"The same Highland High School that Beavis and Butthead attended"
TV series "Breaking Bad" filming locations in Albuquerque New Mexico by Boortz47 (cc by-nc-sa)
Vince Gilligan didn't originally envision the locale as any specific place, certainly not ABQ. He saw this as a story taking place in vanilla suburban USA. So while the show has very much developed a strong sense of place, it's a carefully limited one — emphasizing the quotidian suburban life and bleakly semi-urban neglect and in contrast to the austere desert surrounding it. Missing is the mountain and national forest to the east, the more picturesque and lovely examples of Albuquerque life and architecture. BB's Albuquerque is a city of uninteresting middle-class, suburban homes. The despair of ubiquitous and shabby strip-malls is accurate, though.
Back when I read about where each of the depicted homes really were, I was pleased to find that I'd correctly identified all the neighborhoods by sight.
Ivan Fyodorovich talks about Breaking Bad's sense of place.
