The best drama revolves around conversion. Flannery O’Connor and Dante depict souls aspiring towards Heaven; Shakespeare and Melville show us the fall into Hell. But all of them understood something true about the role of grace in individual lives. Perhaps surprisingly, we can find similar themes of conversion, choice, and grace playing out in the best of our cable TV shows, True Detective and Breaking Bad.

The HBO sleeper hit True Detective is a moody, emotionally heavy, character-driven police procedural that follows two deeply flawed men as they unravel a crime of unspeakable cruelty in rural Louisiana. The show’s tone is oppressively dark, a darkness amplified by the desolate bayou backdrop. Matthew McConaughey, as the misanthropic murder detective Rust Cohle, steals the show, and his simmering animosity with his partner (Woody Harrelson, playing alpha-male cop Marty Hart) drives much of the series’ drama. Their relationship is marked by suspicion, contempt, and betrayal.

The details of the crimes being investigated are almost obtusely vague. Curiously for a show marked by its exploration of evil, the exact nature of that evil is always shrouded in mystery. At one point Rust shows Marty video footage of the murder so graphic that it enrages Marty, but the audience never actually sees what’s on the screen. We are eventually presented with a villain, but he turns out to be more a kaleidoscopic non-person than a mustache-twirling mastermind. The whole investigation becomes a metaphor for evil rather than a discrete instance of wrongdoing. The evil in this case spills over into all aspects of our heroes’ lives and largely succeeds in ruining them. And in their brokenness they are finally united.

The final episode sees Rust and Marty nearly killed—stabbed, beaten, and broken. But they survive, and what follows is perhaps 10 of the best minutes to appear on television in recent years. Rust reveals that in his coma-like state he mystically communed with his dead daughter and father, in whose presence he felt “nothing but that love.” Overwhelmed by the megatonic force of this moment of grace, Rust’s former self—hardened and bitter—dies in front of our eyes. Life becomes for Rust more than the “tragic misstep in evolution” he had previously thought it was, and the scene sweeps us along to a genuinely cathartic denouement suffused with a hard-won optimism.

Contrast this hard-won optimism with the ultimate nihilism of Walter White’s destructive individualism in the AMC hit Breaking Bad. At the heart of Walter’s many sins is an unwillingness to give up control, whether in his interior life, his family, or—eventually—his international drug empire. Walter brings to bear all his formidable skills of science, cunning, and rhetoric to systematically deceive or else destroy those around him, and he repeatedly refuses offers or opportunities to relieve his hardship, perceiving any success as illegitimate that he did not earn himself. While True Detective’s hero ultimately embraces powers beyond his comprehension, Breaking Bad’s anti-hero cannot admit his own smallness, and this becomes the source of all his misery.

This relentlessness defines the show’s finale, which sees Walter returning from self-imposed exile in the backwoods of New Hampshire to secure his vast fortune and brilliantly kill the neo-Nazis that have co-opted his meth operation. He even manages to terrorize an ex-girlfriend whom he feels has long ago wronged him. The show’s writers allow Walter to die by his own bullet, with an almost nostalgic smile playing on his face. But despite having retained control until the very end, Walter remains the monster we know him to be. The show cleverly juxtaposes power and love, and we are not supposed to mistake Walt’s attainment of the former for a commentary on the inadequacy of the latter.

Breaking Bad is in some ways eminently easier to watch than True Detective. An often humorous script and a brighter, more breathable cinematography helps to soften Walter’s transformation “from Mr. Chips to Scarface,” as series creator Vince Gilligan put it. But at the same time the violence on Breaking Bad is more frequent and more explicit than True Detective’s. It is as if—through the cutting of throats, the shooting of children, and the disintegration of corpses in hydrofluoric acid—Breaking Bad needs to remind us just how depraved Walter’s moral universe is. And it is a useful reminder, since Walter’s high degree of techne is indeed seductive. We are repeatedly impressed by how Walter manages to come out on top, but, in the end, Walter never achieves a moment of conversion similar to Rust’s in True Detective and we are left rather sure of Walter’s eternal fate. Walter’s brutality, then, makes clear the limitations of a morally deracinated reason, what Benedict XVI has called a “reason which is deaf to the divine.”

These two shows offer mirror images of a soul converted. Walter, whom the show’s writers were always encouraging us (eventually daring us) to root for, is moved by terror and the threat of death onto the path of damnation. Rust, who unlike Walter is genuinely unlikeable when we first meet him, only arrives at love by way of those same forces. The choice, finally, is between Ahab or Dante. This dichotomy begs reflection on the inscrutable mystery of love, but the shows do tip their hands somewhat in suggesting that radical isolation and individualism like Walter’s are the sure death of true virtue, and that the subtle bonds of affection and obligation that act upon Rust are powerful components of grace.