Breaking Bad

I've had this show lying around my room for a month and it's taken me this long to check it out. It's basically the best show I have ever seen in my life. Nothing else even comes close to the absolute awesomeness that is Breaking Bad. Every other show I have ever loved and preached about pales in comparison and it's no surprise that I was more or less addicted from the first scene of the first episode.

Bryan Cranston plays Walter, a Chemistry teacher and a Dad and it's amazing how I can look at him and not think of Hal from Malcolm in the Middle because I thought I'd always remember him as that guy. But here, despite playing a down on his luck family man, he's completely different. First of all he's super-smart and second of all he has terminal lung cancer. In order to raise money so that his family can live on without him after he dies, he decides to check out the world of drug dealing. During a ride-along with his brother-in-law, who happens to be a DEA agent, he comes across a former student of his named Jessie and proposes that they start making methamphetamine together. At the same time he puts off telling his family about his cancer, and as he begins to spend more and more time out setting up his new scheme, his annoying wife begins to get suspicious and follow up on every little thing he does. But because he teaches chemistry and because he's such a brainiac, he's able to synthesise crystal meth like a pro and it's 99% pure which has Jessie pretty excited. So it would seem like they get off to a good start. But shenanigans ensue...

So far I've only seen the first three episodes, which establish just how out of their depth these two are. As soon as they begin cooking meth they manage to kill two dealers, albeit in self defence. Except then it turns out one of them isn't dead so they decide to flip a coin to decide who gets to take care of the corpse and who has to murder the survivor. Meanwhile they're constantly bickering which makes for the kind of dark humour I love. At one point Jessie decides to get rid of the body by dumping it in a bath on the top floor of his house which he fills with hydrochloric acid. Needless to say it turns out porcelain doesn't hold up too well against acid and after a few hours the ceiling downstairs caves in, showering the house with bits and pieces of dissolved drug dealer. This is the kind of tone Breaking Bad sets for itself and is the reason I am now going to lock myself away until I am finished with it.