Funny and serious

Earth (the book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race is put together by the writing staff for The Daily Show on Comedy Central and is a tongue-in-cheek textbook-style format encyclopedia of sorts designed to explain to our future alien overlords just what they’re looking at when they finally arrive on this planet and start scratching their heads, wondering just what the hell we were doing here. If you’re into that sort of humor, this is pretty funny.

Breaking Bad is here to illustrate that sometimes things can be so completely different that they should, by rights, be in separate reviews, but clearly that isn’t happening.

If you remember Hal (Brian Cranston) from Malcolm in the Middle, your first order of business with Breaking Bad is to somehow extricate that character from your brain matter, possibly using a spoon if needed. The character of Walter White (Cranston again) is the polar opposite of the cheerful and misguided goofball from Malcolm. His performance here goes to show his chops as a truly superb actor. Walter is a genius chemist, and since I’m fairly early in the series, I don’t have the full background on the guy, but he’s a Nobel Prize winning chemist who, through events, is relegated to teaching high school chemistry in New Mexico. His meager earnings set the wheels to hell a rollin’ when he learns he has terminal lung cancer. Right around this time he also learns that his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) is pregnant, and they already have a nearly-grown child, Walter Jr. (RJ Mitte) at home with cerebral palsy. Feeling cornered with no way to provide for the long-term future of his family once he’s gone, he “break’s bad” by getting into the underground world of producing methamphetamine with a former student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul). Being a chemist, he has quite a knack for making high quality stuff, but his DEA Agent brother-in-law Hank Schrader (Dean Norris) makes for some awkward and tense moments when he’s explaining bits to Walter about some of the new meth they’re seeing crop up.

The show is intense, and so far the acting and character development are great. Definitely not kid friendly, but well worth a watch if you enjoy a good crime thriller.