Uncovering the Narrative Structure of “Breaking Bad” Through a Multi-Dimensional Quantitative Analysis

Abstract

The quantitative analysis of TV series has so far focused on the interactions among characters, typically employing a network model. However, such analyses can exploit additional information extracted as manual annotation from the series. That additional information can help us obtain a more complete view of the series narrative structure, accounting for the sequence of scenes and shots. In this paper, we propose an analysis of the TV series "Breaking Bad" that relies on the measurement of locations and scenes as well as the speech and video presence of individual characters. We also exploit those data to measure the degree of concentration achieved by locations and individual characters. We observe a consistent pattern for most variables, which highlight the stylistic characteristics of the series.

Keywords

• tv series
• quantitative analysis
• breaking bad
• narrative structure