I've heard people rave about it. Sounds like a tale with a tragic ending to me, but I don't even know how it ended, when? Last week sometime?
I’ve also never watched the show, but now I want to. Aside from possibly the final season, the entire series is available on DVD.
Basically, this brilliant chemist teacher finds out he has cancer and only has a few months to live. With nothing to leave behind for his family, he decides to use his chemistry skills to cook meth (with a former student of his) for the short time he has remaining before he dies, so that he can leave behind some money for his teenage son and pregnant wife.
Every day he finds himself deeper in the culture and more involved and unable to escape the downward spiral. I can’t say much more without ruining some of the fun, but I HIGHLY recommend it.
I had heard people raving about Breaking Bad, so I DVR’d all 61 episodes on AMC’s BB Marathon last week. I was hooked after the first episode and found myself watching BB from 7 am to midnight for several days. It was awesome.
“I dunno... I’ve never watched it either. I’ve heard it’s about some high school chemistry teacher who loses his job so he becomes a meth maker and dealer.”
He didn’t lose his job. He finds out he has lung cancer, and decides he needs to provide for his family because the bills are skyrocketing and he is afraid by the time he dies his family will be bankrupt. His brother in law is a DEA agent, so he sees first hand how much money is involved in meth, and he believes he can simply make a few batches before getting caught before he dies, and make enough to set the family up for life. He believes he can get away with it since he has so little time. He also has a little of a pride issue as he somehow got screwed out of a very profitable business earlier in his career, so he believes he should be rich anyway.
So, he gets into cooking meth, and from the very first cook,things go horrifically awry, and he is forced to do some very horrific things. The more horrific things he does, it becomes easier to do horrific things again as he becomes desensitized to them. Also, his product, is unprecedented in its quality and purity, which feeds his pride. We watch, an originally sympathetic character fall ever deeper into the abyss and watch as his choices destroy first himself, and then his entire family (the very things he was trying to protect). At the end of the fall, he is almost pure evil. And every single thing he had previously chrerished is utterly and irrevocably destroyed.
It is raw, violent, and at times brutal, but if you have a strong stomach, it is pretty much a classic greek tragedy to the nth degree written for the modern times.