I still pretty much blame Leno. Regardless of whether or not he wanted to leave The Tonight Show in 2009, he DID agree to it, then went on the air and publicly handed the torch to Conan while wishing him well and stressing that he wanted to avoid the messy situation from the previous Tonight Show change.

"And the only reason the game was there to begin with is because Walt felt he needed to be the man, instead of being a working meth cook and make millions of dollar."

There's a big difference between Walter White having always been an egomaniac (a not uncommon human flaw) and Walter White always having been a nascent mass-murdering child poisoner just waiting for an excuse to be unleashed.

Agreed. It defeats the point of both shows if the characters were predestined to become what they became.

Walk me through how Breaking Bad is about "embracing who you really are?"

But then what's the point of a post-Breaking Bad timeline?

They're related in retrospect. Yes, in a vacuum, the decision to not make Jimmy an attorney at HHM right after passing the bar is perfectly reasonable. But Chuck's speech puts lie to the idea that any of the reasonable arguments (nepotism, inexperience) were actually behind it. Instead, this was about Chuck's…

Nor Amazon. Which I was pleasantly surprised about because with Breaking Bad I was definitely subjected to the broadcast version. That even included Mike's written "Fuck you" to Gomie blurred in "Buyout."

Kim has a degree from the University of New Mexico. HHM seems to be a relatively prestigious firm, but it's still in ABQ. Somehow I doubt they're settling for nothing less than what comes out of Harvard Law.

He has the right to feel pissed off, just not wronged.

Jimmy being rejected is not the issue. It's that instead telling him why, Chuck asked Hamlin to play the bad guy, allowing Jimmy to harbor an insane grudge for years based on a lie so that Chuck could still enjoy being his kid brother's idol while thwarting him behind-the-scenes. When Chuck finally tells the truth,…

Yeah, in retrospect Hamlin hasn't done anything all that foul that we know about. He has an oleaginous demeanor (hey, he's a successful attorney) and I do think it was an objectively dick move when he punished Kim for the fact that the Kettlemans wouldn't see reason, but otherwise?

It's not Chuck's belief that Jimmy wasn't fit to be a partner at the firm that's odious, it's the fact that he lied to him for years while pretending to be on his side, which allowed Jimmy to nurse a deep-seated grudge based on falsehoods engineered by a guy who preferred being revered by his kid brother to doing…

I think that's an oversimplification. Walt made his family subordinate to his power trip, but it doesn't tally that he didn't care about them (Skyler included) at all.

Breaking Bad plays a prank on the audience by exploiting the relationship, and the investment, we naturally have with the protagonist. We're tricked into rationalizing right along with him until the point where we simply can't anymore. And that point varies for people because it's hard to have an objective view of…

Yeah, in fact, Walt's loyalty to his wife distinguishes him pretty dramatically from Don and Tony and pretty much all the other characters he's traditionally compared to.

Can't speak for Saul, but haven't the Game of Thrones showrunners intimated that it's logically impossible to squeeze out more than ten episodes of their show on an annual schedule? Thrones has very unique production challenges.

Yeah, they really made the most out of this being a prequel. My devastation at knowing that Jimmy must become Saul is renewed with every episode.

We're just in a ridiculously good era for TV.

There were occasions on Breaking Bad where Saul was shown to have surprising loyalty, but he did propose the deaths of Badger (S2), Jesse (S3,S5B) and Hank (S5B) to save his own skin.