The charming lunatics at Next Media Animation in Taiwan are apparently branching out from covering news and current events, and I don’t think I’m being unreasonable in the least when I say that society as a whole will be better for it. Take for example this video, which is titled “‘Breaking Bad’ Season 5 Trailer [Official],” despite (a) not being official in any way, shape, or form, and (b) containing nothing but baseless animated speculation. To say that it takes some liberties with the basic plot of the show would be an understatement of epic proportions. Unless, of course, the two-part fifth season features glowing green meth turning people into zombies, and Walter White being killed by a Los Pollos Hermanos ATM that falls from the sky and crushes him like a bug even though he appears to be inside a conference room, in which case I will really feel quite silly for doubting them.

Oh, also, the first line of dialogue in the trailer is “Yeah, Mr. White. Yeah, SCIENCE!”, which is spoken while making it rain in a strip club, and that is about eight different kinds of fantastic. Never change, you goofballs.

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Bryan Cranston confirmed on Friday what has been rumored since the season four finale: The final season of “Breaking Bad” — a 16-episode super season — will be split into two. According to Bryan Cranston, “We’re splitting it. We’re going to shoot the first eight, then take a four-month production break, then the rest will air next year.” There’s no official return date, though Cranston has previously suggested that “Breaking Bad” will return in July. Eight episodes should take it through August.

What’s unknown is whether the second half of the season will air after the four-month hiatus — which would mean around January — or if AMC will hold it until the subsequent July (boo!). If the 2011/2012 schedule holds, January/February 2103 could potentially mean running the second half of a “Walking Dead” season as a lead-in for “Breaking Bad” in early 2013, which would be a huge boost to Cranston’s series. “The Walking Dead” is cable’s highest rated scripted program.

Cranston will also be directing the premiere episode in the back 8. He also suggested that the series will — as we predicted earlier — essentially replace Gus Fring’s big bad with Walter White, who may transform from anti-hero to full-blown villain.

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Television websites like WarmingGlow and others cater to a very specific, and relatively small, audience. Great television isn’t watched by a large segment of the population, at least according to traditional Nielsen measurements. Yet, it’s a show like “Mad Men,” which receives a sixth of the viewership of “American Idol” or “Breaking Bad,” which receives a tenth of the audience of “The Voice,” that soak up most of the online conversation (yesterday, for instance, escaping “Mad Men” discussion was practically impossible on the web). This should be a huge draw for advertisers: Smarter, more active television viewers with identifiable demographics (who also tend to be more affluent). That’s why a show like “Breaking Bad” can sustain itself on 1.9 million viewers a week: AMC can charge a premium for those ads, and then extend their profits in DVD sales and Netflix licensing.

Most of us, if we see ratings for basic cablers at all, tend to see them independent of one another. Measured against the top draws on cable — WWE, “Spongebob Squarepants,” “Jersey Shore,” “Big Bang Theory” reruns — many of these shows barely rate. But I was curious myself as to how the best cable shows stacked up against each other in terms of viewers. I took the liberty of finding the average number of viewers for 15 basic cable shows, just to see how they compare against each other. Keep in mind that an average network viewership for a decently rated show (like, say, “Castle”) is around 10 million viewers, “Jersey Shore” receives around 9 million viewers, and a low-rated network show like “Community” receives around 4 million.

Here’s the breakdown:

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Do I have a good reason for posting this “Breaking Bad”/Urkel photoshop mash-up? The question really should be: How can I NOT post this “Breaking Bad”/Urkel photoshop mash-up, which comes from illustrious reader Jeremy Hyler, who just blew my mind.

The entire poster, plus a bonus “Breaking Bad”/Breakin’ mash-up photoshop is after the jump. Urkel will be on this season of “Dancing with the Stars” and “Breaking Bad” is set to return this summer.

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There’s a fascinating piece up on The Atlantic this week about the evolution of television dramas, specifically how the shows themselves have gotten better but for one glaring problem: The main characters never grow. That’s obvious in a show like “The Walking Dead” (Rick Grimes) or “24′ (Jack Bauer), but it is less apparent but no less true in shows like “Mad Men” (Don Draper) and even “Justified” (Raylan Givens). The reason why shows like “Justified” and “Mad Men” are so much better, however, is that the static protagonists surround themselves with dynamic characters, so even if the protagonists face the same dangers and make the same choices week after week, it feels less apparent because characters like Boyd Crowder offset the problems.

There were two paragraphs that best illustrated the dynamic, specifically how one great show (“Breaking Bad”) has managed to grow its main character and another (“Justified”) hasn’t yet (although, it doesn’t take anything away from how brilliant “Justified” is):

It’s easy to rail against the worst offenders (hey there, six seasons of “Dexter”), but take a series as strong as FX’s “Justified,” which—in the middle of what may very well turn out to be its best season—has also reached the point at which its main character is also one of its least interesting. The pilot of “Justified” opened with Raylan offering a fugitive one last off-the-record chance to escape, and though that went poorly, I wouldn’t bat an eye if Raylan made the same offer to a new fugitive next week. For two and a half seasons, Raylan has been too strong and too clever to be beaten, and if even if that wasn’t true, “Justified’s” premise requires him to stay alive anyway.This is no fault of star Timothy Olyphant, who continues to bring nuance, humor, and gravitas to his portrayal of the series’ prickly deputy marshal. It’s not even the fault of Justified’s creative team, which impressively manages each week to invent reasons why a U.S. marshal would be intimately connected with the goings-on of a small Kentucky county. The problem isn’t “Justified”; it’s television, which can’t afford to change its primary status quo until a series’ end is in sight.

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