The basic premise is that Walt White, nerdy, underpaid high school chemistry teacher with a bossy wife and an adorable high school son who has cerebral palsy, passes out while working at his second job at a car wash, and wakes in the emergency room to find that he has terminal, inoperable lung cancer. The impoverished and under-insured family has also recently discovered that the wife is pregnant with a surprise mid-life baby, due in several months.
At about this point in time, Walt goes for a ride-along with his braggadocio bro-in-law, a smart-aleck DEA agent. In the course of his ride-along, Walt happens to observe a suburban meth bust, and sees that a former loser student of his, Jesse Pinkton, is the guy who was doing the cooking. Jesse departs out a second floor window and gets away and Walt keeps mum, but asks the bro-in-law just how much money you can make selling meth. The answer stuns Walt, and within a few days, he conceives a plan to start cooking and selling meth himself, to provide for the baby he doesn't expect to live to see. He recruits the hilariously stupid Jesse( whoin turn recruits his even dumber friends as salesmen), as his sidekick, and between them, they instantly get into big trouble in the nasty underworld of drugs lords, gangs and the DEA.
Complicating matters is the fact that Walt, with his superior knowledge of chemistry (he has shared in a Nobel prize with some past colleagues), creates meth of such hugely superior quality that it instantly creates an uproar both in the drug world and in the DEA.
Watch a few episodes, and you'll be hooked! The first season is available on DVD. It's on Sunday nights on AMC.
4 comments:
My husband absolutely loves this show. I've never seen it--only heard it--and it sounds violent.
It is. But it's also a (black) comedy.
We're saving a bunch of episodes up to watch with our girl when she gets home from college this summer. I adore this show, and Mad Men too. Great post, VQ.
Classic Jesse moment from this week:
Upon learning that their mobile meth lab RV's battery is dead and that he and Walt are stranded in the middle of the desert with no water or food, Jesse says:
"You're good at science, Mr. White. Couldn't you build a robot or something?"
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