Home / General / “Bad history, bad ethics, and bad TV criticism in one nauseating little package.”

“Bad history, bad ethics, and bad TV criticism in one nauseating little package.”

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The opening paragraphs of Anna Breslaw’s…we’ll call it a “review” of Breaking Bad are so jaw-droppingly inhumane, historically erroneous and offensive it’s hard to imagine any criticism astute enough to redeem them.     But what further damns them is that her transparent misreading of Breaking Bad seems to have been generated by her bizarre internalization of anti-Semitic myths about Holocaust survivors, rather than vice versa.   As Lindsay says, the idea that Walt is someone who will do anything to survive and “breaks bad” because of the chemo is completely wrong.   He “breaks bad” because he assumes he’s going to die, and after that his meth business takes on a logic of its own that has very little to do with survival per se.   He reluctantly agrees to undergo chemo so he can “get his family off his back” and preserve the business.  Evidently, this misreading is of trivial importance, but somehow all of the appalling nonsense about “Judenscheisse” is made even worse by the fact that it’s also a non-sequitur.

This is case where I almost blame the editors more than the author.   Leaving aside the inept would-be TV criticism, how could any editor of a magazine (let alone one devoted to Jewish news and culture!) not look at those opening paragraphs and push “reject?”  If you can’t read the draft and tell Breslaw to try again (or, better yet, don’t), what are you getting paid for?  Speaking of non-sequiturs, the defenses offered by Tablet‘s editors do what they can to make things worse.

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