‘Breaking Bad’ is baaad!

This may not be news to those who have US high quality TV series pumped straight into their homes via cable, but for me Breaking Bad is a revelation.

It does so many things at the same time it’s nauseating: it takes an ordinary family which could well be an ordinary sitcom family and plunges it straight
into the nastiness of real life tragedy, and then, by letting things turn far more worse, comes out as black comedy. It has the downward spiral of mishaps plotting of Curb Your Enthusiasm (only, as said, in the form of tragedy), the violence-as-banality logic of The Sopranos, and something else entirely – mainly in the brilliant acting of Brian Cranston as Walter White, a badly paid chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. With his wife pregnant and his son handicapped, he decides the only way he can secure their future financial security is by becoming a meth cooker. And so he does. The first episode of season two aired last Sunday; it brings to a cataclysm Walter’s confrontation with the psychopath drug dealer Tuco. In fact the whole thrill of this series is the contradiction between the initially subdued, even boring manner and character of Walter and the outrageously bizarre mayhem he’s thrown into, and to a large extent actively throws himself into, and the hot-cold determination he develops from that. Murphy’s law should be renamed Walter’s law.