“We all have a monster within; the difference is in degree, not in kind.” This rather frightful view of the human condition is exemplified cunningly in the famous series Breaking Bad. This show follows a middle-aged New Mexican, Walter White, who is a grossly underachieving chemistry genius struggling to make ends meet as a high school teacher. When diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, he comes face to face not only with death, but also with the idea that his family will be left in financial ruin, a vision that torments him even more. Backed into a corner of utter desperation, Walter decides to team up with a former student and try his hand at the drug trade, cooking crystal methamphetamine in an attempt to accumulate enough money for his family after he bites the dust. This new line of work takes Walter down a path of excitement, agony, loss, and eventually, great success that neither he nor the audience saw coming.

Throughout the series, Breaking Bad inclines its viewers to root for Walter at every turn, and it does a brilliant job at initiating this loyalty by garnering a boatload of sympathy for him at the start. In the very first episode, the audience is made aware that Walter once signed away his rights to a company that would come to be worth billions. As if this weren’t bad enough, the pilot heavily juxtaposes what could have been with the sorry excuse for a life Walt leads. Because of this, the audience is heavily inclined to view Walter as a morally-centered man whose illegal actions can be greatly justified by righteous motives. However, as the show progresses, Walter’s actions become harder and harder to condone, and there comes a point at which no one can deny that he has transformed into a truly despicable man and one of the most evil characters in a show full of drug lords and murderers. Yet even at his darkest moments, the audience is made to cheer for Walt just as much as they had in the first episode. So the natural question that stems from all this is, “Why do we continue to root for Walter despite his wickedness?” I believe the answer is twofold. First, Breaking Bad compels its audience to deeply hate most of the characters that oppose Walter. Two, unlike almost all of the other characters of power in the show, our protagonist builds his empire from virtually nothing, making viewers admire him so much that they continue to stick by his side.

Breaking Bad treats its viewers to wave after wave of brilliantly stylish, cunning, and, most of all, hateable opponents to our protagonist. From psychotic cartel gangsters with little control of their temper to Neo-Nazis without a trace of empathy for others, Walter certainly has his work cut out for him. Forced to cooperate with many of these shadowy crooks in order to further his business ventures, he inevitably has some falling-outs along the way. Though Walt isn’t a good guy by any means, the fact that the events are shown from his perspective coupled with the tendency of these villains’ actions and motives to be worse than his own instills in viewers immense feelings of animosity toward the antagonists. By besting each of these villains, Walter manages to climb to the very top of the drug world in a very short span, and he is able to do so with a few simple and yet momentous schemes. Walt’s brilliant toppling of his rivals inclines viewers to both relish in the defeat of the characters they’ve grown to hate and admire the brilliance and planning of the main character, solidifying him as the guy to root for throughout the entire show.

The best example of this pattern can be seen in the season-long rivalry between Walter and Chilean drug-trafficker, Gustavo Fring. In a connection offered by crooked lawyer, Saul Goodman, Walter begins to work for Fring at the end of season two. Operator of the biggest drug empire in the southwest for over two decades, Gus is certainly not a character to be trifled with, and his sneakiness and calm, business-like demeanor make him the scariest villain Breaking Bad has to offer. For a while, the Walter-Gus partnership works like clockwork, and the business is very profitable for the both of them. But when Walter disobeys a direct order from his boss, killing two of Gus’s gang-bangers in an attempt to save his partner, Jesse, Gus decides he can no longer trust his meth cook and sets off to exact revenge and rid himself of the threat he believes Walter has become. This decision makes way for an enduring chess match between Walter and Gus in which each man will stop at nothing to kill the other. From a truly unbiased perspective, perhaps Walter and Gus can be viewed as equally evil drug-runners whose relationship grew to a point at which they could simply no longer co-exist. However, the lense through which viewers see the show does a shrewd job at making Gus appear to be the one taking drastic measures, and Walter’s actions are seen as a desperate, necessary reaction that should be forgiven rather than an act of egotistic rebellion. As the audience grows to hate Gus, they are made to root even harder for Walt, even as he continues down the dark path on which he has embarked.

An entire season of this standoff ensues, the majority of which sees Walt as a battered underdog sure to meet a grizzly end in the near future. However, in one crafty ploy, our main character is able to lure an unsuspecting Gus into a nursing home, where the Chilean kingpin meets a sudden end as one side of his face is blown to bits by a homemade bomb. Just like that, Walter moved from the primary target of the biggest drug empire in the southwest to the main supplier of an entire region on track to profit tens of millions of dollars, and the viewers love it. They love to see Gus go, who they grew to despise with a deep passion. But more than that, they are awed by Walter’s tremendous ability to become “the man” in one fell swoop, and it doesn’t matter what he’s done or what he will do, because he’s just too damn cool.