Whether or not this approach was responsible for the show’s low ratings and viewership in its first few seasons is a debate for another day, but it’s clear it needed a technological boost from video-on-demand streaming.

Breaking Bad revolves around a brilliant and law-abiding high school teacher who winds up manufacturing and selling crystal meth. When Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is diagnosed with lung cancer, he decides to break bad into the illicit drug trade with the help of a former student to secure his family’s future.

Walter progresses from good to bad as his relationship with his family deteriorates, competing drug cartels assert their territorial authority and law enforcement try to put the pieces together and figure out who’s responsible for the new purest meth brand in town. Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman is the moral center in their world oddly enough, but everyone wants to be Walt.

Although Mr. Gilligan considers himself not tech-savvy, the show’s producer appreciates the role that streaming video-on-demand played in popularising and saving Breaking Bad from cancellation. For the final episodes currently airing, Netflix in the UK has made the show available to viewers less than 24 hours after their broadcast on AMC in the US.

Thus, Breaking Bad has taken advantage of on-demand video streams and the power of word of mouth to spread awareness online, according to Gilligan. Few people watched Breaking Bad during its first season and catching up would have been quite difficult for them without access to the already viewed episodes.

Thanks to the power of streaming video-on-demand and other factors, Breaking Bad has received Guinness World Records’ honour as the latest highest-rated TV show. On Metacritic, the show has a 99 out of 100 Metascore from 22 critics. Based on 1194 ratings, the show averaged at 9.6. Thus, the last eight episodes of the final season seem to have surpassed expectations, with many viewers wondering how Gilligan manages to combine detail, intrigue and agony to invoke suspense that hardly keeps them on their seats with eyes firmly secured onto their TV sets.

Breaking Bad is a runway success story that surpassed its own creator’s expectations, and for real reasons. For one, viewers are not accustomed to stories where the protagonist becomes antagonist, yet Gilligan pulled it off. Secondly, the show survived a ‘death bed’ scare in its first season. The good thing is that streaming video-on-demand online gave the show another lease of life and today it endures to its very last episode.

What do you think of Breaking Bad‘s final season so far? Let us know below…