Breaking Bad as Philosophy

Abstract

Breaking Bad has been lauded as the best series ever on television by numerous critics and polls. It follows the “Breaking Bad” (i.e., the moral degradation) of Walter White, a middle-class, middle-aged high school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Presented in the form of a literary epic employing satire, it provides us with a way to look at complex issues of justice, the good, and meaning, all while imparting a sense of aesthetics of justice and morality. The aesthetics of justice in Breaking Bad examines problems and issues of modernity, employing existential and moralistic themes similar to other satirical epic works featuring antiheroes including Ulysses and Don Quixote. In this chapter, the existentialist themes and aesthetic treatment of Walt’s complex moral world are discussed in relation to other epic satirical works, and an argument expanding upon the author’s prior conceptions of Breaking Bad’s aesthetics of the just and the good is made.