“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.
Walt became Gollum.