About

Hank and Marie Watching Walt's Confession, also known as "Hank and Marie Watch," is a series of parody videos based on a scene from the 11th episode of the 5th season of the AMC drama series Breaking Bad, titled Confessions. The scene has gained popularity online as an expolitable, with a variety of other videos spliced in place of Walter White's confession.

Origin

Confessions aired on August 25th, 2013 on AMC, immediately receiving widespread critical acclaim, with many reviewers citing it as one of the best episodes of the series.^[1][2] During the episode, Walter White (played by Brian Cranston) is shown giving his in-laws a DVD supposedly containing his confession to being the mysterious Heisenberg. While watching the video at home, Hank and Marie Schrader (played by Dean Norris and Betsy Brandt, respectively) discover it is actually blackmail as Walt names Hank as the mastermind of the Heisenberg empire, and claims he coerced Walt into cooking meth for him.

Spread

The following day, on August 26th, Tumblr user conanofallon posted a photoset of with the caption "Hank and Marie react to Miley Cyrus VMA performance"^[3], replacing the video on the screen with clips from the awards show. Within 4 days, the post gained more than 45,000 notes. The same day, LiveLeak user swollen submitted the video "Heisenbergs a dick!"^[4] which features the scene with the music video of Never Gonna Give You Up playing on the television (shown below).

Also on the 26th, YouTuber Sam Barnett uploaded a video version of Hank and Marie watching the VMAs (shown below, left), which gained more than 2.3 million views in four days. That day, the video was submitted to reddit^[5], where it accrued more than 32,000 upvotes, 3,000 points overall and nearly 1,500 comments in the same time frame. The next day, user barrywu998 submitted another remix titled "Walt gives Hank the wrong CD" (below, right) to reddit^[6], showing the pair watching a clip from Malcolm in the Middle in which Brian Cranston is dancing on roller skates. The post gained more than 17,000 upvotes, 3,200 points overall and 800 comments within three days.

On the 27th, a number of entertainment and internet culture blogs featured Hank and Marie Watch videos including Viral Viral Videos^[8], Slate^[9], Uproxx^[10] Yahoo! TV^[11], Entertainment Weekly^[12], Heavy^[13], MTV Movies Blog^[14], Rolling Stone^[15] and E! Online.^[16] Over the next several days, additional videos were featured on Variety^[17], who compared the phenomenon to Downfall parodies and the Huffington Post.^[18]

Notable Examples

As of August 30th, 2013, there are more than 66,000 search results for "Hank and Marie watch" on YouTube.^[7]

External References