Breaking Bad’s Crowded Fandom
There is a lot of media participation media about Breaking Bad and its related franchises, Better Call Saul and I guess El Camino is here, too, I suppose. This makes sense — Breaking Bad is a tall series with a long shadow, an influence on the culture around me that makes it perfect for people who like to talk about media to talk about it. It’s not just that Breaking Bad has become a spreading puffball of memes that land on every surface around it — I Am The One Who Knocks — but it’s also got its own subcultural bubble of hack media studies memes — this is the point where Walter White truly became Breaking Bad.
It’s something that means every time I’ve wanted to talk about any of these properties, I only did it if it was literally the most convenient thing. That’s why I wound up talking about El Camino a while back. It was the only thing I’d seen recently that fit the theme. That was a rumination on the same general idea — that Breaking Bad is kind of a crowded space to talk about.
