Breaking Bad is at the moment my favorite television series. It’s about Walter White a high school chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. To secure his family's financial future he started producing and selling methamphetamine with his former student Jesse Pinkman.Despite the series black humor it’s at a first look not much about ruins. But at a second it’s much about decay, about the ruin of the American middle-class, struggling in vain to maintain the status, without a secure future and without a good health-insurance.
This pivotal topic is reflected by the impressive beauty of the images of abandoned parking lots, decaying buildings and behind all a vast western style landscape. Above all because of the images Breaking Bad is also a profoundly romantic series, confronting human decay with the beauty of nature.
And last not least there is Saul Goodman Walt and Jesse's criminal lawyer. Above his shabby office there is flapping a trashy Lady Liberty, in this form a well known symbol of American decay.
