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" I have a friend who loves Breaking Bad, which has come back on the air for the last half of its final season. He keeps telling me, because he knows how much I love Mad Men, &amp;quot;Hey, if you love Mad Men, you&amp;#039;ll love Breaking Bad. It&amp;#039;s great, too!&amp;quot; Really? Not that I doubt it&amp;#039;s a great show. I&amp;#039;ve seen a few episodes. My doubt and confusion comes from his logic that if you like one &amp;quot;quality&amp;quot; TV show, you&amp;#039;ll like another one of equal &amp;quot;quality.&amp;quot; But isn&amp;#039;t that completely untrue, in TV as well as life? I adore Mad Men to an extent that is probably unhealthy. When the premise of the show was announced in 2007, a smile engulfed my face. It was as if Matthew Weiner had done a CAT scan on my brain. I was astonished to hear that all of the things I was obsessed with \u2014 early &amp;#039;60s New York! The advertising industry! Cocktails! The clothing! The music! The architecture! The fonts! \u2014 were going to be put into a TV show that would come into my home every week and entertain me. It was truly thrilling.  But why would I like Breaking Bad \u2014 a great, quality show by anyone&amp;#039;s definition \u2014 just because I like Mad Men? Breaking Bad is about a high-school teacher who becomes a meth dealer when he finds out he&amp;#039;s dying of cancer (and before you think that I&amp;#039;m dismissing the show with that limited description \u2014 oh, Breaking Bad is so much more than that!).  I think my friend&amp;#039;s logic goes like this: Breaking Bad has a fantastic cast, great acting, brilliant writing and direction, and terrific cinematography. Therefore, you should love it the same way you love Mad Men, which also has a fantastic cast, great acting, brilliant writing and direction, and terrific cinematography (and they&amp;#039;re both on AMC!). But is that really how we decide what we like? Is that really how enjoyment happens? Is it even how criticism is supposed to work? We all like things for different reasons, whether it&amp;#039;s a TV show, a film, a song, or a book. Reasons that go beyond a simple &amp;quot;This is great.&amp;quot;  Which brings me to the most controversial point: Subject matter is important. It might even be the most important thing. It&amp;#039;s sort of like prison. So many people have told me that Oz is one of the greatest TV shows of all time. Entertainment Weekly told me this just last month (but then again they didn&amp;#039;t put The Dick Van Dyke Show on their list of the top 100 TV shows, so they can no longer be trusted). But you know what? It isn&amp;#039;t. Not to me anyway. I can&amp;#039;t stand shows set in prisons. I find them narrow and depressing and I just don&amp;#039;t want to visit that world on a regular basis. I don&amp;#039;t care how &amp;quot;great&amp;quot; the show might be. Though I will admit that it was really funny when Gob went to jail on Arrested Development and got stabbed. Breaking Bad isn&amp;#039;t a show about prison, but it&amp;#039;s a lot closer to a world I hate than Mad Men. I&amp;#039;d rather sit around a sleek high-rise drinking old-fashioneds talking about advertising and maybe looking at the tight dress a secretary has on than sell drugs and drive around a hot desert and shoot someone in the face. And I&amp;#039;d rather watch that former world on TV, too. So I&amp;#039;m never going to like Breaking Bad the way I like Mad Men. It doesn&amp;#039;t work that way. They&amp;#039;re two different things, even if they happen to be two different great things. I would never say to someone, &amp;quot;Hey, if you love Breaking Bad (or Game of Thrones or Sons of Anarchy or Homeland), you&amp;#039;ll love Mad Men!&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s like saying, &amp;quot;Hey, if you love pizza, you&amp;#039;ll love lobster!&amp;quot; You may be able to convince me that lobster is a quality food, but I&amp;#039;m always going to order pizza instead (because lobster is disgusting). I wouldn&amp;#039;t even say to someone &amp;quot;Hey, if you like Bewitched, you&amp;#039;ll love I Dream of Jeannie!&amp;quot; even if they are very similar shows (for the record, Bewitched is better, even if Barbara Eden was half-naked all the time).  We need to bring back the phrase &amp;quot;not my cup of tea,&amp;quot; to illustrate that just because something is seen as &amp;quot;great&amp;quot; by many, many people and maybe even we can recognize its general greatness, we just don&amp;#039;t love it as much as the thing that we, well, love. It&amp;#039;s a personal thing.  Speaking of tea, it&amp;#039;s a lot better than coffee. You should try it. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a24249/breaking-bad-vs-mad-men/>