One who doesn't spend time with family is no man! (Don Corleone)

Breaking Bad (Mini-Series, Seasons 1-5; 2008 - 2013)

What do you do when you are stuck in a job where nobody gives two hoots to what you are saying? You are obviously overqualified when you see your contemporaries swift you by in their Bentleys and flaunt their wealth through their garden parties while you stand agape. These people were your partners and had started together. Look and them and where are you? To top it up, the students you teach do not bother what you are trying to impart. They think you are a fool. They believe their wealthy parents would see them through life. 

While they drive around in their spanking new SUVs, sponsored by their parents, you have to break your back trying to make ends meet with a second job!

Then, there is the co-brother-in-law working in the DEA (Drugs Enforcement Administration), who rattles on about these busts and the obscene amount of cash stashed by these law-breaking uneducated vermins of society.

Mr Walter White, chemistry teacher.

Then, you have a bout of paroxysmal coughing during one of the back-breaking sessions, which lays you unconscious. You are sent to the emergency ward. One thing leads to another. You, a 50-year-old non-smoker, are diagnosed with stage 3 inoperable lung cancer.

You are dazed. The only thing that comes to your mind is your family - your 7-month pregnant 40-year-old wife with the surprise unplanned baby, your spastic teenage son who was born with cerebral palsy and their long future without you and without savings. So you wear a perpetual frown on your face and walk through like a zombie with bouts of reflections on life.

You follow your co-brother-in-law in one of his hauls, and what do you see? Your former student making a back door escape from DEA. Then, something strikes you! You are a Chemistry graduate teaching a bunch of non-interested spoilt brats. Why not put your knowledge to good use for your family? It ain't rocket science. And that is when the main character of this mini-series, Mr Walter White, decided to cook high-quality methamphetamines for quick cash before his Maker takes him back. He does all this with the marketing effort of a junkie wayward rich kid and ex-student, Jesse Pinkman, simultaneously as Walt undergoes chemotherapy.

This hush-hush agenda is the background of an interestingly addictive saga with elements of crime drama, suspense, dark humour, the good musical score of a 50-year old Chemistry teacher who has to battle advanced lung cancer and ensure that his family is taken care of after his absence. In the process, he has to cover his track of illicit business and ill-gotten gains. But, more often than not, he only has to dodge the suspicions of his alert wife and the dog-eat-dog world of illegal drugs.

There are more moments of comic relief as the two characters of different generations and intelligence get things going off the ground! But, if you looking for cute characters with a flamboyant change of clothes and sleazy affairs, this one is not for you. After all, the main character is a 50-year-old bald man with a pregnant wife, a spastic son with slurred speech, an oversized cop who looks like 'The Thing' from Fantastic Four' and many drug addicts and baddies, set in the non-picturesque desert-like surrounding of Albuquerque, New Mexico,. And the poetic street lingo...yo!