The Sounds of Breaking Bad
I’m hopelessly addicted to this show. If you’ve never seen it, now’s the time to get caught up because the final eight episodes won’t be aired until sometime next year. Seriously, this is as good as The Sopranos.
Fast Company has a great article on the sounds and music used in the show. Even people who have seen every episode will want to go back to analyze things in greater detail. Thank God for Netflix.
Like the increasingly unglued narrator of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the antiheroes of Breaking Bad have often been haunted by bad choices and circumstances embodied by sounds.
In season two, for instance, it’s the “cash register” computer alert chirpily ch-chinging every time Walter White Jr.’s charity page scores another hopelessly insufficient donation for his papa (star Bryan Cranston), who has already raised far more blood money on his own.
On the August 26th penultimate episode of the current season, White cohort Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) has to choose whether to flee the playground where his granddaughter is still on a swing set, alone, or stay and get arrested.
While he’s making this decision, the only sound we hear is the relentless squeaking of that swing, even though Mike’s vantage point is too far removed for him to actually hear it. Signature sounds like these help emphasize the claustrophobic tightening as the actions of the characters on the show further constrict the world around them. It’s within such audio moments that Nick Forshager shines.
Forshager is the supervising sound editor on Breaking Bad. He is responsible for pulling all the sound effects, dubbing the dialogue, and supervising the mixes. He’s been with the show from the beginning, providing the first ring of Tio Salamanca’s menacing desk bell, and everything since. As the mid-season finale of the show concludes, the soundman talks about the creative decisions that inform the show’s sonic persona, and the intimate spaces where it thrives. (Some spoilers from season one and two follow.)
