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" As Walter White collapsed on the red clay of the New Mexico desert, the side of his head falling to the ground, his mouth a black hole of despair, his mind trying to process how he had just gotten his brother-in-law shot in the head by a neo-Nazi, you would have had to be fking crazy to suggest that anyone other than Bryan Cranston would take home the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for that year in television, which will be presented this coming Monday night. His five-season run as chemistry teacher-turned-meth kingpin was arguably the greatest small-screen acting performance we&amp;#039;d ever seen, and this was his best season. After being given three years off from having to write an acceptance speech \u2014 Kyle Chandler of Friday Night Lights, Damian Lewis of Homeland, and Jeff Daniels of The Newsroom happily filling in for him \u2014 this was the year that the statuette was to go back to its rightful owner, in Breaking Bad&amp;#039;s triumphant final season. ...But then Matthew McConaughey grew a ponytail and started chain smoking. Yes, True Detective happened. It took us by surprise. We didn&amp;#039;t know what to think. The former Wooderson&amp;#039;s performance in Dallas Buyers Club was hard enough to believe. Now this? Going full Brando and creating a 450-page backstory explaining Rustin Cohle&amp;#039;s tortured psyche so that he could then inhabit said psyche and blow all of our own minds? The flat circle? The smell of sulfur and ash? The Big Hug Mug? What happened to &amp;quot;all right, all right, all right&amp;quot;? The fun-loving Texas native known for shirtless jogging had transformed himself into one of the darkest, most pessimistic fictional characters in recent memory. Believe it. We forgot about Cranston, now months in the rearview mirror, whom we already had years of experience appreciating anyway. Rust Cohle&amp;#039;s fleeting existence in our lives deserved all of our attention. It was an impenetrable, awe-inspiring performance. No one else could have played the role at all like McConaughey, and for the two months the show was on, it was hard to imagine that a real-life Matthew McConaughey even existed outside of the True Detective universe. McConaughey was Cohle; Cohle was McConaughey. We were transfixed. After a few episodes had aired and we were able to take stock of the significance of what we were watching, we were conveniently able to avoid the idea of a potential Cranston vs. McConaughey Emmy war by assuming that True Detective would be submitted as a miniseries, given that the season was only a self-contained handful of episodes. But that didn&amp;#039;t happen. HBO didn&amp;#039;t want to relegate its breakout hit to a category no one cared about, and so here we are, a few days away from the Emmys, and there can only be one winner. But to whom should the award be given? Is one actor more deserving than the other? Looking for answers, I went back and watched &amp;quot;Ozymandias,&amp;quot; the episode of Breaking Bad with the collapsing and the howling and the drooling on the dirt, and &amp;quot;Form and Void,&amp;quot; the final episode of True Detective. These were the episodes their respective shows submitted for the Academy of Television Arts &amp;amp;amp; Sciences to consider as they decided who should win the award. Ostensibly, Cranston and McConaughey will be judged based on their performances in these episodes, although the entire body of work is, of course, impossible to ignore. &amp;quot;Ozymandis&amp;quot; is a classic Cranston tour de force from beginning to end. Walter White&amp;#039;s frantic, impassioned plea for the neo-Nazis to spare Hank&amp;#039;s life is heart-wrenching to watch, as is his delusional attempt to whisk his family out of town after Hank is buried in the dirt. They mark the first times in the show&amp;#039;s run when Walt isn&amp;#039;t able to talk his way out of a situation, and we can feel his desperation churning in our own stomachs as we watch. Just as heartbreaking and registering just as viscerally with viewers is when Walt calls and uncharacteristically berates Skyler in an attempt to exonerate her, knowing the police who are listening in will take Walt for a deranged, abusive maniac. It&amp;#039;s another example of the myriad deceptions he has orchestrated over the show&amp;#039;s run. The character himself is a brilliant actor. There are layers upon layers Cranston must tap into to portray this, and he does so seamlessly, making every internal zig and zag of Walter White&amp;#039;s mind apparent to the viewer, though never fully spelled out. &amp;quot;Form and Void&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#039;t feature an especially powerful McConaughey performance relative to the rest of True Detective. Cohle is Cohle. He is solving a case, he is piecing together clues, he is offering vague bits of wisdom as Woody Harrelson&amp;#039;s Marty Hart chauffeurs him around the bayou: By the final episode, Rust Cohle is familiar to us. McConaughey has worn the character into the viewer&amp;#039;s mind so thoroughly that no theatrics are required for it to be an incredible performance. It was, and it still is. ...Well, it wasn&amp;#039;t an especially powerful performance until the last 10 minutes of the episode, when all of the dour prognosticating and grim truths that defined Cohle up to that point unexpectedly turned inside out and opened up to the glistening void of stars and darkness above, and down into the &amp;quot;warm substance&amp;quot; below. A vulnerable man was revealed, simultaneously in shambles and putting himself back together. Spilling from him is genuine, unbridled hope, the one thing of which we were sure Cohle was incapable. Suddenly not only is he full of optimism, McConaughey&amp;#039;s performance makes us believe it had been been latent within him the entire time.  If you just put the performances side-by-side, they are both perfect.  So basically what I&amp;#039;m saying is that there is no answer. It&amp;#039;s impossible to say that one performance was better than the other. It&amp;#039;d be like saying blue is an objectively better color than red, or that the Beatles were categorically better than the Stones. As the Emmys approach, the scales of public opinion seem to be tipping toward McConaughey, mainly because True Detective is fresher in our minds... and because Cranston has already won three times... and because this will be the only opportunity to recognize McConaughey&amp;#039;s portrayal of Rust Cohle... and because we are living in a McConaissance and one of the hallmarks of a McConaissance is Matthew McConaughey giving kind of charming, kind of insane acceptance speeches. But if you just put the performances side-by-side \u2014 Cranston in the final eight episodes of Breaking Bad and McConaughey in the only eight episodes of True Detective \u2014 they are equal. They are both perfect, and therefore one cannot be &amp;quot;better&amp;quot; than the other. It seems deeply wrong that one will fail to be recognized in an official capacity, that the unknowing TV fans of the future will look back at the Emmy Most Outstanding Actor Wikipedia page and assume one was superior. But alas, this is how award shows work. One must be held above the other. Who knows, though. They could just give it to Jeff Daniels again. PLUS: The Esquire 2014 Alternative Emmys &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a29792/cranston-vs-mcconaughey/>