I admit that the majority of my unsavory pals would cheerfully take all of their clothing off in a grocery store for pretty much any reason at all. The partners of those in relationships would not think stripping down in a public place was indicative of anything out of the ordinary. Episode 203 of Breaking Bad, “Bit by a Dead Bee”, explores what happens if you live the sort of life where people do not get naked in food establishments. And then you step outside that world where everyone feels they know what to expect.

On Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston’s Walter White character neglects to mention to his wife when he decides that a dead high school chemistry teacher’s financial potential will be insufficient to care for his family. He neglects to mention to his wife that he might be earning supplemental cash by, ya know, cooking disturbingly high quality methamphetamine and putting his fine mind to figuring out how to distribute to the appropriate drug dealer meth channels without getting murdered or brutalized.

Is not telling his wife what he is up to in his final months before he is likely to succumb to cancer avoiding intimacy? Or are there spaces in one’s existence where it is important to be distinct from one’s partner and autonomous?

Would you fake a psychotic break with public nudity in order to avoid exposing a secret to your family members or romantic partners? If you got starkers inside a large local store, would anyone you know believe this might be indicative of a psychotic break, stepping down the path to madness? Or would that behavior just seem like everything was pretty normal?

Breaking Bad airs tonight on AMC. AMC is free with basic cable.

Do you feel having loved ones makes you stronger of more vulnerable? In “Grilled”, episode 202 of Breaking Bad, hopped-up tweaker drug lord Tuco tells high-school-chemistry-teacher-cum-meth-chemist that he likes doing business with a family man because there is a lot of collateral. My immediate thought is that the fastest way to conquer Tuco would be through his wheelchair-bound beloved uncle Tio. Walter White feels vulnerable and motivated to go along with the abusive drug dealer Tuco, largely out of a desire to protect his own family and his former student/drug dealing partner Jesse Pinkman. He has cancer, so he is less fearful for his own life.

Regarding the cancer, Walt did not want to undergo chemo and such, but he agreed to the unpleasant treatments because most of his loved ones asked him to do so. He may live longer and even better knowing he is loved and wanting to take the time to build a nest egg for his wife, son, and baby on the way. He may live longer and even better for undergoing the chemotherapy.

Walt keeps a second cell phone, one his wife is unaware of, for the purpose of conducting his drug business. He keeps his wife in the dark, partly out of a desire to protect her, and partly out of a desire to appear to be who she sees him as. On the one hand, his wife’s love sustains him and gives his life meaning, but, on the other, his relationship with her leads him to deception and perhaps lead him to a place where he was a high school chemistry teacher eking out a living and not a high rolling research scientist. Perhaps his love for his wife and family lead him to a place where he is manufacturing and selling brilliantly flawless methamphetamine.

I think that a person should choose who to love, partly via an accounting of who, on average or on overall accounting, makes them a better and more fulfilled person than would otherwise be the case. Love makes a person vulnerable in some areas, but real love should make a person stronger in the final analysis. I think.

I’m really looking forward to tonight’s episode of Breaking Bad on AMC.

Breaking Bad is about choices, consequences, and regret. Breaking Bad is about the importance of learning and the application of wisdom. The second season of Breaking Bad starts at 10pm Sunday March 8. If you have not seen the first season yet, you’ve still got time to catch it on On Demand. The pilot episode from season one is available on AMCTV. The basic plot line has mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher Walt White, played by Bryan Cranston, getting into the drug trade with an assist from an overgrown juvenile delinquent former student Jesse Pinkman, played by Aaron Paul, but the clever and beautiful cinematography and the deft characterization and plotting in the writing and the pitch perfect acting all come together to make Breaking Bad so much more than just a fish out of water story. Not that the fish out of water aspect doesn’t get some terrific laughs. Don’t worry because, in addition to ruminations on the meaning of life and self-determination, Breaking Bad also features funny parts, explosions, and fight scenes. Additionally, Emmy winner and CSI alum Michael Slovis does an incredible job as director of photography with the look and feel of the show.

Some of the most entertaining moments are when the expectation is that one character will handle a situation and it turns out that someone else is better suited. But, when you think about, the less obvious character really does have the better skill set. Jesse is charismatic, intelligent, and witty at first glance, but he is weak and having blown off school has limited his options, even as a meth dealer. Walt is retiring and seems more weak and less charismatic at first glance, but he has a more iron core, the sense of responsibility which comes from his loving if overbearing family, and the strength, freedom, and feeling of being on one’s last chance which come from knowing that his lung cancer is probably a death sentence. A lot of it is contextual. A head shaved for chemo can look small and tragic in one context and badass and not to be trifled with in another. Actor Bryan Cranston, once best known as Hal on Malcom in the Middle, won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for his nuanced portrayal of Walter H. White. As things play out, one realizes that Bryan Cranston’s Walt once had a promising and potentially lucrative research career. In the first season, we don’t know yet whether his partners did anything off or if he walked away to start a family or otherwise take the path to a very ordinary life. So, even before finding out he was most likely dying, Walt felt that melancholy creeping sense of being at a stage of life where the questions start sounding less like “what if” and more like “if only”. In a way, the story is about a mid-life crisis ratcheted up to maximum volume, but communicated in a manner which is sympathetic, poetic, and ultimately empowering.

Jesse might be a little lazy and not know his chemistry as well as would be ideal for the local methamphetamine aficionados and he might not be the best at standing up to alpha personalities except in an ineffectual smartass fashion, but he is young and there is clearly potential there. Aaron Paul, as Jesse, and Bryan Cranston play off one another well. The only things I’ve ever seen Aaron Paul in are an episode of CSI and Sleeper Cell where he played Teen #1, but he has guested on like half the shows on television and most notably has an important recurring role on HBO’s Big Love and is appearing in Last House on the Left, directed by Wes Craven which opens this coming week. With Jesse’s character the show becomes not just about middle-aged regrets, but about all the little choices we make all along and all the little deaths by regret we experience. Having the spectrum of Jesse to Walt makes the story very universal.

