AMC’s ‘Breaking Bad’ season one recap and review
Sadly, and out of nowhere, the first season of AMC’s Breaking Bad came to an end Sunday night after only seven episodes. Bryan Cranston garnered newfound respect in my eyes for his portrayal of Walter White, a man diagnosed with lung cancer who tries to help his family’s financial future by “cooking” crystal meth.
I just wanted to do a bit of a recap and review of one of the more surprising new shows this season. If you don’t want to know anything about it because you plan on watching it down the road, then skip this blog post and read about something else, like the new Indiana Jones movie poster with an alien head?
Before you skip though, rest assured that AMC is going to re-air all of season one starting this coming Sunday evening. That’s pretty good news as I have a few friends who missed the first 4 or 5, but AMC’s website only had the first two available for free.
It all starts on Sunday, March 16 @ 10PM | 9C.
Breaking Bad season 1 recap and review
I’m not going to get too detailed into everything that happened this season, but I want to just highlight the big moments and the stuff that made it great.
We first get to know Walter White as a man who has had a boring life, is domesticated, makes no decisions for himself and is stuck working as a chemistry teacher with a second job at a car wash.
Not pleasant. But then it gets worse. He collapses at the car wash and ends up being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.
What happens next is the title of the show. Walt “breaks bad”…or loses it. He realizes that his life has been pathetic and that with him gone, his family (with a new baby on the way) has no way to support itself. His brother-in-law is a DEA officer and one night he talks about how much money the snagged at a meth drug bust.
The light bulb goes off in Walt’s head, and he teams up with a loser former student of his to cook crystal and make money.
The events that unfold next are like a Greek tragedy and a hilarious dark comedy all intertwined. You have scenes of Walt in his underwear and an apron “cooking” and in the next moment he’s killing a drug dealer with a bicycle lock.
The first four episodes or so kind of make up the first chapter of his meth journey. After that, things calm down a bit as he decides to do chemotherapy to appease his distraught wife. But he wont take money from a friend to pay for the $100,000+ in medical bills that will result from it.
So he goes back to cooking. And in the next chapter of the show, he and the kid start making some of the best crystal in Los Angeles and the cash starts to flow.
The show works because of the comedy that is just under the surface of the stories, and because Bryan Cranston is fantastic. But his cohort in crime is Jesse Pinkman, played by Aaron Paul and he’s hilarious. The “chemistry” between the two of them is funny and perfect.
Overall, it was a great first season. It ends early because of the writer’s strike, so that’s a bummer, but you could feel it going places. The only downside I saw in the show was possibly the subplots concerning his wife and her sister, but mostly because I hated being away from the Walt/Jesse moments.
Hopefully you give it a show this coming Sunday and let me know what you think. It’s on cable, so there is swearing and violence, even some pretty gory scenes, so don’t let the kiddies watch.
The good news is that season 2 of Breaking Bad seems to be in the works already, so there doesn’t appear to be that threat of never seeing the story end. Does Walt end up dying eventually?
I want to find out.
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