Some of the best scripted TV isn’t found on free cable anymore, it’s found in shows like The Killing, Game of Thrones and dozens of other shows found in the high cable channels like AMC, HBO, FX, and Showtime. One of those epic dramas is AMC’s Breaking Bad.

Hitting their fourth season on July 17th, Breaking Bad is getting as hard-hitting and inexplicable as ever as we follow the downward spiral (or eye-opening rebirth) of Walter White. For those who still haven’t gotten the chance to catch the show, here’s a brief rundown to bring you up to speed.

Breaking Bad follows protagonist Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a chemistry teacher who lives in New Mexico with his wife (Anna Gunn) and teenage son (RJ Mitte) who has cerebral palsy. White is diagnosed with Stage III cancer and given a prognosis of two years to live. With a new sense of fearlessness, and a desire to secure his family’s financial security, White chooses to enter a dangerous world of drugs and crime, where he ascends to power. The series explores how a fatal diagnosis, such as White’s, releases a typical man from the daily concerns and constraints of normal society and follows his transformation from mild family man to kingpin of the drug trade.

The first trailer for the fourth season has finally hit the web, and we’ve got it for you. Check it out after the jump and be sure to stick to AMC as the next season premieres on July 17th.

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Warner Premiere has been on a roll lately in both the animated world and the live action one. Their newest live action webseries, Mortal Kombat: Legacy has blown up online, and their continuing success with animated films for the DC Universe have put them on top of the map for both genres.

Continuing in that trend, their newest film, Batman: Year One has got some brand new images, and they give us a hint at what we can expect from the film. Here’s the breakdown of the all-star cast from THR.

Bryan Cranston, Ben McKenzie, Eliza Dushku and Katee Sackhoff have been tapped to star as the voices in Batman: Year One, the adaptation of the Frank Miller comic book classic from Warner Premiere, DC Entertainment and Warner Bros. Animation.

Cranston is playing Gordon, while McKenzie is Wayne/Batman. Dushku voices Catwoman, while Sackhoff is Detective Sarah Essen, a Gordon love interest.

The animated feature is based on the 1987 miniseries written by Frank Miller and drawn by David Mazzucchelli, about the time between Bruce Wayne seeing his parents murdered and becoming the caped avenger that we all know and love today.

The flick is expected to hit DVD and Blu-Ray players everywhere later this year. In the meantime, check out two brand new images from the film.

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It’s nice to see talented actors who deserve recognition and more work get both. One such actor is Emmy winner Bryan Cranston, who currently stars in the AMC TV series Breaking Bad as a High School science teacher who decides cooking meth is a better way to make ends meet.

Now, Cranston is poised to further expand the diversity of his work and is all but cast as the bad guy in the Len Wiseman directed remake of Total Recall. Colin Farrell is starring in the sci-fi action movie, which is a retelling of the film made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1990 original.

In case you’re not familiar with it, Total Recall centers on a man haunted by a recurring dream of a visit to Mars. As he investigates, he remembers being a secret agent who fought against the evil administrator of Mars.

The new version is said to be closer to Philip K. Dick’s short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale on which both movies are based. Cranston is perfect for the bad guy and will do a terrific job in the film.

Sometimes it is frustrating when you haven’t watched a television series from the get-go, and you keep hearing how great it is.  You can’t exactly jump right in during the third season, especially if the show is a serial drama. Such is the case with Breaking Bad, arguably one of the best shows on television.

Well fortunatgely, AMC has you covered. Starting Wednesday, December 8, they will air back-to-back episodes of the Emmy award winning drama until March, when the brand new season will begin. In total, there are 33 episodes of Breaking Bad, spanning three seasons. Due to the writer’s strike, the first season consists of a mere seven episodes. Seasons two and three each have 13 episodes.

The series stars Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, Dean Norris, and Anna Gunn. Cranston and Paul have both won Emmy awards for their superb performances on the show. If you are not familiar with the show, it revolves around a High School chemistry teacher who finds out he has terminal cancer and turns to cooking meth as a means of making some quick cash to leave his family. Naturally, the drug world is more complicated than he ever could have imagined.

The show is unflinching in its depiction of the seamy side of drug manufacturing and distribution. Far from glamorizing the trade, the show serves as an excellent deterrent. It is gritty, raw, and ugly.  Now there are no excuses for missing out.

