I missed this show during its initial run on AMC, for the simple reason that I had no idea that my cable provider carried AMC until I stumbled upon an episode of Breaking Bad while flipping channels. At that point, the series was already underway, so I didn't watch, but did put it on my to-see list. Following star Bryan Cranston's shocking Emmy win for Best Leading Actor in a Dramatic Series, AMC hooked me up with a marathon showing of all seven season-one episodes (yes, I'm suggested they did it for my benefit).

Breaking Bad is the story of Walter H. White (Cranston), a high school chemistry teacher struggling to make ends meet with his stay-at-home wife Skyler (Anna Gunn), when he is diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Confronted with his limited mortality and despondent with the series of indignities that make up his life, Walter decides to use his chemistry knowledge to start cooking crystal meth after running into a meth-dealing former student (Aaron Paul).

Reading that description, one might expect Breaking Bad to be a depressing, Alan Ball-type examination of suburban ennui, but then you see the pictures associated with the show featuring shlubby Cranston in his tightie whities and you start to expect a Weeds-type black comedy dealing in the absurd. While I'm a big fan of Ball's Six Feet Under and was a big fan of early seasons of Weeds, I'm thankful that neither expectation was met.

Instead, creator Vince Gilligan found a happy middle, mixing absurdist black humour with genuine drama and pathos, while being unafraid to navigate the dark side of the life Walter has impulsively chosen (whereas Weeds tends to hint at them, then dismiss them for more wacky hijinks). Walter is forced to deal with some very high stakes very early on in the show (as in immediately, as the show begins with Walter desperately trying to find a way out of a horrible predicament in the series' gripping opening scene), setting the tone for a show that successfully meshes tense action with its drama and humour.

It's an ambitious goal for a series that is essentially a character study about an ordinary guy whose life is falling apart, and what those stresses do to him (comparisons to the 1993 Michael Douglas movie Falling Down are both common and apt). A result of its attempts to mix action, drama, and humour into a quiet character study leads to a series that takes a few episodes to completely figure out what it is. After the explosive pilot episode, the series slows down considerably, taking the next two episodes to tell a story that would usually take one.

This measured pace of the early episodes stands in marked contrast to the rushed final episodes, making it difficult to decide what the natural pacing of the show is intended to be (the season was originally slated to be nine episodes long, then cut to seven as a result of the writers strike). My guess is that the show would've preferred something between the two extremes, and will hopefully proceed that way with its second season (I should point out that while the second and third episodes were measured in their pacing, they weren't slow. In fact, they were kind of macabre).