Before I was a Christian, it seemed to me self-evident that humankind was a morass of evil and corruption. Its members had a pathetically short, meaningless existence punctuated by episodes of vanity and despair set between the nothingness before birth and the blackness after death – yet man still had the odd talent of making the whole thing seem comical.

As a Christian, my view is not that much different: man is evil, but his evil has an explanation and a remedy; his earthly pursuits are rendered even more vain by Christian understanding, yet there is meaning to be found in life and it does not end in black nothingness. With the abundance of evidence for the existence of evil – personal evil – I’ve never been able to understand why some Christians find it so hard to believe in the devil as a person.

Unsurprisingly, my favourite book in the Bible is Ecclesiastes – and one of my favourite TV shows was The Sopranos and, now, is Breaking Bad. Some of my Christian friends don’t approve of my viewing tastes – among other things – but both seem to me to represent the human condition – sans redemption, admittedly – rather accurately.

From here:

Breaking Bad, the AMC television drama that wrapped up its fifth season this past summer, is one of the most critically-acclaimed shows of the last several years. It recently won its seventh Emmy award and has been touted by many critics as the best show on TV today.

[….]

Behind all of Breaking Bad‘s artistic and technical brilliance is a clear and consistent picture of human nature fully consistent with orthodox Christianity. Perhaps no other show has ever presented such an honest and carefully drawn picture of total depravity. This emphasis surely comes from Gilligan himself. Although he now describes himself as “pretty much agnostic,” Gilligan continues to bears the imprint of his Catholic upbringing. His show portrays moral decay as part of the natural order of things in a fallen world. “Mr. Chips becomes Scarface” is the pithy way Gilligan puts it when asked to describe Breaking Bad in a single sentence.