tl;dr: "Breaking Bad is not a situation in which the characters' morality is static or contradictory or colored by the time frame; instead, it suggests that morality is continually a personal choice. When the show began, that didn't seem to be the case: It seemed like this was going to be the story of a man (Walter White, portrayed by Bryan Cranston) forced to become a criminal because he was dying of cancer. That's the elevator pitch. But that's completely unrelated to what the show has become. The central question on Breaking Bad is this: What makes a man "bad" - his actions, his motives, or his conscious decision to be a bad person? Judging from the trajectory of its first three seasons, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan believes the answer is option No. 3. So what we see in Breaking Bad is a person who started as one type of human and decides to become something different. And because this is television - because we were introduced to this man in a way that made him impossible to dislike, and because we experience TV through whichever character we understand the most - the audience is placed in the curious position of continuing to root for an individual who's no longer good."
I've only seen the first few episodes, but am hoping to find some time to go through it now. I get plenty of morality from shows like "Mad Men" and "The Wire" in which we feel conflicted because the characters we love are doing bad things (in fact you could say that this is the main theme of serious, dramatic TV shows now), but I think the appeal of "Breaking Bad" is watching a desperate man make the conscious decision to become "evil."
A question unanswered is wheter Walter actually has changed at all. Had he had to make life or death decisions before the diagnosis would he truely have acted differently?
Quite often Walter's actions are motivated purely by narcisistic reasons a tendency he showed even at the start of the show.
tl;dr: "Breaking Bad is not a situation in which the characters' morality is static or contradictory or colored by the time frame; instead, it suggests that morality is continually a personal choice. When the show began, that didn't seem to be the case: It seemed like this was going to be the story of a man (Walter White, portrayed by Bryan Cranston) forced to become a criminal because he was dying of cancer. That's the elevator pitch. But that's completely unrelated to what the show has become. The central question on Breaking Bad is this: What makes a man "bad" - his actions, his motives, or his conscious decision to be a bad person? Judging from the trajectory of its first three seasons, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan believes the answer is option No. 3. So what we see in Breaking Bad is a person who started as one type of human and decides to become something different. And because this is television - because we were introduced to this man in a way that made him impossible to dislike, and because we experience TV through whichever character we understand the most - the audience is placed in the curious position of continuing to root for an individual who's no longer good."
I've only seen the first few episodes, but am hoping to find some time to go through it now. I get plenty of morality from shows like "Mad Men" and "The Wire" in which we feel conflicted because the characters we love are doing bad things (in fact you could say that this is the main theme of serious, dramatic TV shows now), but I think the appeal of "Breaking Bad" is watching a desperate man make the conscious decision to become "evil."