Atomic Nerds

Yeah, you can pretty much tell from the timestamp I got nothin’. Again. So in the interests of somethin’, yet another “you should totally be watching this” pimp post. Most of what’s on TV follows Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is crud”), but we keep watching for the other ten percent.

Breaking Bad, coming out of, surprisingly enough, AMC. The premise is not particularly promising; the basic plot is that a high school chemistry teacher who’s led a very dull and overall “safe” life and has a recently pregnant wife, a teenage kid, and some debt issues is told that he has terminal cancer and maybe a year left to live. Desperate for something to leave his family, he starts cooking meth, with all the purity and potency someone with actual chemistry lab skills can apply. Hijinks ensue.

Like I said, not a terribly promising premise. What it has going for it are acting, and writing. The lead is played by Bryan Cranston, who had previously achieved such lofty dramatic heights as the bumbling dad on Malcolm In The Middle; he seems out to prove he’s been hideously underused, and he seems to be living up to it. The rest of the cast are not quite as standout, but they’re all good enough to convey quite a lot with slight changes in expression or tone, and very believably. Instead of the standard TV Clenched Jaw and dramatic music, scenes that are meant to be intense actually come across as intense enough to be unnerving to the viewer. The music itself, while used, is never made to do the work of conveying the emotion of the scene and instead exists to speed along show-don’t-tell scenes that would otherwise be relatively boring.

The writers themselves seem to be largely folks who made their bones in the X-Files showing what they can do when they don’t have to write in service of Chris Carter’s last weed-and-cheetos binge. While it’s possible to see the basic outlines of the plot just as a logical outgrowth of the premise, things vary between funny, tense, and dark as appropriate, and while the series starts off seeming like more of a black comedy than anything, things get very black at points without remotely veering into wangst or narm territory. What I like best is the characters- while we’re quite obviously meant to be most interested in the lead, even characters that initially seem one-dimensional or living plot devices get far more development than even the main characters in some series. It’s also nice in that we’re not necessarily meant to sympathize or demonize anyone just based on whether they’re likable or not; very often people that are profoundly unlikeable are on the right side of a central point of contention, or people we’ve been sympathizing with the entire time are deeply in the wrong. No plot-induced stupidity or out-of-characterness seems in sight.

Happily from our perspective, it’s also deeply local- it’s set and filmed in Albuquerque, and they go to tremendous pains to get everything right. Occasionally they jumble geographic details, but the local culture is spot on and we quite often spot examples shot in locations very familiar. Even tiny details such as last names that are common among native-born hispanics here but nowhere else in the US are attended to.

I don’t care for many dramas, because for the most part they can’t tell what’s dramatic and what’s just plain stupid, as well as the difference between someone who happens to be the protagonist and someone who is actually interesting on any level to follow. I do like this one, very much. If you want to see the genre done right, give this one a shot.

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