There’s no good way to have a breakdown, but Breaking Bad more than meets its title in the series’ opening flash-forward. Wearing tighty-whities and a gas mask, fledgling crystal-meth cook Walter White (Bryan Cranston) emerges from a wrecked RV in the New Mexico desert, draws a gun from his ginch and faces approaching sirens.

See, within days of discovering he has inoperable lung cancer and hatching an uncharacteristically impulsive plan to provide for his family, the mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher has already poisoned a couple of meth dealers — though at least those sirens were from a fire truck and not his DEA agent brother-in-law’s car.

Despite the drug-world spin, Breaking Bad is really about the male mid-life crisis. We meet Walt on his 50th birthday, a milquetoast beatdown by unfulfilled expectations. Though once contributing to Nobel Prize–winning science, he’s been reduced to teaching apathetic smartasses in a job so low-paying he works at a car wash after school to make ends meet for his handicapped kid (RJ Mitte, who really has cerebral palsy) and his pregnant, eBay-obsessed wife (Deadwood’s Anna Gunn).

Though he loves his family, Walt sleepwalks through each excruciating day until that terminal diagnosis leads him to put his chemistry smarts to bad use and partner up with Jesse, an ex-student meth dealer (Big Love’s Aaron Paul).

What raises the stakes is not the suburban-parent-enters-drug-world set-up — Weeds has been there, smoked that —or the cable-enabled cursing, under-the-covers hand jobs and unsettling violence. It’s Bryan Cranston’s startling performance as a man who starts living life knowing it’s already too late yet remains uptight enough to demand an eyewash station in his meth lab. 

While enjoyable as Hal, Malcolm in the Middle’s exasperated dad, he was too over-the-top for viewers to gauge his dramatic chops. But Cranston invested his Malcolm money well enough to wait for a quality role to come along — the former sitcom buffoon was hired based on his guest appearance as a racist psycho with an exploding head on Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan’s old show, The X-Files.

Cranston’s tragic desperation and dawning vitality provide enough pathos to avoid edgy for edginess sake, but so far Breaking Bad hasn’t made clear what its bigger picture might be.
Still, even if this dark and often depraved comedy needs more time on the Bunsen burner, the ingredients are all there.

BREAKING BAD AIRS SUNDAYS, 10PM ON AMC

Man-o-pause
Ever since a Canadian psychoanalyst first coined the term midlife crisis in 1965, it’s become a much-used narrative device. Here’s a peak at some previous middle-age meltdowns.

Bart (The Simpsons): After losing his last baby tooth and angrily discovering the Tooth Fairy gave his quarter to the United Way as a “grown-up gift,” Bart figures his childhood has ended, holds a fiery Viking funeral for his toys and goes into the t-shirt business: “I’m not getting older, I’m getting bitter.”

Scott Baio (Scott Baio is 45... and Single): Since nobody would cast him in a midlife crisis role, the ex-Happy Days star went the reality route. Sick of being a semi-famous philanderer, Baio hires a life coach to discover why he can’t settle down. The bigger question is how come Chachi’s hanging with Wayne from The Wonder Years.

Jan Levinson Gould (The Office): Divorced corporate bigwig Jan begins a monumentally ill-advised relationship with underling Michael Scott. Jan is subsequently fired, gets a boob job and winds up living off her boyfriend’s paltry Dunder-Mifflin salary. In a subtle gag, Levinson and Gould were mid-life crisis researchers.