For Breaking Bad, The Proof is in The…

You have to love AMC. Sitting atop the media world, or pretty near close to it, with its record 3 Golden Globes for Best Drama for Mad Men and 2 consecutive Emmy wins for Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston, the network is feeling plucky. How else to explain its ad campaign for the new season of Breaking Bad at New York’s Times Square?

Below at left you’ll see the controversial ad that features a photo of the country’s Commander in Chief wearing a Weatherproof coat at the Great Wall of China. Apparently the White House didn’t sanction this endorsement, but the coat is, in fact, a Weatherproof.

Responding to the ad, AMC installed the billboard you see on the right side of this photo for AMC by Jason de Crow, featuring Cranston, as covert meth cooker Walter White, also standing at the Great Wall in a jacket (probably not a Weatherproof offering, not on a chemistry teacher’s salary), with the clever accompanying verbiage YOUGOTNOPROOF. Below that, ‘Getting Away With It Since 2008′ and then ‘A Dealer in Style.’

For those who know Breaking Bad, the jokes are on several levels. In Breaking Bad, which began in 2008, Cranston’s Walter White is a mild-mannered high-school chem teacher, husband and father who turns his knowledge of compounds into a lucrative sidelight as a producer of extremely potent crystal meth. He’s also totally lacking in sartorial style. Frustrated by the inability of dealers to move his ‘product,’ Walt dabbles in dealing, too. One of the series’ tensions is that White must hide his activities (and resulting cash rewards) from his intelligent wife (played by the beautiful Anna Gunn), teen son and brother in law, who happens to be a DEA agent on the trail of White’s powerful blue meth.

AMC chief Charlie Collier said, “This was an irresistible opportunity to get attention for an incredibly critically acclaimed and award winning series.” In this increasingly button-down corporate world that cable has become, it’s refreshing to see evidence of the spunk that was present at cable’s birth. Breaking Bad, season 3, begins March 21, 10pm.