Breaking Bad comes to an end tomorrow. In the UK we haven’t been able to watch the show on a regular broadcast channel for years, since series 2 was on Channel 5 on a daily basis over a Christmas holiday. The same happened to Mad Men, which moved to Sky, which isn’t worth having, so you have to wait for the boxed set, or make do with Elizabeth Moss in Jane Campion’s very so-so New Zealand new age/redneck thriller on BBC2, and Mad Men was never as good after Don D left his wife and daughter. After the pilot of BB I remember thinking, how are they going to keep this up: the concept of a meek high-school chemistry teacher who gets diagnosed with cancer and goes into drug dealing to provide a pension for his family after he has gone . . . They kept it up by making the supporting characters more interesting than the main guy and paying real attention to the sub-plotting. Other good things about BB: the clear light of the desert locations; the proximity of the Mexican border, which lets it get very Peckinpah from time to time; the detailed organisation of crime via legitimate fronts (BB does great laundry as well as being a manual on how to go into the drugs business, should you wish); the fact that it is shot on 35mm; sustained panic attacks; really good heavies. Of course UK TV executives want an English BB, just like last year they wanted Danish noir. Actually, they wouldn’t know what to do with it if they got it because what we do “best” is camp heritage (Downton, Marple, Poirot, Dr Who) or comedy, which is so exportable that more or less any comedian with a show to his name can get a gig in Hollywood (Brand, Gervais, Coogan, Simon Pegg). I like BB, but am not so interested in the main character or his domestic set up (let’s go cook some meth), although the actress who plays the wife is wholly watchable, as are the psychotic sidekick kid, the crooked lawyer and the grizzled hard guy, whose weary understatement is one of the finest things around. BB is better than The Wire but still not as good as The Shield. You can watch Breaking Bad on Netflix. I just took out a free month’s trial.