For more information, you can visit the Breaking Bad facebook page, follow Breaking Bad on Twitter, or check the AMC website for viewing times.

Missed last night’s Emmy Awards? Didn’t feel like sitting through the entire spectacle just to see if Jon Hamm took home that shiny trophy? We’ve got your solution. Here is the complete list of Emmy Winners from last night’s show. Enjoy.

Drama Series: “Mad Men,” AMC.

Comedy Series: “Modern Family,” ABC.

Actor, Drama Series: Bryan Cranston, “Breaking Bad,” AMC.

Actress, Drama Series: Kyra Sedgwick, “The Closer,” TNT.

Actor, Comedy Series: Jim Parsons, “The Big Bang Theory,” CBS.

Actress, Comedy Series: Edie Falco, “Nurse Jackie,” Showtime.

Supporting Actor, Drama Series: Aaron Paul, “Breaking Bad,” AMC.

Supporting Actress, Drama Series: Archie Panjabi, “The Good Wife,” CBS.

Supporting Actor, Comedy Series: Eric Stonestreet, “Modern Family,” ABC.

Supporting Actress, Comedy Series: Jane Lynch, “Glee,” Fox.

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It’s Emmy time and the nominations were announced this morning in LA at the Academy of Arts & Sciences for the 62nd annual awards show. It was a big day for HBO as it’s show The Pacific received the most nominations with 24.

Other shows nominated for several awards include Fox’s Glee with 19 nominations, AMC’s Mad Men with 17, NBC’s 30 Rock and HBO’s Temple Grandin and You Don’t Know Jack with 15 each, ABC’s Modern Family with 14 and NBC’s Saturday Night Live with 12.

Also nominated in a big way was ABC’s Dancing With The Stars with 9, Showtime’s Nurse Jackie with 8, CBS’ Two And A Half Men with 6, CBS’ Big Bang Theory with 5. HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, CBS’ How I Met Your Mother and NBC’s The Office all tied with 4.

As it often does, HBO led with 101 nominations total. ABC, with 63 nominations, received the most for any broadcast network followed by CBS with 57, NBC with 48, FOX with 47, and mighty PBS with 32.

All in all it seems like quite a diverse group of shows were nominated this year and we congratulate all of the nominees. Plus, it’s nice to see people finally get recognized for their work including Kyle Chandler of Friday Night Lights as well as Betty White with her 20th nomination for hosting Saturday Night Live.

Click through for more nominees and be sure to check out the official Emmy site for more. The 62nd annual Primetime Emmy Awards air on August 29, 2010 on NBC.

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This should come as great news to fans of AMC’s awesome show Breaking Bad (especially our own Shannon Hood). AMC has closed a deal to renew creator Vince Gilligan’s dark drama for a fourth season. The network made the announcement this morning via an official press release.

The deal had been reportedly in the workd for several months but had stalled due to budget considerations for the fourth season. The studio had wanted the per episode cost not to exceed $3.1 Million while the show’s producers were hoping for more like $3.3 Million per episode. Apparenly, the must have found a happy medium, or ‘Split the difference” as they say in the biz, because the show is coming back next year.

Breaking Bad has performed decently in the ratings but has achieved critical success. It has also garnered star Bryan Cranston two Emmys for his work on the show and a best series nomination last year. Knowing how this season ended, I’m very pleased the show will have a chance to continue. It deserves to be on for a long time.

Click through for the complete press release from AMC.

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Hmm. Is it safe to call the show Broken Bad now? I have held out hope, despite all the signs pointing otherwise, that Walt is still a decent human being. Guess I was wrong. The season finale of Breaking Bad was a mixed bag, as far as I am concerned. Let me be clear, I thoroughly enjoyed it, but with so many story lines swirling around (Skylar? Hank? The cartel vs. Gus?) I was left wanting a little.

Who didn’t want to see Hank open a can of whup-ass on someone this season? Looks like Hank’s reckoning day will have to wait for another season. So be it.

(Spoilers for the season finale of Breaking Bad.) The writers chose to end season three with a Walt/Jesse centric episode. This is the episode that has absolutely confirmed the fact that Walt has gone to the dark side. He has sold his soul to the devil, and then some. We’ve seen the characters of Walt and Jesse transpose throughout the series.

