Breaking Bad, season 1

What I knew beforehand via fannish osmosis and enthusiastic media: the show's basic premise as laid out in the pilot (chemistry teacher, devoted husband and father, is diagnosed with third degree lung cancer, decides to solve financial situation by cooking meth), and that, as every article mentioning the show brings up, this is a story where over the course of several seasons the main character goes from hero the audience roots for to antihero to villain the audience is supposed to root against. This intrigued me, because while many a show gets that reaction for their main character inadvertendly (sometimes something yours truly finds unfair, sometimes something I understand), it's pretty daring to go for it deliberately. Not to mention that it could simply happen that no matter what crap the main character pulls, the audience, having once decided they love him, keeps on loving him (hello there, Tony Soprano), and/or they accuse the writers of writing him ooc and go into denial about canon. (Male form used deliberately. While there are a few female characters fandom responds to this way, they are very very rare, and it's more usual to condemm a female character for even a small percentage of the kind of behaviour that's generously accepted in a male.)

After finding out that the first season only has seven episodes, I decided to marathon it before rl takes me away on the road again. The resulting impression:

( beneath the spoilery cut )