WHEN AMC decided to get into the business of creating and producing original series, they didn’t fool around.
And they still don’t. Fool around, that is.
The first series out of the box for them was “Mad Men” – which was arguably the best new series of last season.
And now they’ve gone and done it again with a new and really bizarre series, “Breaking Bad,” which is as different from “Mad Men” as can be – with one exception.
Both shows hinge on what even the most normal of family men are actually capable of.
In “Mad Men,” the men secretly live wild within the confines of conventionally living large.
Fast forward 40 years to “Breaking Bad” and an America where living the dream doesn’t mean having to cloak oneself in conventionality – no matter how conventional a family man you used to be.
This new series is about a family man, Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a high school chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer.
Bryan realizes that when he dies, he’ll leave his pregnant wife, Sklyer (Anna Gunn), and teenage son, Walter, Jr. (RJ Mitte), who has cerebral palsy, with nothing.
So he decides to use his training to become a chemical millionaire – by becoming the best maker of meth in all of New Mexico.
Through a series of events, he hooks up with Jesse Pinkman, one of his former students, now a slacker and a no-goodnik who has made good as a meth dealer.
The two make an unpredictable team of ill-fitting drug purveyors in a business so dangerous, so miserable and so fraught with unhappy consequences, that you’ll be nearly out of your seat.
Add into the mix Skyler’s sister, Marie (Betsy Brandt), an X-ray technician, and her husband, a bigoted, boisterous and exceptionally insensitive DEA agent named Hank (Dean Norris).
Creating a rolling meth lab out of an RV, Walt and Jesse end up on Day One with the best meth in New Mexico and two dead men.
Gory, ugly, at times funny, at times horrifying, Cranston and Paul are so good, it’s astounding. I’d say the two have created great chemistry, but I’m ashamed to say such a cheap thing.
The acting is as good as you’ll see on TV (take a hard look at the genius of RJ Mitte, who really does have CP). And the script and plot are as out-there as creator/writer/producer Vince Gilligan’s other series, “The X-Files.”
No, “Breaking Bad” is not for everyone – but if you’ve got the stomach, AMC has got the guts.
“Breaking Bad”
Sunday night at 10 on AMC