Faustian pact

When my kids grow up, I want them to go to university and read chemistry. That way they will have the skills to manufacture high-class crystal meth (or similar), make lots and lots of money and keep their father in the style to which of late he has become unaccustomed.

I got the idea for this, some of you will have guessed, from Breaking Bad — probably the most brilliant series to come out of the US (or anywhere else) since The Sopranos. Its hero is Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a middle-aged high school chemistry teacher from Albuquerque, New Mexico who realises — as we all do eventually — that his talents have gone unrewarded, he’s never going to make any real money, his friends are doing so much better and all that lies ahead of him is mediocrity, drudgery and decline.

Just when things can’t get any worse, they do. Walt discovers he has terminal lung cancer, so that in a matter of months he’ll be leaving his (extremely hot, blonde) wife, his delightful, cerebral palsy-afflicted teenage son and his as-yet-unborn surprise baby husbandless/fatherless and penniless. Then Walt hits on a cunning plan: he will team up with one of his failed students Jesse and reinvent himself as a drug baron, manufacturing and dealing the world’s most powerfully addictive drug.

If it sounds like the premise of a fun, offbeat and slightly implausible movie, you’ve reckoned without the genius of series creator Vince Gilligan. What would, in less deft hands, have burned out after two hours in a cinema has instead been stretched so far to a mammoth five seasons of HBO drama as rich and complex and intelligent and satisfying as anything I’ve ever seen on TV.