The Break Up.

Have you heard of Breaking Bad? Well, it's the best thing since The Wire. If you haven't seen that Family Guy video and don't know what Breaking Bad is, you definitely need to get out less.


Breaking Bad is a mind-blowingly good TV show that has engulfed my life (albeit on and off) for the past six months. I'm not going to go on and on about Breaking Bad and what it's about, because you probably know. Here's a very quick synopsis

• Bryan Cranston (Hal from Malcolm in the Middle) gets cancer. He shaves his head and becomes a badass meth cook.
• He is helped by Aaron Paul, the most beautiful man ever to exist. He says "bitch!" a lot.
• Bryan Cranston's brother is in the DEA. This makes things complicated. Way complicated.
• There's a lot of violence, hilarity and awesome meth-making montages.

So what more do you want, really? Well, I know what I want. I want it to never end -- I want Walt and Jesse to go on having methy adventures forever. This is my problem with television. TV, unlike movies and books, creep up on you. You start watching it, one or two episodes a day. You fall slowly in love with their clever direction, pithy one-liners and forty minute episodes. Time passes and you find yourself missing Breaking Bad if it doesn't feature in your day. Breaking Bad becomes what you wake up to (iPhones with Netflix apps are my lord and savior) and what you fall asleep to. In short: I fell in love with Breaking Bad, and over the summer we got into a relationship of sorts. We spent three beautiful seasons together, before I took a break. See, that's the thing with Breaking Bad...it's really, really intense. It's beautiful and magical but way too intense. It's violent. It breaks your heart.

So, we stopped. I sped through three seasons of Arrested Development. But I missed the intensity. AD is a wonderful, wonderful show I'll blog about later in the year, but it's just not the same...there wasn't enough meth involved, I guess. Like the drug, Breaking Bad is horribly addictive. So I went back. Breaking Bad and I got back together and I've just finished the first half of season five.

So where does that leave me? Suddenly -- just as we were doing so well -- Breaking Bad has left me until July. It's a real kick in the teeth that comes only with TV -- the show finishes, almost as soon as it starts -- and leaves you without something to pass the evenings. There's a little hole in your life when a TV show finishes that no amount of Tumblr or movies can fill. Maybe it's just The Breaking Bad Effect. It's the most intense thing I've ever watched -- I feel somewhat lost without having another episode to eat.

You'd think that I wouldn't recommend it because of this awful sadness: I would. Trust me: you need to watch this show. It will ruin your life. You'll sit, lost, after it finishes, looking at photos of Aaron Paul on Google Images. You'll count the days to July. But you'll love the show. It will take over your life. It converted me to TV.

Go on, break bad. You know you want to. Until all of you become converts, I'll just sit here crossing off days until I discover what happens next.

(My blog inexplicably won't let me post videos, but here is a really good trailer for season one if you're not convinced by my heartbreak)