ABQ

Shows that do cities right.

The Great American Television Dramas of the 21st Century each took on the city in their own way. “The Wire,” most famously, pieced together a Baltimore characterized by multivalency, a blown out, concrete place where nothing is discrete: all the pieces matter. “The Sopranos” deliberately swerved away from the city like Tony does in the opening credits, relocating the mob drama from its inner Manhattan, Little Italy origins to the capillaries of calm suburbia spreading out beyond, permanently removed from, and economically reliant upon a thumping New York heart.

“Mad Men” is also a New York show, and at that a suburban one, but where the drama of The Sopranos occurred in the volatile outdoors — the parkways and Pine Barrens and parking lots, and the café tables outside Satriale’s — Mad Men’s world is an insular one; exterior shots are few and far between, and the characters seem to transition from home to office to restaurant to bar without needing to venture out in to the wider world. There are no shots of skyscrapers or city lights, downtown traffic jams or subway entrances. The entire thing exists in an artificially-lit, hermetically sealed otherworld, one fitting the hyper-reality of protagonist Don Draper’s advertising trade.

In “Breaking Bad,” Albuquerque is an oasis and a mirage. The show’s hero (of sorts), Walter White, lives in a small, flat, indistinct bungalow in a neat suburbia — but it’s a suburb distinguished not by the moneyed grandeur of Tony Soprano’s neighborhood, but in the modest ambition of the American 20th Century pioneer that even a high school teacher should be able to carve out his own free-standing, self-contained refuge from the hurley burley of city life. Walt’s partner-in-crime, Jesse Pinkman, at first lives even farther removed from the urban and the natural environments surrounding him; his neighborhood is characterized by verdant lawns and lush foliage, a pocket of every-America in a mountainous desert state.

The Western was about the arrival of civilization to the frontier, but Breaking Bad is a post-Western; it narrates the return of the savage. The brusque desert is never far from Walt and Jesse’s subdued suburbia; it’s where they cook the meth that makes them rich, in a dilapidated recreational vehicle parked in the flat, alien wasteland off I-40, the trail connecting Albuquerque to the wider Southwest. The scenes shot out here, far from the moderate residential regions, are blankly beautiful: flat yellow prairie, blue sky, and, every now and then, a stretch of red mountain in the distance; a furnace, a cauldron, a place to cook.

The crystal meth they produce out in that moonscape comes back to Albuquerque, and so does the desert. The city can’t keep it out. Walt’s home is decorated in warm earthtones: golds and browns, offset — like the sky above the desert — with brilliant blues. Walt’s brother-in-law Hank, the DEA agent, is even closer to the desert, just like he’s (as far as most people know) even closer to the drug trade: Hank lives in an adobe home, that Southwestern style patterned after the pueblo constructions of the region’s Native Americans. High on a mountain, he looks out over the city, and the desert in which it sits — and where Walt cooks.

The drugs Walt cooks are sold in small pockets of a city where everything is fractured. Albuquerque is a town of crystals — yes, pun intended. In The Wire, everything is linked to something; in Breaking Bad, everywhere is nowhere. A gas station, a seedy motel, a franchise of a fast food chicken chain, a vacant lot, a junkyard, a strip mall legal firm’s storefront, the wide empty streets connecting them: all united only in that all are dissociated. Even Albuquerque’s downtown is squat and modest; the most prominent scenes here take place in the anonymity of a federal government building.

In Breaking Bad, Albuquerque is a city whose triumph is its ordinariness, and its existential threat is the blank amorality of the desert creeping back into town.