Cranston plays Walt White, who - as AMC gleefully notes - is about to enter the worst midlife crisis ever. He's a couple of days shy of 50, and he looks pretty shopworn. He's a straight-arrow high school chemistry teacher who is all of that simple description and no more. His clothes are mostly brown and boring. His glasses are nerdy. He's got an ill-advised mustache. Writer-creator Gilligan achieves, in very little time, an almost complete portrait of a man who has never actually lived his life. He doesn't play sports. He does not have an outsize or even charming personality. His great luck in life is that his wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn), is about a decade younger than he is and, though staid and unassuming, is attractive and loving and has a sense of humor. She's also pregnant. Both are great parents to their teenage son, Walter Jr. (RJ Mitte), who has cerebral palsy.
But they are barely getting by. The bills are stacking up. Walt has taken a second job at the local car wash. It's a good thing he's not looking for or demanding respect because he's all of a sudden got two jobs where he's either invisible or looked down upon. He drives a Pontiac Aztek. That seems especially cruel.
"Breaking Bad" is filmed on location in New Mexico. It's a wonderful setting, different than viewers are used to. The cinematography is both beautiful and depressing, the vast expanses signifying nothingness at times.
It's clear that Gilligan was hoping to create in Walt an everyman who is just trying to get by and do right by his family but is ground down by life.
At Walt's 50th birthday party, he's overshadowed by the boisterous, demeaning antics of his brother-in-law Hank (Dean Norris), a burly DEA agent.
Yep.
As they watch a local news report on Hank's latest meth lab bust - the cops confiscated $700,000 - Walt seems intrigued. During a ride-along with Hank at another meth raid, Walt is the only one outside when Jesse (Aaron Paul), one of the two guys cooking chemicals for speed freaks, slips away. Jesse is a former student - a chemistry flunky now doing big business as "Captain Cook" in the meth world. Driven by desperation - as all everymen are when life deals the last cruel blow or becomes a puzzle of complicated, unlikable options - Walt starts to "break bad" and partners with Jesse.
Now, if you're thinking this isn't an entirely foreign premise, you're right. "Weeds" on Showtime has a suburban pot-dealing mom who came into her situation when her breadwinning husband dies while jogging. Obviously we have free will, and Nancy on "Weeds" chooses to become a dealer, and Walt on "Breaking Bad" decides to cook meth (which he's really, really good at - an "artist," Jesse says), by choice. Like "Dexter," they are not necessarily anti-heroes, just people who have made bad - sometimes really bad - decisions that they now must live with.
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