Breaking Bad has several interesting but I think coincidental similarities to A Serious Man, the Coen Brothers' latest film. That's about a Physics professor who contracts lung cancer and I think it is about uncertainty. Breaking Bad is about a Chemistry teacher who contracts lung cancer, and adopts the street name Heisenburg. Slightly obvious code perhaps. Towards the end of the second series Breaking Bad starts to lose touch with normality, in inexplicable occurrences which seem to have an elusive meaning, very much like the Coens' films.
But I think Brooker, for the purposes of the piece, makes the overall feeling one of millenial decadence instead of anguish.
