The end of TV

Summer is almost here and production has officially wrapped on two of the best if not the best two tv series around. Breaking Bad Season 5 Part II and Dexter Season 8 commence in but a few months and it’s just about time to get all hyped for the end. If you haven’t seen either one of these amazing shows now’s the time to begin because once the final episode has aired, you can bet the shows are gonna be spoiled for you. So the end begins a bit sooner for tv’s favorite serial killer, Dexter’s first episode of season 8 begins June 30th with Breaking Bad’s episode 9 of Season 5 airing August 11th.  

Dividing the show’s final season in 2 is kind of a cheap trick of making each of the two real final seasons a little bit shorter. Each of the “parts” consists of 8 episodes, with the original full seasons, except for season 1 which also had 8 episodes due to the writer’s strike of 2007-08, consisting of 12 episodes. The “first half” of season 5 was, for me, one of the weakest seasons breaking bad had to offer, with the exception of the teaser at the beginning of episode 1 and , of course, episode 8. Hopefully all the good stuff has been saved up for the end. I always had this feeling that Breaking Bad introduced a lot of it’s characters without knowing how far they’re gonna last, after all, the show’s creator Vince Gilligan mentioned that supporting character Jesse Pinkman was supposed to die in the first season. The first time Gus Fring was introduced i don’t think they set out to create this giant foe for main character Walter White, or when they introduced Sal the lawyer, i don’t think they wrote him as a character that would have an importance in the series until the very end, but nevertheless, it worked. It’s one of the few shows where ‘winging it’ actually delivered a great series, unlike the epic failures of Prison Break and Lost’s endings, another of the two greatest shows of the last decade. 

Dexter’s last few seasons have kept up with the series’ standard and although the way the show ends is kind of predictable at this point, i think they’ve done a good job at leaving fans hungry up until season 7. Last season definitely wasn’t Dexter’s weakest but the character has seen so many troubles that the whole of his story is beginning to feel implausible. The best of Dexter can be seen in season 4, the ending of which, had the series ended, i believe would have left the fans satisfied. I think it will be very hard to beat that ending, but we’ll have to see. Dexter is one of the few tv-series that has never gotten boring. Although it featured a bit of the old CSI bug with the ‘case per episode’, the overall story arc of each season always was worth it and with a run-time of around 50 minutes, there was always time for character development. 

I think that’s what makes these two shows the best, with Breaking Bad arguably the king of TV Dramas, the characters continued to evolve until the very end, you will never feel whilst following these series’ protagonists that you know them 100%, there’s always a little more to find out about them and i can’t wait to have the full picture regarding the best written characters in tv history beginning this summer. The best summer in tv history, hopefully.