Perino: 'Breaking Bad' is a conservative TV show because 'there's consequences'

Fox News host Dana Perino says that AMC's Breaking Bad drama is "one of the most conservative shows on television because there's consequences for your bad decisions."

During a Tuesday discussion about reality television shows like Oxygen's All My Baby Mamas and TLC's Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Fox News co-host Eric Bolling worried that "we're watching American society and culture disintegrate."

Co-host Greg Gutfeld agreed that shows like All My Baby Mamas -- which follows African-American rapper Shawty Lo and his 11 children with 10 different mothers -- had become popular because "we've denigrated traditional modes of support, replacing home and church with government. And with $16 trillion [of national debt], that doesn't work. You can love and hate religion all you want, we took a moral structure and made it uncool. The elites think it's stupid because the elites didn't need it and now you have a society that could have used it that doesn't."

"Because it's up to us as conservatives and conservative libertarians to stare at our culture soberly and go -- and caring liberals -- and say, what's happening to our culture?" Gutfeld insisted. "We have to infiltrate and we have to change and make our culture. Having said that, I do notice that each one of these series do have an ethnic quality to them, whether it is Southern, whether it is black, whether it is Italian."

Perino pointed out that reality television shows were plentiful because they made a lot of money and were inexpensive to produce, but the entertainment industry "deserves some credit" for quality scripted dramas.

"We talked about [PBS'] Downton Abbey yesterday," she recalled. "And then we've got, like Breaking Bad."

"That's one of the most conservative shows on television because there's consequences for your bad decisions. [FX's] Justified starts tonight. Lot's of people are watching great television."

In 2011, Think Progress' Alyssa Rosenberg also argued that Breaking Bad, a drama about high school science teacher Walter White's descent into the world of manufacturing and dealing meth, was a conservative show, but not in the positive sense that Perino described.

"To the limited extent that it explores drug organizations, Breaking Bad tends to portray dealers as violent psychopaths like Tuco and the extended Salamanca family, or as shadowy amoral operators like Gus," Rosenberg wrote. "It’s harder to treat the War on Drugs as if it’s manifestly unjust if you reject or obscure the idea that the drug trade is the product of larger societal structures."

Watch this video from the Fox News' The Five, broadcast Jan. 8, 2013.