Walter White’s Post Breaking Bad Scheme Is A Winning Ticket 

By Robert Scucci
| Published 8 seconds ago

Watching 2022’s Jerry & Marge Go Large is a fun experience because Bryan Cranston is the perfect lead for this movie. In Breaking Bad, he plays a desperate man who, in Vince Gilligan’s words, transforms “from Mr. Chips to Scarface.” Walter White takes on the Heisenberg alter ego and becomes a truly terrible person in his pursuit of financial security for his family after his cancer diagnosis. What he learns along the way is that he likes being a crime lord, and he eventually becomes a monster fueled by greed, violence, and ego.

Jerry Selbee (Bryan Cranston), on the other hand, feels unfulfilled after retirement and decides to use his knack for numbers to game the lottery system. After discovering a clever loophole, he goes all in and slowly builds his fortune. The difference here is that he uses his money for good. Jerry & Marge Go Large starts with similar DNA to Breaking Bad but becomes an exercise in wholesome community outreach instead of laundering meth money through a car wash.

While the film is based on a true story, I’m never one to compare a work of fiction to the events that inspired it. As a movie, Jerry & Marge Go Large is a fun watch, but not without its shortcomings. The only reason I tuned into the Paramount+ original was because of the obvious Breaking Bad parallel. I wanted to see Bryan Cranston play a bizarro version of Walter White.

From Retiree To Big Baller

Jerry & Marge Go Large opens with a retirement party, where Jerry Selbee reluctantly eases into his golden years. After 40 years as a line manager for a cereal company, he feels lost because he loves numbers, solving problems, and being an all-around helpful guy. Not knowing how to live without meaningful work to define him, Jerry is puttering around at his local convenience store one day when he notices a loophole in the lottery, specifically the game known as Winfall.

The loophole is simple, and was cracked by Jerry in no time. Instead of constantly increasing the jackpot when there’s no clear winner, the Winfall game rolls the prize money down to the next tier of winners. If nobody matches all six numbers, those who match fewer numbers receive a payout during designated “rolldown” weeks. A statistics wizard at heart, Jerry realizes that if he buys enough tickets during these periods, he’ll always come out ahead. He withdraws the last $8,000 from his savings account to test the theory, doubling his money overnight.

This is where the Breaking Bad parallel comes in. At first, Jerry keeps his lottery scheme to himself, afraid that his wife, Marge (Anette Bening), would disapprove. He hides wads of cash in cereal boxes and popcorn tins in his pantry, but eventually he has to confess because he’s raking in serious dough and is running out of excuses for his disappearances during the rolldown weeks.

To his surprise, Marge is thrilled that he found a new hobby, and she wants to help him play the game. When Winfall is discontinued in Michigan, they travel out of state to buy tickets, which reinvigorates their marriage because it’s a new hobby they can share. Deciding to go legit, Jerry incorporates an investment company, rounds up members of his community to increase the betting pool, and makes them equal partners, effectively revitalizing their downtown area one strategic win at a time.

There’s Another Kingpin To Watch Out For

While Jerry and Marge are certainly going large at this point, a new obstacle emerges. A Harvard student, Tyler Langford (Uly Schlesinger), discovers the same glitch and decides to raise the stakes. Jerry games the system through legal means, but Tyler pushes it further by exploiting technology and hacking the Lottery to gain an edge and scale up a competing operation.

Once Jerry learns about Tyler’s involvement, there’s a confrontation. Nothing explosive happens, but there’s a quiet tension because Jerry and Marge have never been happier, and their entire community now benefits from Jerry’s numbers game.

At the end of the day, Jerry & Marge Go Large is standard, middle-of-the-road, feel-good fare, but I got a lot of entertainment value out of constantly comparing it to Breaking Bad. 

Half the fun was waiting for Jerry to snap and send a cartel leader to blow Tyler’s face off. That never happens, and instead we get an optimistic 60-something rounding up his neighbors and doing the right thing, golly gee willickers. He even keeps crates of used lottery tickets in his garage in case he gets audited. It’s all so adorable.

Still a fun movie despite the disappointing lack of any suspense or tension, Jerry & Marge Go Large is a Paramount+ original and can be streamed with an active subscription.