Breaking Bad’s narrative is about as grand-scale noir as any story can get. At the end of the first episode, you’re told that the main character, chemistry teacher Walter White (played beautifully by Bryan Cranston), has inoperable lung cancer, and that he’ll be lucky if he lasts two years.



There goes any hope for a happy ending.

The show’s teleology, however, is what makes it so enticing. White, a Nobel Prize winning Chemist turned family man whose everyday life has become somewhat of an ennui-laced non-struggle, completely abandons conventional morality upon realizing the inevitability of his death. Most intriguing is how realistic this abandonment is. White doesn’t leave his family behind to pursue whatever it is he so pleases, but rather, seeks a compromise that allows him to “wake up” emotionally while still keeping in mind the financial security of his pregnant wife and cerebral-palsy stricken son.

And how exactly does he go about drumming up a significant little nestegg for his immediate family?

By cooking Meth, of course. This of course entails ignoring a few pillars of moral code, but in the end, it’s all for a good cause. You know, the end-justifies-the means dynamic that makes for such good existential literature and film.



Mix this wonderful set-up with great performances (the elasticity of Cranston’s emotion is subtle and incredible; Anna Gunn’s “skeptical-yet-loving” wife evokes a more delicate, less informed Carmela Soprano; Aaron Paul plays a likable meth dealer) and a cinematographic style that borders on surrealism without ever venturing too far from reality, and you have a highly watchable television program with a significant amount of artistic implication.

I’ve only seen two episodes of the first season, and while I’m already hooked, from what I hear it gets even better. Season two started yesterday, so I have some catching up to do.