Three episodes remain of Breaking Bad, the riveting series on AMC that tracks the descent of Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin. The show has accurately been compared to a Shakespearean tragedy, and it’s clear that the Bard’s works have influenced Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator. Perhaps, then, one might turn to the works of Shakespeare to try and divine how Breaking Bad might end—or at least, how Shakespeare would end it.

I’m posting the beginning of this article by D.B. Grady in The Atlantic, because I’m always interested in how the best of pop culture draws on the greatest of our literary figures for inspiration. Check it out for a fascinating overview of the influence of Shakespeare in the brilliant series Breaking Bad.

Breaking Bad is one of the best TV series in what many, including Kevin Spacey at last month’s Edinburgh Television Festival, are calling a ‘third golden age’ of television. Spacey cites The Sopranos, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Homeland and Breaking Bad as programs with the time to ‘develop creatively over several series’, thus allowing their writers to chart in considerable depth the tragic decline and fall of heroic, or not so heroic, figures. I agree with the article that of them all, Breaking Bad is the most Shakespearean in taking a ‘good’ man and tracking his inward conflict and downward moral spiral over the course of many seasons. Like all fans of the show, I’m looking forward to seeing what Vince Gilligan does with the ending, specifically whether Walter White gains redemption before he dies (as die he surely must!).

Kevin Spacey’s talk is worth a listen, although it’s quite long!