Breaking Bad might have looked a lot more comical and a lot less serious with Edgar Wright directing, and the spoofs probably would have been off the charts. Is that a bad thing though? Only if you were already expecting the kind of show we did manage to get I suppose. There were a few dark, comedic moments in the show but they were so few and far between that they were kind of surprising when they came around. Breaking Bad was for the most part a very serious and edgy show that didn’t really pull punches and was all about the gradual descent of a hard-working family man and his degenerate accomplice into a world of drugs, deceit, and eventual madness that consumed anyone it touched.
Putting funny tones and spoofs into something like that might have been kind of interesting but it wouldn’t have been the same show. That’s the trick though isn’t it? You try to add something that doesn’t feel like it fits and a lot of times it comes out in a way you didn’t expect, be it good or bad. Making this show in the style of Baby Driver however seems like it would have diminished what Jesse and Walt were doing from the get-go and would have possibly reduced it to a bumbling enterprise that just happened to have made a lot of people relevant for very silly reasons. I mean don’t forget that this is the guy that directed Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and the like. He’s obviously very capable at what he does and makes a good movie. He doesn’t even focus primarily on comedy since the two pictures mentioned in the line above are funny but still dark in many ways.
But for Breaking Bad the humor didn’t have to be just dark, it had to be blacker than midnight during a new moon with massive cloud cover. The humor in the show was so random and off beat when it came that anything Edgar Wright could have done would have changed the entire landscape of the show. Granted, if it would have started out in this manner then it would likely have been kind of awesome, but looking at it now the show might not have been quite as popular as it became.
After all Breaking Bad was known for its edgy and dangerous style. It was meant to be something that made you sit up in your seat with wide eyes and wonder just how they were allowed to show and do the kind of things they did. Then you realized that AMC, particularly later in the evening, manages to get away with a lot of stuff that daytime TV can’t possibly do. That was part of what made Breaking Bad so special and so loved. It was the edge that people wanted and the type of series that gave away just enough hints per episode to make it continually interesting.
Edgar Wright could have made it interesting, but it wouldn’t have been the same.
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