Fourmost

Fascinating essay from Chuck Klosterman on why Breaking Bad is the best TV show of the last decade.  He starts noting everyone agrees what the top four shows are:

there doesn't seem to be much debate over what have been the four best television shows of the past 10 years. [....] The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and [...] Breaking Bad. [....] Taste is subjective, but the critical consensus surrounding these four dramas is so widespread that it feels like an objective truth; it's become so accepted that this entire paragraph is a remarkably mundane argument to make in public. I'm basically writing, "The greatness of these great shows is defined by their greatness."

I agree it's hard to top those four.  Though I'd throw in Lost, despite its last season, and Battlestar Galactica and House aren't that far behind.  I'm also ignoring sitcoms, which are a different game, though Klosterman doesn't exclude them. (I like how Klosterman criticizes Wire fans for being so obnoxious about the greatness of their show.)

Klosterman puts Breaking Bad at the top because it's the only one where a character actually goes through a moral arc, and consciously decides to do wrong.  The other shows allow the viewer a distance, since the time and place the characters find themselves in help define them.  But in Breaking Bad--and this wasn't obvious at first--characters create their own moral destiny.  And we start by identifying with Walt, and even as he sinks in deeper and deeper, we still (so far, I think) take his side. (This is actually an old dramatic trick--creating a sympathetic character who starts doing really nasty things.  Euripides did it all the time.)

I'm not sure if this is a good enough reason to put the show on top, but it does make it different.  It's true we tend to identify with Tony Soprano, but from the first episode he's a mobster and we have to accept that.

Actually, each of these shows sticks out in its own way.  Mad Men is different because the other three deal with organized crime and contain lots of violence.  The Wire has the widest view of society, each season including a little more of what Baltimore is about.  The Sopranos (which was the biggest cultural phenomenon of the four) has the "glamor" of the mafia.  But Breaking Bad might be the most different of the four in that, good or bad, it's the most concentrated.  All the other shows have much bigger casts and many more themes, but Breaking Bad is about one man making one decision that creates a very different world for himself and those around him.

Is it the best of those four?  I don't know.  But when I'm watching it, I think it is.