American Breaking Horror Walking Bad Dead Story

Every couple of years a show appears on TV which seems to hook everyone in. They have ranged in the past from the sublime – BBC’s State of Play or HBO’s The Wire – to the ridiculous ABC’s Lost or ITV’s Primeval – but the show of the last year has to have been Breaking Bad which was brought to us by AMC.

The story is well known but I will quickly re-iterate it for you; high school chemistry teacher who never fulfilled his potential is told he has terminal lung cancer so he starts cooking crystal meth to leave something behind for his family…the profits, not the meth. The show then follows this ‘everyman’ on his chaotic adventure through the Albuquerque underworld.

Like many others I was essentially forced into watching due to peer pressure. Everyone was watching it and at least once a week it takes over Facebook status updates of most of my friends. Which I did, life is simply easier that way sometimes.

Yet at the same time I stumbled across another show about which I’d heard nothing; FX’s American Horror Story. Now, I use Netflix and when the show appeared with its cover a man in a gimp suit being lowered spider style a top a pregnant woman I was concerned. Concerned that this was another of those little oddities that seems to plague services like Netflix or iTunes’ genius. For example, Netflex is determined to make me watch The Lincoln Lawyer starring Matthew Mahogany regardless of how many times I tell it I’m not interested or iTunes trying to sell me Jessie J’s ‘music’.

Breaking Bad started slowly and I twice had to be drawn back into the first season yet it ended well and despite only having seven episodes and clearly being mostly groundwork we had some good characters in Walt, Jessie and Hank but something was missing. In season two it became clear what it was – women- believable, balanced, bearable women.

Our two key female characters in Breaking Bad are, at best, neurotic and at worse simply pathological. Take for example Skyler’s reaction to almost every action in the show. She is consistently unfeeling, single minded and acts without consulting or considering others around her or heeding their advice. Certainly a trait which would catch the eye of most passing psychologists. Then there is also Marie, a character so inconsistent in her motivation she could have come from the writer’s strike or Heroes. First she is a kleptomaniac, then a pushy wife who wants her husband to climb the management ladder at the D.E.A. then into a paranoid state before becoming the Walter Mitty of the New Mexico housing market.

This isn’t an isolated incident. Take another popular AMC show, The Walking Dead, this show – of which I believe the first season is wildly over-rated – is also littered with female characters who can best be described as unsympathetic if I was being sympathetic. In fact, you could use the shows as a Rorschach test for potential partners, if they like Skyler, Marie or Lori then make like Iron Maiden and run to the hills.

The internet is full of articles analysing and critiquing this issue yet it isn’t one which seems to make it into the mainstream media in much the same way that no one talks about how shows like Gossip Girl promote promiscuity and almost every show re-enforces the idea that a woman can only have value if it is within the context of their relation to the male characters.

Pajiba.com describes Skyler White as a woman who “epitomizes the calculating shrew,” and “a villain in her characterisation.” Actress Anna Gunn has even been forced to respond in interviews to accusations of being an ‘annoyance’ and a ‘reason to stop watching’.

In The Walking Dead we have Lori who, despite being consistently sanctimonious in her interactions with all other characters, in particular to the other women, waited the best part of seven hours into the Zombie Apocalypse on jump into bed/sleeping bag with her husband’s best friend. She defends herself to Rick, her husband, by saying; “I thought you were dead!” Why he didn’t reply; “It was the same day!” Or something to that effect is beyond me and most of the public. She then callously yet passively goads the two men into an inevitable stand-off where one will be left as the un-opposed leader of the group and with whom she would be able to secure her privileged position.

Compare these women to Vic’s long suffering wife in the The Shield, a woman who realistically goes through cycles of anger, rejection, denial, reconciliation. Many situations take place which have caused so many problems in other shows yet the elasticity of their bond is still there. They may be tearing into each other yet it is a layered attack or rebuke. Compare that to Skyler’s unilateral ultimatums in Breaking Bad.

American Horror Story, which adopted the suffix ‘murder house’ when a second independent season was commissioned is a show populated by the same number of male and female characters yet it is the women that you remember the most. With the exception of Hayden, the student with whom the father of the family had an affair, they are balanced, expressive and believable characters. In particular, Constance who essentially provides the narration and tempo of the story and Violet whose performance is delicately concealing the (spoiler alert!) show’s twist.

Over their respective seasons Skyler and Lori would plumb new depths of irrational bitchyness and cryptic changes in attitude, for example Skyler suddenly deciding to take part in the money laundering, flipping out about Walt buying a flash car for his son but giving $600,000 to the man she cheated on him with and for who she cooked company accounts.

Over on FX veteran Jessica Lange shows them how it’s done. There is no doubt that Constance Tait is a prime bitch, she is manipulative, deceitful and often cruel but there is more there, a frailty or fear beneath it. If it is a good example of character progression and changes in representation the look no further than the show’s treatment of the house’s maid played by both Francis Conroy and Alexandra Breckenridge.

Ok, so it has one of those pathetic final closure episodes at the end which is at best unnecessary and at worst cowardly from the show’s writing staff, the issue of the demon-baby Thaddeus in the basement is never reconciled and the season is littered with movie tropes from The Shining to Beetlejuice but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt that those were homages and not Heroes-esque lacks of inspiration.

What will come of season two and three I don’t know? For the record, I’m deeply concerned by the guy from Maroon 5 being in it – or anything for that matter - and worry about them using the same actors in a new setting and story as new characters. Though I will probably have to watch Breaking Bad and I will probably watch The Walking Dead for David Morrissey alone, I can’t help but feel that there is a wider issue here which is being missed about how women are portrayed on American TV.

To play us out here is a quote from the feminist website, FeministFatale.com who asks if the reaction to the characters isn’t based instead on our preconceptions of gender roles within life/art; “why are these women so strongly hated while the men get a pass?  Walter White’s a badass, Jesse Pinkman’s hilarious, Rick is a leader, Shane was just being honest.  But Skyler, Lori, and Marie are mean bitches and horrible mothers.”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------