Breaking Bad returned to US television on Sunday night for the an eight-episode arc that is the first half of the series' fifth and final season. The Sunday night television landscape it left behind in October has become saturated with water-cooler fodder: Girls, Game of Thrones, Veep, Mad Men, The Good Wife, The Walking Dead, True Blood, Sherlock, The Newsroom.
Sometime around mid-May, when television aficionados had to choose between Game of Thrones and Mad Men – two very different shows whose viewers made for a surprisingly overlapping Venn diagram – the conversation briefly became less about the shows themselves and more about how we were watching them. What were you watching live, and what were you streaming later? Did you have an HBO Go login (or, be honest, borrow a friend's)? Did you stream, did you pay, did you Torrent, did you YouTube? Did you spread it out over the following week? Sunday night television was and is a feast, and it's up to us how we order the courses.
Enter Breaking Bad: after this spring's crash course, television viewers are now experts on getting their Sunday night television when and how they want it. (But be careful not to watch too much of it at once, or Jim Pagels over at Slate may revoke your Netflix privileges.)
Sometimes, though, the choice isn't up to the viewers. A few days before Breaking Bad's highly anticipated premiere, a fight between AMC, the network on which it airs, and Dish, the satellite operator that delivers that network to about 14 million subscribers, turned the show into a football. Dish yanked AMC from its line-up, and AMC in turn offered to stream the episode live for customers left in the lurch. The spat mirrors one in which DirectTV pulled Viacom content from its lineup in a dispute over digital content rights.
So this is where we are: networks and the companies that deliver those networks to viewers have shown themselves perfectly willing to use favorite shows to manipulate fans who just want to watch some TV. And those fans have shown themselves perfectly willing to use whatever means necessary – legal or not, as if we were all in our own Walter White-inspired morality play – to get at those shows.
Everyone's on the edge of something new, just like a cancer-stricken high school chemistry teacher who finds himself teetering toward a morality-free zone in which he may or may not become the biggest meth dealer in the American south-west.
Over at the Atlantic, Derek Thompson surveys the landscape:
A la carte would blow up television, which has been the most dependable and lucrative business model in modern entertainment history. The internet gutted the music industry. Print journalism has been forced to innovate or die – or, sometimes, both simultaneously – in response to the web … Innovation is an answer to a problem. As long as cable providers don't have a revenue problem, they have less need to innovate
We're primed for a change, and Breaking Bad might be the show that finally gets us there. Less than 12 hours after Sunday night's premiere, AMC had made sure it was already on iTunes, where it was almost immediately the most downloaded TV show on the site. In the olden days of 2011, we had to wait days for our shows to make their way over to the legal download sites (and we had to walk uphill in snow without boots to get to our laptops … ).
Reaction to Breaking Bad
On Twitter, reaction to Breaking Bad on Sunday night was as common as reaction to the reaction to the show – plenty of people were watching, but plenty more were busy doing other things with their Sunday nights and wanted to remain spoiler-free for as long as possible. Some were more Walter White-ish than others in their warnings to those who would dare spoil:
everyone that posts breaking bad spoilers tonight deserves a parking ticket every day this week & also ever
— lauren ashley bishop (@sbellelauren) July 16, 2012
Seriously thinking about calling the cops on the person who posted a Breaking Bad spoiler on Instagram.
— Nicole Betz (@TomHanksIsHot) July 11, 2012
Forgot that with Breaking Bad's return, Twitter/Facebook on Sunday PM/Monday AM become a spoiler minefield #WhyWeCantHaveNiceThings
— Bedirhan Cinar (@bedirhan) July 16, 2012
Somehow I need to get through an entire news day without any Breaking Bad spoilers. The journalism equivalent of a perfect game.
— Josh Visser (@joshvisser) July 16, 2012
Others just took it all as a joke:
Spoiler alert: First episode of this season of Breaking Bad starts with Frankie Muniz awaking his dad from a TERRIBLE dream.
— John Moe (@johnmoe) July 16, 2012
BREAKING BAD SPOILER ALERT: Jim and Pam get together.
— Steven Amiri (@StevenAmiri) July 16, 2012
BREAKING BAD SPOILER ALERT: Chandler and Monica finally get together!!
— Sekou Lumumba™ (@sekoulumumba) July 16, 2012
Breaking Bad Spoiler: Walter Jr. is a horcrux.
— MJ (@sucittaM) July 16, 2012
BREAKING BAD SPOILER - Two words: Crystal. Meth.
— Eli Braden (@EliBraden) July 16, 2012
If you're a Breaking Bad fan, how did you watch the episode? Have you watched the episode? Or, better yet, are you actually trying to avoid the entire season so you can view it all in a weekend binge in two months?
What are you doing to stay away from spoilers? Tell us in the comments, or tweet us @GuardianUS.
