‘Breaking Bad’ family man breaks law in name of love

When the girls of “90210” don’t eat, it no longer has much to do with vanity. Angelina Jolie made it through the entire Academy Awards without adopting a single member of the “Slumdog Millionaire” cast. And if things don’t improve soon, actual celebrities may find themselves on “The Celebrity Apprentice.”

Then there’s Walt White (Bryan Cranston) on “Breaking Bad” (10 p.m. today, AMC). He just turned 50. His wife is seven months pregnant. His teenage son has cerebral palsy. He makes $43,700 a year as a high school chemistry teacher. And he works part time at a car wash to help pay the bills. So when he’s diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and given mere months to live, he does what any good family man would — he sets up a rolling meth lab.

Walt’s just looking out for his loved ones, breaking the law only so he can support them like some modern Jean Valjean, minus the elaborate musical numbers. In tonight’s second season premiere, he figures his family will need $737,000 to get by without him, and once he earns that, he’s out.

The idea is genius, really. Walt has the chemistry background, not to mention the access to rare flasks and beakers, to make some of the purest crystal anyone’s ever seen. You have to think the only reason there haven’t been hundreds of real-life copycats is that so few people even know the series exists.

The writers strike cut its first season in half, and “Breaking Bad” was off the air before many viewers had the chance to discover it. But during its brief, seven-episode run, Walt graduated from cooking a couple of ounces to unleashing a homemade explosive in a rival dealer’s headquarters and becoming a burgeoning kingpin.

He got in deeper, quicker, than Nancy Botwin on Showtime’s “Weeds,” his closest challenger in cable’s unlikeliest dealer competition.

He also ended up on the law enforcement radar faster, but somehow has managed to stay one methodical step ahead of his DEA agent brother-in-law (Dean Norris), not to mention his ever-more-suspicious wife (Anna Gunn), despite a series of how’s-he-gonna-get-out-of-this close calls.

But Walt isn’t in this alone. He reconnected with Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), a former student with first-hand knowledge of the drug trade. Because, as the white-boy-rapper type tells him, “You may know a lot about chemistry, man, but you don’t know jack about slingin’ dope.”

Their’s in an uneasy alliance, separated by age, outlook and Jesse’s overreliance on the word “yo.” And master criminals they are not: Their first attempt at selling their product left one dealer dead in Walt’s RV and another chained by his neck, waiting to die, in Jesse’s basement.

That debacle led to yet another chance for Jesse to learn from Walt, whom he still, despite their criminal undertakings, calls Mr. White.

When it came time to dispose of the dealer, Walt told his partner to put the body in a plastic tub and dissolve it in acid. Only Jesse skipped one crucial step, doing the deed in his bathtub instead. After an ominous creaking sound, the ceiling opened up and let loose gallons upon gallons of blood, guts and chunky bits like some sort of gangbanger stew. “You see, hydrofluoric acid won’t eat through plastic,” Walt patiently explained. “It will, however, dissolve metal, rock, glass, ceramic … .”

It was a rare moment of excess for the intimate, sparse drama. Unlike its sister series “Mad Men’s” attention to period detail — The clothes! The hair! The Princess phones! — that often threatens to overshadow both the actors and the script, much of “Breaking Bad” would work just as well as a theater piece in front of nothing more elaborate than a black curtain.

That’s largely due to the meticulous dialogue and the quiet desperation Cranston brings to Walt. During his years as the beleaguered dad on “Malcolm in the Middle,” Cranston developed a reputation as a fine comedic actor. But his “Breaking Bad” performance has been a revelation. It’s TV’s most stunning transformation since Michael Chiklis rebuilt himself from the ground up for “The Shield.”

And, like Chiklis, Cranston was rewarded handsomely for it.

I rarely pay much attention to the Emmys, since the results usually make about as much sense as the banter between presenters. (Ed Asner and Hayden Panettiere are in the same Pilates class? You don’t say!)

But voters’ rewarding Cranston’s little-seen performance over the likes of “House’s” Hugh Laurie, “Boston Legal’s” three-time winner James Spader and “Mad Men’s” pop-culture phenom Jon Hamm was the biggest and most welcome upset since Chiklis’ win back in 2002. It was the award-show equivalent of a bachelor on Bravo’s “The Millionaire Matchmaker” picking the age appropriate woman with the great personality over the double-jointed bisexual lingerie model.

It was a beautiful moment.

And it proved once again that crime — even with the noblest of intentions — really does pay.

Christopher Lawrence’s Life on the Couch column appears on Sundays. E-mail him at clawrence@reviewjournal.com.