Humanizing drug culture?

[linguist]

Breaking Bad and Weeds try to justify drug dealing to better the lives of the protagonists' families.

no they don't. weeds...well, nancy's always been a bit sociopathic, and that itself has it a pretty detrimental effect on her family, but it's a comedy, and everything is played for laughs.

as for breaking bad, the whole show is about more about the effect that being involved with drug culture has on walt and his family. he starts off as a pretty decent guy in a shitty circumstance who does what he feels he has to, but his series of bad choices starts a moral decay and by the current season he's a pretty horrible person.

Huh? Is it car racing like NASCAR? That's the only sport I can think of that would have any possible relation to running moonshine. And even that's drawing a pretty big bow.

yep. nascar has its origins in moonshine runners testing the driving skills and vehicle modifications that would allow them to outrun police and government agents by racing against each other.

Er, ummmmm, nope. I got nothing. Drawing a blank. What is it?

mountain dew.

[ThePhoneGoddess]

I see these shows from a writer's point of view. Shows like Weeds and Breaking Bad are not purposely written to glorify drug dealing or drug culture. Screenwriting tends to follow certain trends, just like any other profession, and these shows are part of a huge trend that first appeared in films during the nineties.

The trend is basing the plots off of a specific theme, often referred to as 'the dark underbelly of suburbia'. Early examples are 'The Burbs' from 1989 and 'Twin Peaks' from 1990. More recent examples would be 'American Beauty' or 'The Ice Storm'.

In the last decade, the trend has taken over TV. Desperate Housewives, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Weeds and Breaking Bad are all shows that have this underlying theme. I suspect that Weeds and Breaking Bad came to be about drug dealing because most of the other bad things that can afflict suburbia had already been explored, such as violence, domestic abuse, criminal organizations, mental illness, inappropriate relationships, etc.

Also, in the last decade there has been a surge in people feeling that the drug war has failed and our tactics need to change; this has caused it to become more acceptable for writers and artists to explore the concept that drug abuse and dealing is common in many suburbs, that the people engaged in it are not gangsters, or street thugs, or international kingpins, but normal looking suburbanites, ones you'd never suspect. Exploring this concept is not part of an agenda, it's an attempt to make sense of this negative aspect of our culture, to look at it from different angles and try to understand how it came about while we weren't paying attention.

Writers don't think about political agendas when they come up with spec scripts or ideas to pitch (unless it is a political show.) They're trying to come up with concepts that are new and fresh, or that look at an old issue in a new and fresh way, that an audience can identify with and get engaged in. This is why the whole 'dark underbelly of suburbia' theme is so popular right now: most Americans today grew up in the suburbs, and we can identify with shows that portray suburbia as a place that might look like paradise but that is imperfect underneath.