Breaking Bad

Walter White (Bryan Cranston), after discovering he has lung cancer, wants to make sure that his family is taken care of after he dies. What better way for a high school chemistry professor to do so then to start making meth. Both Walter and his student partner Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) began this somewhat ignorantly innocent venture in season one which has taken them down a slippery slope of murder and neglect to this season where Walter realizes he can’t be the bad guy and Jesse, that he IS the bad guy.

Breaking Bad has won several awards including Emmy Wins for both Cranston and Paul for Lead Actor and Supporting Actor, respectively. The show, which costs a whopping three million per episode, has been renewed for a fourth season where 13 all new episodes will continue the story of Walter White and his slow decline into the drug world.

QUALITY:
I was surprised because usually television shows that make it to the BD format usually sport a 1080i picture quality, which is sometimes between nearly 1080p and not that great (depending), but Breaking Bad sports a true 1080p picture and its looks absolutely gorgeous. Mind you the scenes that are depicted as being shot in Mexico (actually New Mexico) do have a slight off color look about them but is due to and is supposed to look like the sunny deserts of Mexico. Outside of this the picture is so clear, just about every aspect of picture has an organic vibrant flare to them, and clarity is dead on. My only real complaint is a few scattered moments of grain in some slightly dark interior scenes. Other then that you will be amazed at how mind blowing this picture is. Audio? Absolutely perfect. Immersion is as best as it can be for a dialogue driven show. Traffic and other ambient sounds work well here and in every other aspect of what I would consider a perfect audio mix Breaking Bad exceeds.

BONUS FEATURES:
Without a doubt some people will be on the fence about the menu set up for Breaking Bad. If you select individual episodes you get a play feature and you get that episodes deleted scenes. That’s pretty cool, but when you select special features from the main menu you can’t access deleted scenes from here which means you have to continually access each individual episode for their deleted scene content. If you press Play All Episodes you negate the deleted scenes completely and have to go back through each individual episode to gain access to their deleted scenes. Sounds like a bit of work right? Also when you press Special Features in the main menu you get ALL of the special features listed, however, when you try to click on certain special features your instructed to put in a different disc which contains said special features. Kind of makes that feature option moot and since there is nowhere on the case or artwork that would suggest this is how the bonus features section works let this be warning that if you intend on watching them don’t get snug in your recliner because you’ll have to get up to switch out the discs for all bonus feature content.  

Okay that’s the somewhat bad news about the bonus feature stuff. The good news is that for bonus features your going to be buried by the amount that is included in the set. Over ten hours of bonus footage makes for a lot of supplemental material watching from Deleted Scenes to Gag Reel, to behind the scenes on everything from episodes, music, and more. Plus there is commentary featured on select tracks to help you navigate Breaking Bad and its sometimes cryptic storytelling platform. So, despite how you may look at the menu options for the disc Sony has really left no rock unturned for you so kudo’s for that. As always final judgment is yours. Enjoy.