TV Review - Breaking Bad

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Some TV shows seem to have been out forever and seen by everyone on Earth except me before I get round to them, and Breaking Bad is one such must see series. I got to binge watch it on a friend’s Netflix TV set recently and it is one of my all-time favourites. Bryan Cranston is Walter White, a chemistry professor and teacher who’s life disintegrates when he is diagnosed with lung cancer. Initially to pay his bills and leave his family some money for after he has gone, he sets himself up as a crystal meth drug dealer, employing junkie and student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) a a dealer and distributor. White has to be careful to hide his crime from his family especially as his brother in law works for the DA’s office. White’s family includes his son, Walter junior, who suffers from Cerebral Palsy (played beautifully by real-life palsy sufferer R J Mitte). Walt Senior’s get rich quick scheme runs into enormous complications from the outset and things get progressively worse for him as the series progresses. His chemistry skills mean his meth is too pure to market discreetly, attracting attention from the police, his brother-in-law, and major crime syndicates alike. Walt’s only security comes from having exclusive control of his own manufacturing formula, but others want to force him to share it, so they can kill him. Walt and Jesse find themselves divided and in deadly conflict over their different stances. Jesse wants out of the operation while Walt, initially free from his cancer, is too obsessed with his power and can’t get free of the deadly game. He ends up making more millions than his wife (trapped into the grand deceptions) can possibly launder for him and he still can’t stop himself. Walt actually loses his morality as the series progresses. When Jesse gets involved with a girl who draws him into heroin addiction, Walt deliberately leaves her to overdose to death and later cruelly tells Jesse that he did it. Only in the final episode will Walt finally redeem himself as his empire collapses and his cancer returns as well. There are many astonishing side performances, John De Lancie (Q in Star Trek The Next Generation) plays an air traffic control officer who ends up crashing planes due to Walt’s caual calculating murder of his daughter. Johnathon Banks plays Mike Ehmentraut, a hitman, and gun for hire who is ruthless but pragmatic, but ultimately doomed as his efforts to break free of his lifestyle come too late. Giancario Esposito is Gus, possibly the most outright evil character in any TV series, calm and utterly immoral, pitiless in using children as assassins, and even relaxed in his own final comeuppance. He is what Walt is dangerously close to turning into throughout, an unforgetably chilling look at a criminal devoid of conscience. Then there is the scenery chewing Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman (who now has his own spin-off prequel series Better Call Saul) a shady lawyer who get results in the most unorthodox legally questionable manner, and as charismatic and sleazy as a televangelist. He provides light relief amidst a series of shocks and increasingly depressing revelations. The acting and scripting in the series is wonderful, as Walt's efforts to save his family peels their lives apart. His cancer becomes a metaphor for his own struggle with his inner evils, pushing him and Jesse dangerously close to Gus’s world, but with the spark of decency gaining them some redemption before the truly stunning final episode. Probably one of the greatest TV shows ever. Arthur Chappell