How Breaking Bad, The Wire, Mad Men and The Sopranos Heralded America’s Fall

Stephen Marche

This past week, The New York Times rolled out a list of the top 100 TV shows of the 21st century, as decided by a large group of television watchers and insiders. A few familiar shows, long anointed as part of the Mount Rushmore of prestige TV, topped the list: “Breaking Bad” at No. 1, “The Wire” at No. 2 and “Mad Men” at No. 3. (A fourth behemoth, “The Sopranos,” just missed being eligible, having debuted in 1999.)

Any list of great artworks presents a portrait of the era that produced them — in this case, the prestreaming era 20 years ago when cable channels like HBO and AMC ruled the dial and America felt like the world’s last remaining superpower. But what strikes me about these shows is not just how closely they echo their era but how presciently they envisioned the turmoil to come that would lead to the moment we’re in now.

“The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad,” besides being among the best shows the medium has ever produced, together served as a televisual Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Two hundred years from now, when people look to understand life in the United States in 2026 — a time of masked federal agents in the streets, presidential pardons for sale and gulag-style detention camps for immigrants — they’d be well advised to bypass whatever happens to be playing currently on TV. Despite these shows’ very different premises — one about the mafia, one about the drug trade in Baltimore, one about advertising on Madison Avenue in the 1960s and one about a chemistry teacher turned meth kingpin in New Mexico — all four contained clear warnings about where the country was headed, and their warnings have come true. Critics, at the time of their release, saw them, collectively, as prestige antihero television. We can now see that they all had the same antihero at their core: America itself.

In 2008, “Breaking Bad” offered two separate portraits of American decline. The first was a portrayal of the financial crisis-era plight of the middle class. A good man with a decent job cannot afford even basic health care. The message: Don’t get unlucky in America. You’re on your own.

But the show shifted over its five seasons, subtly, slowly, into a portrait of a capitalist overlord run amok. The show was about meth in suburban America but now feels like an allegory about the material rise and spiritual decline of Silicon Valley. Like tech lords, Walter White sells an addictive product produced by a proprietary formula along global logistics networks that generates a pile of cash so big the money is virtually meaningless. His accomplice Jesse asks him if he’s in the meth business or the money business, and the answer is neither: “I’m in the empire business,” he replies. Elon Musk couldn’t have put it any better. Seen from the vantage point of 2026, it’s almost too on the nose that Mr. White joins forces with a crew of white-power supremacists in his relentless quest for impunity.