that piece of shit. It wasn’t “revealing” as much as it was “changing”. He took on aspects of every person he killed, for better or worse. The idolatry was certainly a problem with the fans, but (again) that was the entire point of the show. By the later seasons, even the writers were baffled at how people were still rooting for Walt, because he was inarguably a monster. But because people watched his descent into madness, they were still hoping for him to come out on top.
But it's also just a century-old idiom for what happens to the main character.
Why does that remind me of American politics?
He doesn't really BECOME a bad person so much as get places in situations that more clearly illustrate that he is a bad person.
He blackmails a former highschool student of his to cook meth, murders two dudes, and decides to commit suicide by cop in the FIRST EPISODE of the show. The series goes on to do little more than present him increasingly extreme opportunities to do something horrible to benefit himself and he never fails to do it. He is CONSISTENTLY terrible for the entire show until literally the last episode. We are given increasingly clear evidence of who Walt really is. The journey isn't Walt's its the audiences and that of all the other characters around him. Walt really stays the same, he just gets better at being a criminal. It is everyone ELSE that changes around him.
David Chase has talked about how it frustrated him that people were rooting for Tony like he was the hero, so he kept making him do more fucked up shit. Americans aren’t good at processing anti-heroes. Part of the problem might be that they’re all played by charismatic actors, whereas the megalomaniacs you meet in real life are just assholes.