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Breaking Bad: Netflix Replaced Extended Pilot with Edited Version

Hello! I figured I would let everyone know this since I just found out yesterday. I recently finished up all three seasons of Breaking Bad on Netflix and, like with most good shows, just started watching it again with my brother. I was seriously confused for the first half of the pilot, as scenes that I vividly remembered watching before were no longer there. Figuring that I wasn't some creative genius that imagined scenes that fit so perfectly into the show, I told my brother to wait a few minutes so I could look something up on the Internet. While I couldn't find anything specifically about this situation, I did learn that there were two versions of the pilot: a 58-minute version, and a 48-minute version that aired later. Netflix originally had the 58-minute pilot, but, for some reason, replaced it with the edited one fairly recently.

I feel that the full pilot is the one to watch, as cutting out nearly 1/6th of a TV episode results in a lot of missing scenes, some of which I consider to be important and make Walt's decision to start cooking meth make more sense. We went to Amazon's streaming service and bought the episode, which is the full version, and went back to Netflix for the rest.

Just something to think about for those of you that would care.

Here are some of the scenes that were cut out (minor spoilers ahead!): 

  • The ambulance scene where you learn Walt's never smoked.
  • The part where the car he is wiping down belongs to his asshole student, who proceeds to take a picture of him.
  • The handjob scene where you learn Skyler sells stuff on eBay.
  • The broken glove compartment scene. 

There might have been more scenes that were cut, too. We stopped the episode about 25 minutes in, so I'm not 100% sure on what was left out.

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