In the first scene of AMC’s Breaking Bad, debuting Sunday, Bryan Cranston crashes an R.V. in the New Mexico desert, staggers out of it wearing nothing but tighty-whitey underwear and a gas mask, then turns to look in the passenger door. Because it’s Bryan Cranston, it’s hard to see the scene and not expect him to yell, “REEEEESE!!!”
Cranston plays a dad with bigger problems and fewer clothes. / AMC
He doesn’t, and the fact that in about 30 seconds Cranston makes you forget he ever played beleaguered dad Hal on Malcolm in the Middle is the great strength of this black-comic drama. Cranston plays a very different dad: Walter White, a chemistry teacher and formerly brilliant research scientist who’s deep in debt, moonlights at a car wash and has just been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. To provide for his pregnant wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) and Walt Jr. (RJ Mitte), his son with cerebral palsy, he joins up with a former student to cook crystal meth in a mobile lab. Not surprisingly, things have just gone very wrong.
Created by The X-Files’ Vince Gilligan, Bad is nothing but not audacious in its premise: a decent, 50-year-old man is disappointed by life, does horrible things and–as you know from almost the get-go–is going to drop dead in a couple years, max. (Judging from the three first episodes, the series deals with Walter’s curtailed timeline by compressing its own. Each episode picks off immediately where the last left off.)
I reviewed Bad briefly in the latest Time, and as I said there it has some problems of uneven tone. The first half of the pilot is nearly perfect–haunting, deeply felt yet funny, it shapes up as a story about a disappointed man looking to reclaim some dignity and control in his remaining months. (Also, as you might expect from a writer of The X-Files, there are some nerdily poetic reflections on the beautiful chemistry.) Once Walter hooks up with white-boy gangsta-wannabe Jesse (Aaron Paul), it’s clear the show is going to be something different at the same time: a Coen-brothers-like odd-couple black comedy. On top of that, there’s an uplifting theme: that facing death–and becoming a felon–has brought sad-sack Walter to life.
All great ideas separately, and potentially a great show if they mesh together, but the first few episodes lurch between them rather than combine them. (Here it has something in common–besides an RV–with FX’s excellent but inconsistent The Riches, even though the story has more in common with Showtime’s more consistent, but less ambitious, Weeds.) And while Gunn (formerly Martha Bullock on Deadwood) is a great foil as Skyler–who grounds her distracted husband while tending to her own deferred dream of writing short stories–Jesse needs to develop into something more than comic relief. On the bright side, episode 3 improves on the weak second episode, so it’s worth sticking around to see if the elements ionically bond.