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Breaking Bad is a show that revolves around addiction. Not just the plot, mind you, but the way its fans consume it. There are no casual users. Once you start watching it, suddenly you find yourself sifting through each new episode and plot point with the rigor of a junkie looking for a lost crystal in the carpet.
But no matter how addictive the show may be, you can't get people hooked on something they won't sample, and getting viewers to try a new show isn't easy. Luckily, in the case of Breaking Bad it came along at a time when TV fans were just becoming accustomed to all-you-can-eat viewing thanks to services like Netflix, iTunes and – later – Amazon Instant. It was those services that, according to Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, allowed fans to catch up on his acclaimed AMC show and join it in later seasons.
"I don't really have a complete understanding of it or a complete metric for it but I got to believe – my gut tells me–that it's very possible we wouldn't have made it to 62 episodes without this creation of these technologies and this cultural creation of binge-watching," Gilligan told Wired. "Under the old paradigm – using the old technology of simply having first runs and then reruns on networks – I don't know that we would've reached the critical mass that we reached."
'In the Breaking Bad world good news doesn't necessarily last long. It has shelf-life of sushi.' — Vince GilliganCritical mass, indeed. Breaking Bad has consistently increased its live viewership base over the last three seasons. The show averaged 1.9 million viewers in Season 4 — an increase of 23 percent from Season 3 — and the first half of the final season brought in an average of 2.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen. It's hard to imagine that many of those new viewers didn't catch up via weekends lost to back-to-back Netflix streams of the show; Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz has made similar comments about how streaming services not only kept the fandom for his show alive, but helped it grow even after it went off the air.
And it's not too late to join those throngs of binge-watching fans, though anyone looking pick up a Breaking Bad binge-watch addiction before the series' final run has a fast-approaching deadline to contend with. The show begins the second half of its fifth and final season August 11 and there are 54 episodes to watch before then, whether on Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Instant, or Blu-ray/DVD (the first half of Season 5 went on sale today). After that, AMC's final eight episodes will offer the ultimate verdict on what happens to Walter White (Bryan Cranston), Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), and the rest of the cast touched by their meth-dealing empire.
(Spoiler alert: Spoilers for Season 5 of Breaking Bad follow.)
So what's to come? When we last left Walt in the first half of Season 5—out today on DVD and Blu-ray for non-streaming binge-watchers—his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) had shown him the storage unit stacked with more money than they could count, Jesse had sworn he was getting out of the game and Mike was dead by Walt's hand. Without his former partners, Walt was running out of options, and after Skyler showed him his fat stacks, he (supposedly) decided to retire from the meth game. But not before his DEA agent brother-in-law Hank (Dean Norris) finally started to get a clue about what Walt's been up to these past five seasons.
"They seem to be having a pretty good cookout with the family when last we see them," Gilligan said. "So that looks like good news, but in the Breaking Bad world good news doesn't necessarily last long. It has shelf-life of sushi."
Gilligan, of course, isn't sharing how the Bad news will break, but says that if there's any moral for people to take away from the show, it's that "actions have consequences ... [that] seems to be the case in life and I wanted Breaking Bad to mirror real life in that regard."
Ready for the final conclusion of Breaking Bad? Get back on track by binge-watching the best moments from the first half of Season 5 above (spoilers, obviously), then tune into the final eight episodes starting August 11 on AMC.
