Congrats to Brian Cranston, emmy winner for his role as Walter White in one of my favorite shows, AMC's Breaking Bad.

As a recent resident of Albuquerque, I fell in love with the American Southwest. Since I left that desolate region of the country, I’ve made the most of recent investments made by the Land of Enchantment to draw film crews to New Mexico for television and movies, using these programs to take a cheap trip back to my adopted home.

Through these virtual travels, I’ve enjoyed In the Valley of Elah, hated Wild Hogs and The Eye and fallen in love with Breaking Bad.

Staring Cranston—the dad from Malcolm in the Middle—the show follows a recently diagnosed, terminal lung cancer patient, Walter White.

White’s also a Chemistry genius, but also somewhat of an underachiever who never fully capitalized on his smarts (we meet his incredibly more successful former partner towards the end of Season 1 and are introduced to a plaque celebrating White as a contributor to a Nobel Prize-winning team in Episode 1).

In order to take care of his wife, Skylar, unborn child and teenage son(who has MS), White decides to cash in on his talents—as a Meth dealer.

Using the sparse, vast desert landscape of New Mexico as a metaphor for his hopelessness (ugh, did I just write that?), White exits the safe confines of Suburbia and enters the filthy, unglamorous world of drug dealing, working with one of his former loser students to cook and distribute the product.

Watching Walt work in a mobile meth lab with professional precision is a neat entrance into fantasy, as he’s contrasted with the yeoman’s work done by the considerably more careless. Throughout the first season, the moral challenges presented by Walt’s bargain with the devil are thought-provoking and in most cases unpredictable.

Thankfully, the show doesn’t try to be preachy. Even as one of the neat devices surrounds Walt’s brother in law, who is (of course) a Special Agent in the DEA, this character isn’t used as a foil to talk about the inanities of our nation’s drug policies or to hammer home the sins of drug use. Instead, the show incredibly focuses on solid writing, excellent character acting and an intriguing premise.
Thanks to the writer’s strike, the show’s first season only ran eight episodes. As the second season revs up in production, a word of advice: The show must commit to it’s finite premise.

Here’s hoping the production team commits to another good season, maybe 10 episodes, committed to tying up loose ends. Pushing the show beyond another season will stray from its initial premise and will begin to beat a dead horse.

Here's a link to the pilot episode (and it's free!).

Labels: Guilty Pleasure