So you’ve finished watching Breaking Bad, and you’re feeling a little bit…restless. What TV series should you embark on next?
Well, we’ve already written about a couple great SF/F series that you should absolutely get started on if you haven’t already—but today I’m going to be talking specifically about what I’m calling “post-Breaking Bad palate cleansers.”
See, Breaking Bad is—was, I suppose—a fantastic show, perhaps one of the best in television history. But wasn’t it a little…bleak? I don’t know about you, but after this past season’s parade of death and despair, I need something a little upbeat to balance out my worldview before moving on.
Well, I’ve got a couple suggestions, two series that constitute, each in their own way, Breaking Bad’s polar opposite. Whereas Breaking Bad focused on a male antihero, a bad man doing very bad things, these two shows focus on female protagonists on a very different path—the struggle to be good, to live a decent life in a topsy-turvy world.
#1: Parks and Recreation (NBC)
Parks and Recreation is on this list because it’s just as cheerful as Breaking Bad is bleak. If Breaking Bad focuses on bad people doing bad things to each other, Parks and Rec focuses on nice people doing nice things for each other.
That makes the show sound hokey, but if you’ve seen it, you know it’s not. From a rocky first season in which it was trying to be The Office-lite, it’s grown into one of the best comedy shows on TV.
At the center of Parks and Rec is the great Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope, the head of the parks department of Pawnee, Indiana. The obvious choice with such subject matter would be to satirize bureaucratic dysfunction and middle America hayseeds. But with Leslie at the center of the show, Parks and Rec does something different and more interesting. You see, Leslie is an idealist, a person who really believes in the power of government to improve people’s lives, and who believes that most people are good at heart. With a main character like that, it’s nearly impossible for Parks and Rec to be a cynical or nasty show.
What it is instead is a genuinely kind comedy that somehow avoids sentimentality. The cast of characters—Leslie, Ron, Andy, April, Tom, Ann, and others—are just simple people who are trying to do some good in the world, to fulfill their potential, and to keep their idealism. But in a world of soulless corporations and institutional intertia, it’s not always easy. Especially when you keep getting Jammed.
#2: Enlightened (HBO)
I don’t know you or your TV viewing habits, but I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that Enlightened is the best show that you—and everyone else, sadly—never watched. It was unceremoniously cancelled after two truly glorious seasons, but luckily that’s all Mike White and Laura Dern needed to tell a truly wonderful and I think essential story about the difficulty of living a good life in this messed-up world.
Enlightened concerns Amy Jellicoe (Dern), a middle manager at Abaddon, a mega health and wellness conglomerate. (Abaddon is also a term used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to destruction, death, and the devil—an evocation that will become increasingly appropriate as the series wears on.)
The pilot opens with Amy in the midst of a crisis, a nervous breakdown brought on by her affair with a coworker, a man who betrayed her and denied her a crucial promotion. She leaves Abaddon and goes to a recovery center, where she has a near-religious experience involving a sea turtle that seems, at the moment, to be an incarnation of God—then returns to her old life a new person, with new ideals involving peace, love, and a mystical oneness with all things.
But what happens after a conversion experience like that? What happens to Amy’s ideals when she returns to her unglamorous, difficult life? Can she maintain the change that she underwent at the recovery center in the real world?
Breaking Bad famously focused on the theme of change—the change of one chemical element to another, but also its main character’s change from someone good to someone very, very bad. Enlightened focuses on a different kind of change—Amy’s desire to change for the better, and to be an agent of change in the world.
Enlightened is, in some respects, an extended meditation on Hannah Arendt’s notion that “only the Good can have depth and be radical.” There’s a certain monstrous fascination to watching someone like Walter White break bad, but in Enlightened, it’s the struggle to be good, to live a good life against all the forces to the contrary, that is truly fascinating, that involves true bravery and struggle. It’s easy to have a spiritual awakening on a beach in Hawaii—but it’s a little more difficult to live a good life when you’re an adult still living at your mom’s house, when you’re still so angry at your ex, when your boss is a jerk, your coworkers losers, and the company you work for completely evil.
Enlightened is a mere 18 half-hour episodes of comedy, drama, and insight. Many of them directed by such luminaries as Jonathan Demme, Nicole Holofcener, and of course, Mike White. If that doesn’t convince you to watch it, perhaps this pitch-perfect sequence from the pilot, in which Amy’s simple routine of getting up and going to work in the morning becomes a near-religious act of hope and spiritual transcendence, will. (The Regina Spektor track doesn’t hurt either.)
So there you go: two suggestions for something to watch now that Breaking Bad is done. And if they happen to restore your faith in humanity in the process—well, why not?
