Do you want to know how to make a truly great drama? Well, to quote a man who once accidentally ran to Windsor, ‘the secret ingredient is crime’.
Yeah, I know heartbreaking stories of divorce can be sad, we’re all partial to a bit of romance now and again, and who doesn’t love a spy thriller, but all of these genres can be improved by crime.
Don’t believe me? Well, just look at the three shows regularly named the best in the history of television – The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad.
What do all three have in common?
They’re all about bad men (and occasionally women … but mostly men now that I think about it) doing bad things.
Of this triumvirate of transgressive TV, my favourite is probably Breaking Bad, in large part thanks to its greatest ever episode, which aired 12 years ago today.
I’m writing, of course, about Ozymandias, the fourteenth episode of Breaking Bad’s fifth and final season.
This mind-blowing episode saw Walter White (Bryan Cranston) finally get his comeuppance as his grand schemes are brought to ruin by the combined efforts of his brother-in-law Hank (Dean Norris) and the neo-Nazis he foolishly partnered with (Rule number one: never trust a Nazi).
This is no triumphant and cathartic fall from grace where we get to revel in the bad guy’s downfall.
It’s a tragedy where Walt loses everything he’s been working towards.
His fortune is stolen, he’s ripped from the heart of his family, and worst of all, there’s no road back for him.
It’s genuinely a sensational chapter in Walt’s transformation from Mr Chips to Scarface.
Now gallons of digital ink have been spilt by journalists and critics gushing about this episode.
Even the biggest contrarian in a country solely inhabited by contrarians (I think it would be called Contraria) would struggle to find a flaw in Ozymandias.
Indeed, it remains the only Breaking Bad episode to have an IMDb aggregate rating of 10/10, and it regularly tops lists of the best TV episodes ever.
What makes it so special? Well, critics and academics love everything about it, from its tragic twist, the acting, and the clever literary reference it makes to a once-great pharaoh brought low.
Yet, if you were to ask me what makes this such a special episode, it’s that in a regular series, Ozymandias would be the grand finale.
A final disastrous chapter where Walt ran out of road, and the audience was taught some tawdry lesson about ‘drugs being bad’ and ‘crime never paying’.
But Breaking Bad is better than that because Ozymandias isn’t the story of how Walter White lost it all. It’s about the death and ruin of his criminal alter-ego, Heisenberg.
You see, throughout the fifth season of Breaking Bad, Walter White’s civilian identity had been completely subsumed by his criminal persona, Heisenberg.
Walt had gone from a kind man, willing to sacrifice his own morality for his family, to a ruthless kingpin obsessed with money and power. He’d lost himself and with it the audience’s sympathy.
Ozymandias then serves to destroy the Heisenberg persona, allowing Walt to reemerge in the final episodes, not quite as a hero but as a man we can sympathise with.
Without this brutal chapter, the final two episodes would have felt hollow and empty.
Like the Neo Nazi’s attempts to replicate Walt’s blue meth, they’d have offered an inferior, empty buzz instead of the cathartic high we’d become addicted to.
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