What’s with AMC’s Alliteratively Mad and Bad Men?

(Note: The following has mild spoilers for both Mad Men and Breaking Bad.  It is written with the assumption that readers are up-to-date on both shows, but does not delve deep into plot specifics of either show.)

Four years ago, AMC was known for airing B-rate movies that were only mildly intriguing.  Maybe occasionally they’d air a Clint Eastwood film or a Chuck Norris action set, but rarely was there any reason to tune to the channel.  Then, as if out of nowhere, they decided to start airing original programming, and over the course of six months in 2007 and 2008 they unveiled two shows that would soon become the best on television.

From where I sit today, Mad Men and Breaking Bad are the two best shows on television.  In fact, with Mad Men in the midst of its best season yet, and Breaking Bad having just finished one of the best seasons in (dare I say it) television history; the network is flying high and introducing even more new scripted fare such as Rubicon and the forthcoming The Walking Dead.  When it comes to the two shows, however, I believe the stories of Walter White and Donald Draper are much more similar than they might appear.

In Mad Men, the story of Don Draper is one of a man’s existential crisis.  He is a man living two lives (Draper and Whitman) and keeping one of these lives as a complete secret from his wife and family.  While he cares about his kids, he has no idea how to properly express these feelings while he struggles with dark anger issues that come from his troubled past.  Draper is an excellent ad man, but his personal life completely falls apart when his wife finds out about his secrets.

Similarly, Breaking Bad is the story of Walter White and his mid-life crisis.  White is a man living two lives (White and Heisenberg) and keeping his second life a complete secret from his wife and family.  While Walter justifies his behavior as “for his family”, the behavior continues to escalate long after the justification has diminished.  Like Draper, White also displays deep-seated anger issues that ostensibly come from his troubled relationships with his friends and business partners.  White is an excellent meth cook, but his personal life completely falls apart when his wife finds out about his secrets.

Both characters also have love-hate relationships with their protégés: Peggy Olson and Jesse Pinkman.  These protégés begin their series’ knowing just about nothing about Draper and White’s respective art forms, but over the course of months (Breaking Bad) and years (Mad Men), the two not only become excellent at advertising and cooking meth respectively, but they get to the point where they are doing the brunt of the work while their teachers are struggling with personal demons.

Olson and Pinkman are further important to Draper and White because they are pretty much the only characters that actually know personal secrets about the leading men.  Olson has learned (and accepted) more of Don’s secrets than any other person in his life (except, maybe, Anna—who is isolated from New York anyways).  Jesse too knows far more about the lengths to which Walter has fallen into the drug trade.  While Skylar might have slowly learned much of what has happened, she’ll likely never know how bad it is.

The thing that’s strange about these two men is that their secrets are what make them relatable.  To a certain degree, most people have secrets and different sides to themselves that they don’t always show, and most people also have a few close confidants who understand these secrets and their implications.  While White and Draper’s secrets are far more intense than the average person’s, their creators are also using these dual lives to make grand statements about the world that go far beyond the individual characters. 

With Mad Men, Matthew Weiner and his team are using the characters not only to bring out different aspects of Don’s personal crisis, but also to reflect the turbulent 1960s.  The changes in the times are reflected by the changes of the characters.  In Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan and his team use their characters to create a complex story of morality where the difference between right and wrong is dangerously thin and where circumstances can turn good people into killers in the blink of an eye.

Because of Weiner’s and Gilligan’s expertise, these characters that live and work in worlds so foreign to our own (drug cartels and 1960s ad agencies) have come to embody universal truths on internal and external levels.  They have taken these compelling worlds and filled them not only with compelling people and stories, but also (more importantly) with compelling ideas that will stand the test of time—and that make Breaking 
Bad and Mad Men the best that television has to offer.


Like Mad Men?  Read my Character Power Rankings for the first six episodes of this season HERE