You can check out Walt, Jesse, Walt’s overbearing but loving wife frustrated writer Skyler White, Skyler’s competitive shoplifer sister Marie, Marie’s super-overbearing macho but well-meaning DEA agent husband Hank Schrader, and Walt and Skyler’s son Walter Jr. who, despite having cerebral palsy, seems far more well-adjusted and content than many of the other characters, on AMC March 8 Sunday at 10pm or later on On Demand. X-Files alum Vince Gilligan created the offbeat Breaking Bad and is credited as having both written and executive produced 20 episodes of the show, so I’m guessing we’ll get to enjoy a third season as well. The other executive producer on the show is Oscar-winner Mark Johnson who has worked on such a large string of hits and great movies that it almost seems like overkill, including Galaxy Quest, Diner, Kafka, Rain man, Donnie Brasco, Home Fries, Narnia, the list goes on.

AMC stands for American Movie Classics because they got their start inexpensively licensing old classic films, but, wow, when AMC decided to get into producing original television, they kicked things off producing two of the best shows ever made by any network with Mad Men and Breaking Bad. I can’t imagine a more impressive start. AMC produced some of the best shows on television last year.

I did not have a television for many years. Then, when I had one, it was only used to play videotapes; I didn’t even know for sure whether it failed to get reception or I’d never tried to get any on there. In the process of getting myself the Hell out of Georgia, I hocked the aforementioned television and used the proceeds for moving expenses (paying off a truck tow driver not to tow away the moving truck cab with almost everything I was moving inside.) I did not miss my hocked television.

But then they invented TiVo, On Demand, UnBox, instant download, renting DVDs by mail, and high quality TV shows with long, complex, and well-written story arcs. My two biggest objections to television in the past were always that (1) I couldn’t see planning my schedule around when a television show was on and (2) I’m not exactly the average person, so I was pretty sure that no show aimed at the lowest common denominator was likely to appeal to me.

The Sopranos sucked me in on DVD and I watched the first few years in an absolute orgy of television consumption. Even though The Sopranos often dropped whatever storyline had made me push play on the next episode, the show was still a whole lot of cuts above what I thought of television as capable of being. Prior to The Sopranos, my mobster fetish had only been satisfied by movies and real life.

Since then, I’ve come to strongly prefer the format of the long cable drama over all other video media. It’s funny that I don’t even really know what the name for it ought to be, but it is definitely a new structure for story-telling, one which allows for the communication of much more complex and interesting stories. Some of my favorite shows in this emergent form are the Weeds tales of a suburban widow-cum-drug-dealer who maintains her style of life and Dexter’s introspective serial killer and The Tudors with the sexiest retelling ever of the monarchy of King Henry VIII, all on Showtime. On AMC, I’m currently watching Breaking Bad which is about a middle-aged chemistry teacher who learns he has terminal cancer and starts cooking meth and I’m looking forward to the return of Mad Men about a poor Jewish orphan who reinvents himself as a WASPy philandering Madison Avenue executive. Don’t get me wrong; the complex cable drama has some wretched shows in that format too. The politico and mobster show Brotherhood on Showtime is so over-acted with such heavy-handed writing that it is painful to watch. HBO’s bigamist Mormons with sinister associations show Big Love is unwatchable unless you are far far more titillated by unconventional sexual relationships than I am. But, on the overall, this is a pretty awesome format.

And then there is The Wire. The Wire is pretty much the absolute perfection of the form. The first season was all about a successful street drug distribution organization. It was gripping and both police and gangsters were written, acted, and directed so well that the viewer truly felt like they were real people. Then they switched to the potentially less glamourous dockworkers the second season and they made it work, made that gripping too. Today is the last episode of The Wire. Creator David Simon, frequent collaborator Ed Burns, and the rest of the impressive Wire team have done such a good job up until now that I accept that the series was ready to come to a close. They told the story. It took five seasons to tell it, but, unlike a sitcom where nothing changes, the various characters have had their story arcs at this point. They’ve told us what they came to tell.

I’ve seen a number of bloggers jumping up and down about how The Wire deserves an Emmy and how everyone should tune in for the final episode. I have a couple thoughts on that. Firstly, HBO broadcast two half hour specials comprised of clips from the show and interviews with the cast and crew who were clearly supposed to be pushing the agenda of getting The Wire an Emmy. The show is brilliantly written and a cynical Angeleno might speculate that maybe their Baltimore shooting location has contributed to them not winning so far. Personally, I couldn’t tell you when the Emmies are or name three shows which have won one for writing. I bet the bloggers demanding an Emmy for The Wire couldn’t either. But it is good to know that HBO is taking care of their people after five seasons of excellence.

Lastly, if you have not been watching The Wire so far, do not start now. Or at least do not start with the finale. The thing about a complex story is that it can’t be told or comprehended in one hour. The last 59 episodes are not available for instant download or On Demand customers, but the first four seasons can be rented or purchased on DVD. I recommend starting at the beginning and getting the whole story. By the time you finish watching through the fourth season, with its focus on education, maybe the current season, examining the role of media, will be out on DVD.

I don’t usually like to schedule around television. Ever really. But I’m pretty sure we are now about a quarter of an hour into the East Coast showing of The Wire finale and my TiVo has been picking it up for me. And I want to watch it before the entire internet starts posting spoilers.