Breaking Bad - By Michael Lewitt

The AMC television series Breaking Bad tells the story of Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher who has a son with cerebral palsy, an unwanted daughter on the way, a lousy second job at a car wash, and then learns that he is going to die of cancer in a few months. With nothing to lose, desperate to provide a financial future for his family, Walt comes up with a devilish plan to put his scientific skills to use as a cooker of the purest methamphetamine in the Southwest. Of course he has a brother-in-law in the DEA and a new business partner who happens to have been one of his most recalcitrant high school students who manages to wear his guilt on his sleeve as he self-medicates himself through the moral jungle of the drug underworld that he and Walt inhabit. Over the course of the series, we watch Walt transform from a man who was ostensibly good into a man who discovers the evil that lies in the heart of Everyman as he does whatever is necessary to protect his new business and provide for his family – which in his new business often includes killing people. The damage initially affects those who deserve bad things to happen to them, but inevitably it starts reaching those who don’t.

One of the great characters in this complex drama is Walt’s wife, Skyler, who wrestles with what Walt is doing while trying to launder the money that it provides. Skyler has to provide adult supervision because one of Walt’s endearing traits is that he is an absent-minded professor and learning his criminal skills on the run. He is often his own worst enemy, which is when Skyler needs to step in and save him (and his family) from himself. At one point she delivers a line that could serve for the age we live in: “Someone has to protect this family from the man who protects this family.” With our largest business and government institutions - and the individuals running them - committing every conceivable act of legal or moral anomie, we have every right to ask who is going to protect the rest of us from those who have been entrusted with so much power and influence. The institutions that were supposed to be the lifeblood of our economy are the same institutions that inflicted the greatest harm on society – with ample assistance from the willful blindness or flat-out incompetence of the regulators. When the family has to be protected from the man who is supposed to protect the family, the family is in serious trouble.