Checking in With… is a regular column which features a Spinoff writer watching one or more episodes of a current show and attempting to decode its appeal. This week, we previewed Better Call Saul, arriving exclusively to Lightbox at 8pm on Monday 9th February. // Episodes Consumed: 1 What’s it about? Set in the same … Read more
Alex Casey assembles a car boot full of internet ammunition to defend Skyler White against the haters to the bitter end. // “I’m a bitch, I’m a lover. I’m a child, I’m a mother. I’m a sinner, I’m a saint. I do not feel ashamed” – Meredith Brooks and Skyler White, probably. There are a lot of … Read more
Breaking Bad is one of the most acclaimed television shows of the century – of course you love it. But Joseph Nunweek strongly recommends you avoid interacting with your fellow fans. // Our hero is bald, save for a goatee that would seem ridiculous were the stakes not so high. He dresses like he’s a would-be kingpin – … Read more
Part of what made Breaking Bad work was a thread of plausibility amongst the violence. We spoke with a fan and former drug squad cop to test the show’s realism. // For 13 years, starting in 1993, Dale Kirk roved the Waikato, catching crooks. He started as a beat cop, then joined serious crime unit the CIB in 1999, just … Read more
In this special Bad edition of Throwback Thursday, Joseph Harper looks back at Bob ‘Saul’ Odenkirk’s alternative comedy career. // Before he joined the cast of Breaking Bad as unscrupulous attorney Saul Goodman, Bob Odenkirk carved himself out a broad and varied career in the alternative undercurrents of American comedy. Stints with Second City, Saturday Night Live, … Read more
Alex Casey heads down to The Spinoff lab to mix up a beaker of piping hot Breaking Bad stats. Some of them are made up, most of them are realer than a meth head squashed by an ATM. // There are loads of good infographics out there about Breaking Bad. Want to see a colourising chart of … Read more
For years Joseph Harper has been nurturing an obstinate theory: HBO’s mostly unwatched comedy Eastbound and Down is essentially the same show as Breaking Bad, only a whole lot better. 2013 was a big year on the telly. It saw in the end of one of my favourite shows to ever drag its way onto a television screen. … Read more
Breaking Bad is acclaimed for delivering heart-stopping drama, spectacular violence and television’s most infamous anti-hero. Alex Casey, however, wishes to applaud a less critically-indulged area of the Breaking Bad universe: the wondrous food of Middle America. I have a deep interest in food. I want to know what everyone is eating all the time. I … Read more
The New Zealand Initiative’s Head of Research Eric Crampton breaks down the depressing drug market economics which drive Walter White to murder and mayhem. // The most successful anti-methamphetamine campaign ever run in the United States came in 1995, resulting in a short-run tripling of the price of meth and a drop in purity from 90% … Read more
Alex Casey sifts through the mighty body count of Breaking Bad to rank her top ten most memorable deaths on the show. // The statistics of Breaking Bad are always impressive – it received 110 notable awards, had 10.3 million Americans tune in for the finale and over 33,000 articles written about it in the … Read more
Before Breaking Bad, the world’s sharpest look at the scourge of methamphetamine was written by Deja Voodoo. Ten years on, songwriter Matt Heath recalls the fallout from their hit single ‘P’. ‘I smoke P and I’m alright’. It’s the first line of the fourth single from Deja Voodoo’s debut album Brown Sabbath. We wrote the … Read more