Television dramas have never been as terrible as they are today. There are dozens of half baked shows out there with hollow plots and empty dialogue and this will never change. But somewhere, somehow, one drama series has found a way to shine through the smog and pollution of mindless charactor plots; that show is Breaking Bad.
AMC's Breaking Bad stars Bryan Cranston as Walter White, an obscenely overqualified high school chemestry teacher who is recently diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. After going through his finances, he is overwhelmed with the thought of leaving his family in debt, and thus decides to put his profession to use cooking methemphetamine with an old high school student/slacker Jessie Pinkman (Aaron Paul), who is a classic drug influenced drop out. They band together in a delapitated RV and Walter finds his true calling cooking the purest meth Jessie, and for that matter, anyone has ever seen. This sets the stage for the most epic character drama ever made.
I will now take the time to adaquately express Walters personality as I see it. He is a very logical person, above all else, he is a man of thought. He does not make mistakes, he does not miscalculate, and will not do something risky unless absolutely necessary. His character has never commited a crime in his life, and is not a violent person by nature, and thus is new to the entire drug/murder scene, hence the title of the series Breaking Bad, for that is exactly what Walter is doing.
In the first season, the big dilema for Walts character is whether or not to kill a drug dealer, crazy-8, who tried to kill him, or to simply let him go and hope for the best. Crazy-8 is locked to a pipe in Jessies basement and Walter is upstairs, pacing around, using his logical mind to calculate what he should do. He goes down stairs to feed C8 and breaks a plate on accident, after seeing a piece is missing, the cold water of reality pours on him as he realizes he has to murder him. This is the great turning point for Walt, the great moral dilema. He walks downstairs, and chokes C8 to death. A suburban man, who in 1 month has gone from average man, to a dying, meth cooking, murderer.
Hows that for a drama series. This black comedy is, hands down, the best show on TV.
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