Review 373: Breaking Bad (Season 1)

Breaking Bad is far from easy watch but it's dark sense of humour, excellent writing and superb performances of Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul make it worth a watch.

Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is 50-year-old chemistry teacher who learns that he's dying of cancer. Desperate to secure the financial future of his family including his pregnant wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) and his disabled son Walter, Jr. (RJ Mitte), Walter teams up with a former student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) and together they secretly begin making crystallised meth to sell to potential buyers and support his family.

The plot is of this Season is fantastic. The writing is so intricate and detailed

At only 7 episodes in length, Breaking Bad is still quite an unbearably slow burner 

In a lot of ways, Breaking Bad is very much like a modern Western, the Albuquerque, New Mexico setting 

Directors Vince Gilligan (the showrunner), Adam Bernstein, Jim McKay, Tricia Brock, Bronwen Hughes and Tim Hunter's direction is  the cinematography is gorgeous and captures the exoticness of Albuquerque, New Mexico as well as its isolation from the rest of the world and  the score by Dave Porter is

Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul are stupendous as Walter White and Jesse Pinkman respectively. Their chemistry is extremely palatable and their relationship is a very interesting spin on a teacher student dynamic.
Jesse is not a bad kid by any means, he kind of a lost soul who's just gotten mixed in the wrong crowd

Anna Gunn is also very strong playing Skyler Walt's wife. Grounded, tough, smart and driven,

Another actor who's very good in this series is Dean Norris as Hank Schrader, Walter's Brother-in-Law who works as a DEA agent, Hank is one of those characters with a hard outside but a soft inside

One very notable guest star is Raymond Cruz as Tuco Salamanca, a Mexican drug kingpin who becomes Walter and Jesse's meth distributor. Unpredictable and prone to violent outbursts, Tuco is a one hell of a guy with a short fuse.