No, but I've been meaning to. I'll get to it eventually I'm sure.

I rarely follow tv shows anymore, I think the only shows I follow are Top Gear and Doctor Who. And The Walking Dead when the next season starts, maybe.

I loved last night's premiere. Gus slicing that guy's jugular vein with a box cutter and then holding him while he bled out was the most violent thing I've ever seen on television. The cinematography and editing continues to be tremendous. The match cut from the mop in the pool of blood to the french fry in the ketchup was outstanding. Seriously, if you aren't watching this show, you need to get on this shit as soon as possible.

I haven't seen season 4 because my only means of watching the show is on Netflix.  That said, this show is awesome, I shouldn't have held out on it as long as I did and once again Ewing is right about awesome TV.

Though he does like LOST and I have serious doubts I'll ever successfully enjoy that show.

We were talking not too long ago about how awesome a Dexter/Breaking Bad crossover would be.  I might write that fanfic.

Trust me, that's hardly a spoiler. I might as well have said, "Something really exciting happened!"

But if you do feel like I spoiled it for you, I sincerely apologize.

As I understand it, (and I could be TOTALLY wrong, just basing this all on observations of public material) AMC took a gamble by letting talented people make the shows they wanted to make, and gave up the creative input almost every other channel has over its programming. The shows they've been putting out: Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, etc. all got SUPER popular, relative to a small cable network, but they fucked their bargaining power against the shows since they never really helped develop the shows.

The longer a scripted show is on the air, they tend to cost more and more. And the increased cost of production might not coincide with the amount of subscribers or the ad dollars they can get for their shows. Hence this drawn out holding pattern where contracts are hashed out, showrunners butt heads with channel execs, and we see a year or more while shows cycle into and out of higher and higher cost productions.

Could anyone with a better knowledge of the production company-channel-advertisers dynamic speak any truth or corrections to this reading of the situation? Just curious to know if I'm talking out of my ass.