Breaking Bad
Overview
It starts with a dying man doing math. Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is a mild-mannered, overqualified high school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque who learns he has terminal lung cancer, and his first thought is brutally practical: what does his family live on when he's gone? So he does the one thing his wasted expertise is perfect for — he starts cooking crystal meth, teaming up with Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), a former student and small-time dealer who becomes the show's broken heart. The genius of the series is how patiently it walks Walt from desperate to monstrous. Season by season, the sympathetic dad becomes "Heisenberg": a man who watches Jesse's girlfriend Jane die and does nothing, who poisons a child to manipulate Jesse, who orders the murder of his ally Mike and lets his own brother-in-law Hank — the DEA agent hunting Heisenberg — be killed. Cranston makes you understand every step even as you stop forgiving them, and Giancarlo Esposito's Gus Fring, the calmest drug lord on television, gives Walt a mirror to turn into. It's a show about pride wearing the mask of providing, and its finale has Walt finally say the quiet part out loud: he didn't do it for his family. He did it because he liked it.
