July 4, 2013 – Michigan Quarterly Review

July 4, 2013

The Best Show in the World

* Claire Skinner *

Last fall, I became obsessed with AMC’s show Breaking Bad. It was like developing a crush. Slow at first, then a headlong swoon. I found myself sidling out of social events earlier than usual, claiming that I needed to get some sleep. But instead of sleeping, I’d flop myself on the sofa and watch Walter White, the conflicted main character, cook meth in a trailer parked somewhere in the endless New Mexico desert. I’d watch episode after episode, each one as acidic and delicious as the strawberries I popped in mouth, cold and wet from the refrigerator.

Thirteen Ways of Talking About a Volcano

I recall standing on a platform before a television set, which was shrouded in funereal black cloth, and which played on loop a talk given by a grave white-haired scientist in a lab coat. The screen was grainy in a way I discerned to be fake: each trawling black worm was evenly sized, evenly spaced on the screen. The actor playing the scientist would cough when the screen broke up, due to an untimely earthquake disrupting the calm of his lab; the cough gave him away as an actor. My suspicion that the scientist was an actor made the film in which he appeared no less terrifying to me, a sensitive child, a nervous child.

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