Episode 01: Pilot

"Pilot" (titled "Breaking Bad" on DVD and Blu-ray releases) is the series premiere of the American television crime drama series Breaking Bad. The episode was directed and written by series creator and showrunner Vince Gilligan. It first aired on AMC on January 20, 2008.

Episode 01: Pilot

In the episode, chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Keeping it a secret from his pregnant wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) and their teenage son Walter Jr. (RJ Mitte), he decides that he wants to spend his last years saving money for his family. After going on a drug bust with his brother-in-law and DEA agent Hank Schrader (Dean Norris), Walt spots his former student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) and later blackmails him into helping him cook methamphetamine in an RV.

In its initial airing, the pilot received mostly positive reviews from critics, who praised Gilligan for his script and Cranston for his performance. At the 60th Primetime Emmy Awards, the episode received various nominations, with Cranston winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and Gilligan earning a nomination for Outstanding Directing.

Gilligan cast Bryan Cranston for the role of Walter White based on having worked with him in "Drive", an episode of the sixth season of the science fiction television series The X-Files, where Gilligan worked as a writer. Cranston played an anti-Semite with a terminal illness who took Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) hostage. Gilligan said the character had to be simultaneously loathsome and sympathetic, and that only Cranston could play the part.[6][7] AMC officials were wary of casting Cranston, due to him being mostly known for his comedic role as Hal on the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle, and offered the role to John Cusack and Matthew Broderick, who both turned it down.[8] After seeing Cranston in the X-Files episode, the executives were convinced to cast him.[9] For his role, Cranston met frequently with a chemistry teacher to learn about the subject, gained fifteen pounds to reflect the character's personal decline, and had his hair dyed brown to mask his natural red highlights.[10][11]

The script was originally set in Riverside, California, but at the suggestion of Sony, which was producing the pilot, Albuquerque was chosen for production due to the favorable financial conditions offered by the state of New Mexico.[17][18] Filming for the episode began on March 6, 2007, concluding after several weeks on March 21.[19][20]

In 2013, Gilligan recalled the viewership for the episode being below a million viewers due to a football game that aired at the same time.[27] However, The Hollywood Reporter revealed later in the same year that the pilot had been watched by 1.41 million people instead.[28]

The episode then cements its mastery of its own visual motifs by repeating the hallway bathed in green light; only now Mildred Ratched is Nurse Ratched, wearing the blue uniform of the hospital and bathed in the green of sin.

Especially since the bar got set pretty high in the premiere. So now each episode, due to the characters being kind of meh, has to compete against the last one to try to come up with realistic, yet still outrageous, situations to draw your attention.

Or, one a more pessimistic note, it could very well be that Murphy and Falchuk are good at ideas, big openings, but maintaining that ante for a full season, whether that is 10-12 episodes or 20+, is a struggle. Which, as someone who has watched a good amount of their productions since Glee, I honestly feel one of the two are the case and that is what makes me fear for the future of 9-1-1. It is rare for their shows to get better over time, if anything, they are always chasing that pop the first episode, or first season, had.

The show lasted just one 13-episode season, and never gained the sort of rabid fan following of other one-season wonders like Firefly. What was the problem? Looking back from the summer of 2016, one can't help but assume it was a show before its time.

Was Birds of Prey a good show that hit at the wrong time, or was it really a bad show that only deserved 13 episodes? We're going to find out with Bird Watching, a look back at every episode of the series. Your bird watchers are Caleb Mozzocco, long-time ComicsAlliance contributor and a guy with a longbox full of Birds of Prey comics, and Meredith Tomeo, a librarian who specializes in media, an experienced watcher of superhero television, and a Barbara Gordon fan (Babs being a sort of patron superhero of librarians, after all).

The pilot episode introduces us to New Gotham's cape-less crusaders Oracle and The Huntress, a blonde teenage metahuman named Dinah, apparently freelance bulter Alfred Pennyworth, a couple of romantic interests, and a suspicious mental health professional. Our heroes become embroiled in a triple murder plot involving real estate developers coincidentally committing suicide. This episode originally aired on October 9, 2002 and was directed by Brian Robbins and written by series creator Laeta Kalogridis.

The Birds of Prey premiere was a hit for the WB, bringing in 7.6 million viewers and, at the time, managing to attract the WB's largest audience in the 18-34 demographic. But with steadily declining ratings in the following weeks, the WB gave it the axe after 13 episodes.

I was genuinely surprised to see things like Batman, The Joker, Catwoman and Batgirl on-screen at all, even if only in snippets of flashbacks. It really made me wonder why Gotham is Gotham and not, like, an adaptation of Gotham Central, with special guest-villains in particular episodes, and some combination of a stuntman and voice actor playing Batman for a few seconds at a time, as needed.

Was Birds of Prey a good show that hit at the wrong time, or was it really a bad show that only deserved 13 episodes? We're going to find out with Bird Watching, a look back at every episode of the series. Your bird watchers are Caleb Mozzocco, long-time ComicsAlliance contributor and a guy with a longbox full of Birds of Prey comics, and Meredith Tomeo, a librarian who specializes in media, an experienced watcher of superhero television, and a Barbara Gordon fan (Babs being a sort of patron superhero of librarians, after all).\nRead More 041b061a72