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By Johnny Firecloud

The series premier of AMC’s new dark comedy “Breaking Bad” had me sold two minutes in. At the onset we find Bryan Cranston, formerly the ridiculous buffoon father in “Malcolm in the Middle”, tearing hell through the New Mexico desert in an old Winnebago, wearing nothing but a gas mask and a pair of tighty-whities.

Riding shotgun is an unconscious man, also in a gas mask. In the back of the RV, two bodies roll back and forth on the floor amidst broken beakers and a pool of toxic chemicals. Panic overtakes Mr. Cranston’s character, and he crashes the RV into a ditch.

This is how we are introduced to Walt White, a high school chemistry teacher pushed beyond the limits of desperation in his otherwise mundane existence. Having just hit 50 years old, Cranston’s character was living a wimpy, pushover life not unlike Kevin Spacey’s character in American Beauty. His wife is pregnant, his son has cerebral palsy, and he’s barely making ends meet despite a second job at a car wash. White discovers that he has inoperable lung cancer, and realizes that between insurance costs and the financial demands of his loved ones, he needs to make some serious cash to provide for his family – and fast. Through a series of events he discovers that Jesse, one of his former students, cooks crystal meth, and after discovering the staggering financial potential in the trade, he blackmails the kid into dealing him into the business.

Cranston's take on a man pushed beyond the limits of reason and sanity is nothing short of brilliant. Despite the controversial premise of a show centering on a man using his chem skills to cook up the purest crystal meth in town, Cranston brings exactly the right level of desperate, subtle humor to his character, conveying White's meticulous, anal-retentive mannerisms with precision. Cooking meth in an RV in tighty-whities in the middle of the desert may be a horrible plan, but his intentions are entirely selfless (by the way, he's in his underwear to protect his clothes from toxic meth fumes - it's just a shame that they blow away in the wind).

Breaking Bad doesn't glamorize the drug trade or minimize the danger. White's misadventures with Jesse lead to deadly complications, and we're never allowed to forget how hard it is to kill, or to dispose of the dead. This isn't a laugh-a-minute kind of adventure where the protagonist is an existential punchline. He is a desperate, dying man cooking drugs in a gas mask and his underwear in the desert. It's as fucked up as any stretch of the Coen Brothers' imagination, and AMC deserves credit for taking a risk like this.