Stephen King’s favourite TV show of the 21st century: “I knew it was great from the first scene”
The relationship between Stephen King and television might be every bit as lengthy and prolific as his bibliography, but it’s also a great deal more complicated, with the author and episodic storytelling having experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly together.
He’s famously one of the very few people who prefers 1997’s miniseries The Shining to Stanley Kubrick’s classic counterpart, which admittedly makes sense when it’s a lot more faithful to the source material than the legendary director’s acclaimed psychological horror and that was always King’s major bugbear.
His back catalogue has been adapted and repurposed for the small screen almost as regularly as it has the silver one, which has also presented its own set of issues. King went from initially praising Under the Dome before refusing to ever speak about it publicly ever again, while he spent years resisting overtures from Hollywood to tackle Lisey’s Story before finally relenting when AppleTV+ came calling.
King is known for taking to social media and singing the praises of anything he deems worthy, and it’s not a small list. The bestselling writer and icon of fiction has recommended dozens of shows he’s happy to tout to his millions of followers around the world, but rather strangely, it didn’t include the one he named as the 21st century’s best.
While King celebrated Shawn Ryan’s The Shield as the series that “changed everything” for the way it placed a corrupt cop as its focal point and antihero, there’s another he’s adamant is better. Not that it’s a particularly left-field or outside-of-the-box choice, but that doesn’t make it any less accurate.
In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, King was pressed to name the single greatest television production to emerge in the last decade and a half. Of course, the current ‘Golden Age’ was already in full swing by then, even if it hardly left him umming and awing to try and come up with a suitable candidate.
“Breaking Bad,” he answered unequivocally. “I knew it was great from the first scene, you see him wearing jockey shorts. I thought it was amazingly brave since they look so geeky.” There’s no shortage of people who’d call Vince Gilligan’s masterpiece the best of all time, but Walter White’s underpants generally aren’t used as either the barometer or the definitive explanation.
Clothes often maketh the man, though, and in the case of Bryan Cranston’s iconic drug kingpin, it was his pants that illustrated to King how Breaking Bad was destined for televised greatness. That notion was only reinforced over the course of an awards-laden five seasons and 62 episodes, but the mastermind behind scores of spine-chilling terrors needed nothing more than an arid desert backdrop and a moustachioed man in his skivvies to come to that conclusion.
