| dc.description.abstract | As a communication device, television helps cultivate a culture’s social reality. Yet,
television sometimes advances flawed concepts in a social reality, particularly concerning
addiction. Television appears to have cultivated limiting stereotypical concepts regarding the
attitudes, thoughts, and action patterns characteristic of addicts. These stereotypes may hinder a
person’s recovery. This analysis, therefore, examines narratives in AMC’s Breaking Bad to
learn how the television series conceptualizes addiction. Combing Walter Fisher’s Narrative
Paradigm with William Kirkwood’s Rhetoric of Possibility, it delineates an alternative narrative
representation of addiction. It reveals limitations in stereotypically conceived representations of
addiction, and shows coherent narratives supporting a more comprehensive concept of the term.
Through the Fisher-Kirkwood lens, Breaking Bad may be seen as cultivating an enlightened
conceptualization of addiction. In so doing, the television show’s cultural importance is
established. | en_US |
