Breaking Bad: A Good Read for Team Hank Supporters (Spoilers)

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Hank was introduced in the first season as the jerkish, bullying foil to a put-upon, underappreciated protagonist who back then had the audience’s sympathies. But over time the apparent foil been gradually revealed as, if not the show’s hero, then at least it’s (if you will) anti-anti-hero: A better husband than Walt, a better father (figure) to Walt’s children, and the only man in law enforcement capable of consistently putting his brother-in-law’s twisted genius to the test. In the course of the show, as Walt has sunk to ever-lower depths of turpitude, his brother-in-law has been given the classic hero’s arc: The repeated testing, physical and moral and physical again; the near-successes in which the prize is plucked away the last moment; the temporary falls from grace; the persistent brushes with despair. And he has followed this arc without either turning into a plaster saint (the flawed, crude, bullying character of Season 1 is still recognizable in the Hank of Season 5) or doing anything bad enough to make him an anti-hero in his own right. (His one huge moral lapse, the beating of Jesse Pinkman in Season 3, took place under extenuating circumstances and was followed by Hank taking full responsibility and accepting his potential dismissal from the D.E.A. without a fight.)

This willingness to let a major character be genuinely heroic — again, not flawless or entirely saintly, but heroic all the same — is something you don’t see on a lot of the “Sopranos” imitators that now crowd the cable landscape, where the pursuit of grittiness increasingly means making everyone an adulterer, everyone a crook, and writing characters who tend to converge in corruption, until it’s anti-heroes all the way down. And it’s very easy to imagine a version of “Breaking Bad” in which Hank wasn’t allowed to occupy a steady moral center — a version in which he was on the take from the cartel, for instance, or a version in which he was a good cop but a lousy philanderer of a husband, like Jimmy McNulty on “The Wire” or countless other examples on lesser shows.

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