Breaking Bad introduced us to the good in bad people, as well as the bad in those who try (at least at the start) to be good. Ending with quite a bang heard throughout the country last week, the show started out simply enough, telling the story of a high school chemistry teacher who started concocting meth to help his family survive on the money he would receive before his freshly diagnosed cancer killed him. Life had other plans for Walter White, though, and his family has had to suffer the consequences over the years.
Before the finale, Walt tries to reconcile with his son Walt Jr., aka Flynn (RJ Mitte), by calling him at school and telling Flynn that he’s sending money to one of Flynn’s friends. Flynn denies his father’s request and will not accept a thing from him, his compassion included. We see from their conversation how Flynn is adamant in his feelings, accepting the general and simple belief: his Dad is a criminal and shouldn’t get away with it.
On that note, and surprisingly enough, a show that deals with a related topic is Sesame Street. Last year, the immortal PBS children’s program introduced us to new Muppet, Alex. A standout character, Alex is a first for the network in that his dad is incarcerated in prison; Alex openly discusses his feelings on this and gets support from his friends. It’s curious that so little of television represents the large segment of the population with family members in prison, and what that experience is really like. Even though [**SPOILER ALERT**] Flynn’s father didn’t make it to jail in the end, Flynn’s feelings are just as confused and angry. While one’s a puppet and the other is human, both Alex and Flynn are victims of their father’s mistakes.
This parallel isn’t that outlandish, in fact—everyone can relate to Sesame Street, and the program has a history of doing clever and popular takeoffs on various shows and other pieces of pop culture (a shining example is their riff on Sons of Anarchy). While we wont see any more of Flynn (the actor RJ Mitte is about to make quite an attitude adjustment as he joins the cast of Switched at Birth), hopefully Sesame’s Alex will continue to shed light on this subject, giving us the young adult’s point-of-view and saying a lot in so few words.