"Breaking Bad" and the continual fascination of villain protagonists

The following contains spoilers for AMC's Breaking Bad.

This post is not a post about how gosh, there sure are a lot of anti-heroes on cable. Those are played out, and have been played out since the first wave of them were written when The Sopranos first started to hit its stride, and again in response to The Shield. Rather, this post is about a character who's distinct from the anti-hero, and understanding this distinction is key to understanding a show like Breaking Bad. See, Walter White, the chemistry teacher cum cancer patient cum meth kingpin who is the series' protagonist, is not, strictly speaking, an anti-hero at this point; an anti-hero is a character who lacks heroic qualities, but is, in most cases, working towards a goal we can get behind. Gregory House is a douchebag to pretty much everybody, but that doesn't mean we're against him helping patients, or that that isn't a worthy goal on his part; Dexter is either a sociopath or a psychopath depending on how he's being written (TV writers and people who know anything about psychology don't seem to be demographics with a lot of overlap), but if there's such a thing as a constructive outlet for that, he's found it. Nucky Thompson is a bootlegger and a crooked politician who murdered the closest thing he had to a son (well, second-closest), but we're still rooting for him because he's kind to his wife and her children, he can't abide spousal or child abuse and his adversaries are, for the most part, total bastards.

Compare that to guys like Tony Soprano or Vic Mackey. Tony was probably the most compelling character on his show, certainly the most charismatic and entertaining, but did anybody really want him to achieve his goals? We rooted against people like Phil, Livia and Ralphie who threatened to fuck up his world, but it wasn't because (with the exception of the latter) they were necessarily worse people than he was, it was that Tony was the guy we were along for the ride with, and he was fun-or at least interesting- to watch.  There's a similar situation with Cersei Lannister in A Song of Ice and Fire; even now that we're seeing things from her perspective, she's not a sympathetic character, but she's turned out as such an epic fuckup that we want to see what happens next. But despite all that, if a character like Tony or Cersei were to be killed, it would be hard to argue they didn't deserve it.

What's interesting about Walter White is that he's essentially migrated from anti-hero to villain protagonist. For the first 1.5 seasons, nobody's going "fuck yeah! Cook that meth, Walt!" but we certainly don't judge a dying man who's doing drastic things out of a desire to provide for his family too harshly. As the series progresses, though, we see Walt let a woman die an easily preventable death because she's blackmailed him, bully his protege into murdering a decent guy (not out of any malice, but because his continued existence puts Walt in danger) and, most infamously, in the finale, poison a child to get Jesse back in his corner. And the worst bit, of course, is that Walt has been cancer-free for a while now; he's in the game for no real reason beyond the fact that it makes him feel more powerful.

That's the Walt that we open the show's fifth season with, and yet the show's as compelling as ever; it's an artful bait-and-switch that it's hard to imagine many shows pulling off.  Dirty Harry is one of the all-time great anti-heroes, but would you watch a movie where he joins the mob? Or if Tyrion Lannister decided Joffrey had the right idea about things? That's the thing about this particular show; even though it still has some sympathetic characters (coming from the other direction, did you ever imagine in the early episodes that there'd come a time when Jesse was more vulnerable and sympathetic than Walt?), so much of its continued appeal is morbid curiosity about how Walt is inevitably going to fuck up his newfound dominance (I mean, has the man EVER had a triumph that didn't lead to him vastly overestimating his ability?). And it still works. Even in an age where TV anti-heroes have become the rule rather than the exception, it takes some great writing and acting to have a TV show make us want to keep watching for a full season after they've blown their apparent Big Bad's face off. Because really, if you had a choice between going inside the head of Al Capone and the head of Eliot Ness, which one would you be likely to go with? Assuming you know you could leave when you were done, of course.