Spoiler warning: If you haven’t watched the “Breaking Bad” finale yet, turn back now.
For one night, a television show that thrived because of new media options forced viewers to do something very old-fashioned: Gather around a television and watch something as it aired, commercials and all.
The only television programs that tend to draw big audiences these days are things that need to be seen as they air, and these things are almost always live events: Sports, presidential debates, breaking news, award shows. Scripted shows, by comparison, can be watched other ways. They can be recorded, they can be saved, they can be nudged to the side, with the hope that spoilers can be avoided.
But waiting to watch “Felina,” the final episode of “Breaking Bad” meant more than just hearing a spoiler. It meant missing out on the cultural conversation, one that has seemingly been all-“Bad,” all the time, as the show has rocketed toward its conclusion. It meant missing the Monday morning discussions about how the finale worked, and it meant missing the morning-after conversations that can shape the way some shows are remembered.
“The Sopranos” may have been the finest television achievement of the last two decades, but discussions about the show all seem to inevitably drift toward The Cut To Black. An underwhelming finale can make the entire experience leading up to it feel like a waste in hindsight. (Look, we’re thinking “Lost,” you’re thinking “Lost,” let’s just accept that “Lost” is the shorthand here and move on.)
Things are also different for this finale and for this show than for the final episodes of other high-profile dramas in recent years. Twitter wasn’t Twitter for “The Sopranos” (though you can only imagine what GIFs would have resulted had that show’s finale aired in 2013). “Lost,” which only went off the air three and a half years ago, felt like a show that had peaked several years earlier, as did the recently-departed “Dexter.” But “Bad” broke through as it continued, reaching its conclusion just as it was achieving its greatest artistic and commercial success.
Still, live television is no longer live, and this has been the new normal for so long it’s no longer particularly new or novel. We record, we download, we stream and we wait until we have several episodes built up before shotgunning them in one blistering sitting. One episode meted out each week seems so old-fashioned. (Our grandparents trudged in the snow for three hours each way just to sit through one episode of “All in the Family” each week, you know.)
Or, as has been the case with “Breaking Bad,” we start late, giving us several seasons to binge on. Everyone who has caught up late has their story. (For me, it was between seasons four and five, with many a lovely weekend day spent huddled indoors in front of the television.)
Yet even as we turn away from viewing television shows as they air, we live in an era of insta-analysis and are buffeted by the constant churn and roil of Twitter and other social media platforms. That made the “Bad" finale something that had to be seen so that you would follow whatever came next, so you could celebrate watching something great or commiserate when it screwed up the final act.
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