Breaking Not-Very-Good-At-All, Really.

 There are, I admit, a phole plethora of cultural phenomena that have passed me by.

 Ten years down the line, and I still can't Cha-Cha Slide. I don't have a tribal tattoo, or any other kind of ink. I never owned an iPod, and only ended up with an iPhone by accident. I've never Skyped anyone.

 All of this is pretty minimal stuff, though. I mean, none of it really makes much difference in my day-to-day life. It's like me not being into "Hannah Montana." There's no real reason why I should have been, it was clearly for people with whom I shared little cultural ground, and nobody is getting irate about my not being a fan.

 Then there are other, epochal moments in pop culture that left me cold, but seem to have excited the humours of basically everyone I know.

 I'm thinking, primarily, about "Breaking Bad."

 I'm already on record a few times as saying that I don't like it. But with fandom reaching hysterical fever-pitch over the last few episodes, I feel more alienated than ever, and I guess I need to examine just why I don't like what is, I'm assured, the greatest thing put on TV, ever. (It isn't.)

 Breaking Bad tells the story of Walter White, a gifted chemist who has ended up slumming as a high-school science teacher. Upon finding out that he has lung cancer, White decides to use his abilities as a chemist to cook crystal meth, and as such make enough money to support his family after his death. He enlists the help of a former pupil, drug-addled loser Jesse, and finds the whole situation complicated by the fact that his brother-in-law is a cop.

 That's a pretty good setup for a show, I admit.

 The trouble, for me, was that it stayed a setup pretty much forever.

 The pace of the show is absolutely glacial. The whole central premise - will Walt get away with it?! - is necessarily samey. If he gets caught, the show is over. Or would at least have to invest in some new sets and show how he is forced to adapt to prison life which, just by the way, would have been far more interesting.

 Instead, the series has always been about Walter White not being outed as a meth dealer. Maintaining a secret identity for this long is only fun for the audience if your alter-ego wears a big red cape.

 Walt's character arc, meanwhile, is nowhere near as interesting as people think. It's basically just Michael Corleone all over again; a good man who turns to crime to try to do the right thing by his family and ends up becoming so corrupted by his own power that he loses everything, and ends up a rich, powerful monster, feared, respected, and utterly unloved.

 That whole arc, incidentally, takes about six-and-a-half hours on screen in the Godfather movies. Breaking Bad took five SERIES to tell the same story. The Godfather also managed to tell stories about other people, something of which Breaking Bad seems singularly incapable.

 Walter White is an interesting and complicated protagonist - albeit a humourless one - but every other character feels flat and dull to me. His wife is far too uptight to be relatable, horrified at the thought of marijuana in early episodes. Her transformation into willing accomplice in later episodes rings hollow as a result. Compare her to Lorraine Braco's character in "Goodfellas," at once appalled and aroused by her husband's violent pistol-whipping of a man in the street, to see a more believable criminal spouse.

 Jesse Pinkman, Walt's stoner sidekick, was a whining annoyance at first, and as the series wore on, was given "depth" by becoming a depressed, whining annoyance, ie: one with extra whining. Walt's brother-in-law Hank was far too much of a comedy fat guy to be taken seriously as a threat, and in episodes where he actually got his hands dirty and killed people in the line of duty, he immediately became traumatised and sank into PTSD until everyone forgot that he'd done anything interesting.

 The fact that I'm identifying all characters in relation to Walter White, incidentally, should be evidence that everyone is just a cardboard cutout to furnish Bryan Cranston's admittedly impressive descent into Faustian torment as Walt slowly becomes a genuine bad guy. The whole Cranston-centric nature of Breaking Bad has served to make it predictable, in my eyes. Of course, as Walt travels deeper into a Hell of his own making, he's going to kill off the other drug dealers. Why? Because he's so relentlessly the main character that there's never a chance of him getting caught or dying. The show would collapse. And so we watch him climbing the ladder inexorably as he becomes a major villain.

 Even here, though, the series does nothing for me. The fact that Walt and Jesse are so clearly not real hard-assed gangsters is just frustrating. When compared to the brutality of the cast of, say, "The Sopranos," Breaking Bad's characters feel like amateurs; boys playing war. This is never going to excite me as a premise - watch a bunch of wannabe criminals struggle to succeed - unless you pitch it as a comedy, and BB's already noted humourlessness is one of its biggest flaws, for me.

 Now, as the final episodes get around to actually doing something, and show the flop on cards that were dealt five long, drawn out years ago, I can't help but wonder why I feel like the little boy who knows the emperor has no clothes. It's taken THIS LONG for Walt's brother-in-law to work out that he's a drug dealer?! That's not just drawing something out; that's stretching it until it snaps and then twiddling with the ends for another two series.

 I'm painfully aware that this is all my own opinion. I know many people who will sing the praises of the show in unison for the rest of their lives, like a celestial choir, exalting the endless virtue of what Father Ted writer Graham Linehan described as a show so good it made him proud just to be a part of the same industry.

 I know I'm in a tiny minority of people who don't like it. I also freely admit that I dropped out of the show mid-way through series 3, when I realised I'd watched two series and still wasn't enjoying it. Any information I've gleaned since then has been down to occasional Wikipedia checks to see if the show had done anything interesting yet - which it hadn't, except to kill off obviously doomed supporting characters.

 Still, in my lonely, iconoclast opinion, Breaking Bad just isn't worth getting excited about.

 Let the flaming begin.