Breaking Bad Season 1
Overview
He starts out in his underwear, in the desert, holding a gun toward a road he hopes the police never reach. Walter White is fifty, teaches high school chemistry in Albuquerque, moonlights at a car wash, and has just been told that cough is lung cancer — the inoperable kind. Bryan Cranston, who most people knew as the goofy dad from Malcolm in the Middle, plays him as a man who's been quietly swallowing humiliation for decades. With a baby on the way and nothing to leave behind, Walt ropes in a former student, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), and starts cooking crystal meth in a beat-up RV. Seven episodes is all creator Vince Gilligan got, thanks to a writers' strike, and honestly the short season works in the show's favor. There's no fat on it. A body-disposal job goes wrong in a way you'll never unsee, a broken plate becomes the tensest object on television, and by the meeting with Tuco you can feel the mild teacher starting to crack. Cranston won his first Emmy for this. Go back now, knowing what Walt becomes, and the scariest part is how reasonable he sounds.