Jesse was a strung out loser with questionable morals and penchant for the rock and roll lifestyle. Really, nothing he would have done would have surprised us. Now, he serves as the moral compass of the dysfunctional duo.

Walt was initially drawn to a life of crime out of necessity. He was dying, and cooking meth was a quick way for him to make cash to leave his family. Now he has become a comon thug, routinely participating in atrocities he never could have imagined before.

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Now, that’s how it is done. The best show on television gave us one of the best hours of television I can remember. It took me a full ten minutes after the conclusion to pick my jaw up off the floor and compose myself. It was that good. I LOVE THIS SHOW!

I also cannot really talk about this episode without revealing huge spoilers, so please don’t read unless you’ve seen the episode. This is one you don’t want spoiled.

This week’s trademark opening sequence shows the day in the life of a prostitute, Wendy, who is working out of the Crossroad Hotel. She looks rode hard and put away wet, and wears white go-go boots while she orally services dozens of men who pick her up in the parking lot. Her tawdry acts are juxtaposed against the jaunty song “Windy” by The Association. Perfect.

She takes a bag of fast food burgers to the street corner (where Combo died) and gives them to the two drug dealers we saw in the last episode. She hands over some money, and at first I thought they were her pimps, but she was actually buying product, and Jesse is watching the whole transaction camped out in his car.

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This recap contains spoilers for the Breaking Bad episode, “Abiquiu.”

“Abiquiu” opens with a flashback of Jesse and Jane pontificating about the artwork of Georgia O’Keefe. The two are examining a more chaste collection of O’Keefe paintings featuring a series of doors, which Jesse finds boring and pointless, while Jane admires artistic liberties that O’Keefe took with each individual painting.

Jesse can’t understand why O’Keefe basically repeated the same painting with slight variations. “Isn’t that insane?” he asks Jane.

Jane counters that she believes you should go wherever the universe takes you, and by using Jesse’s logic, there is no point to repeating anything, even acts that are enjoyable. She takes a last drag and crushes her cigarette out in his car ashtray, leaving the tell-tale lipstick trace that caused Jesse to fish it out of the ashtray earlier this season, as it is the the last tangible remnant of her physical being.

The scene brilliantly cuts to a pair of feet dangling several feet above the ground. Uh oh, who is that hanging? Once the camera pans back, you see that it is Hank, in the Hospital, in some sort of harness device that is lowering him to the ground. A physical therapists encourages him to take a step while Marie, Walt Jr., and Skylar look on.

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Note: this episode was directed by Rian Johnson, who also directed Brick and The Brothers Bloom. This recap assumes that you have seen the episode, heavy spoilers.

Well, this evening we had a two man show, in every sense of the word. This episode was 100% dialogue and character driven, which was a little surprising to me considering that we only have 3 episodes left this season.

As usual, we get treated to a visually pleasing opening sequence. This week, we see a housefly, going about its business in extreme close-ups while we hear “hush little baby” in the background.

I immediately thought of the expression “fly in the ointment”, and found myself thinking about it throughout the show. This was a very distinctive episode in that it only featured Jesse and Walt, and was self-contained within the meth lab.

Walt discovers that there is a fly in the lab, and he completely over-reacts and obsesses over the insect. He tries various methods of swatting the irritating bug, to no avail. He then takes it upon himself to go onto the mezzanine level of the lab and promptly takes a nasty spill while trying to depose of the fly.

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Kafkaesque: The adjective refers to anything suggestive of Kafka, especially his nightmarish style of narration, in which characters lack a clear course of action, the ability to see beyond immediate events, and the possibility of escape. The term’s meaning has transcended the literary realm to apply to real-life occurrences and situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical.

In this 9th episode of the current season, we get a blessed reprieve from all the frenetic madness.  This episode was contemplative and character driven.  Ironically, despite its title, I found it to be one of the least bizarre shows of the season.

“Kafkaesque” delivers another great title sequence.  We get to see an awesome commercial for Pollos chicken, where we see images of  mouthwatering fried chicken set against the story of the “chicken robbers.”, the original founders of Pollos.  This advertisement is juxtaposed against scenes of Jesse and Walt churning out boxes of Meth.  Their Meth bags go into vats of “fry batter” that is distributed to Gus’s stores.

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