KEY POINTS:
The first episode of Breaking Bad (C4, last night, 9.30pm) started with a man in awful underpants and tragic droopy socks, wielding a gun, in the middle of a desert, a crashed Winnebago behind him.
We already knew what his end was going to be: death from inoperable
lung cancer, for a man who has never smoked. Such is the luck of Walter White.
Walter (Bryan Cranston), with two dead crack dealers and a crack lab in his motorhome, looks like a particularly pathetic fugitive. His shirt - and it's hard to know why this makes him even more tragic - is tucked into the back of those appalling underpants. His moustache looks moth-eaten.
At home he has a pregnant wife who nags her dying husband (she doesn't know about his diagnosis) into taking echinacea for his cough, into eating vege bacon for his cholesterol.
Vege bacon, as their teenage boy says (he has cerebral palsy), tastes likes band aids.
They are middle-class American: he's a chemistry teacher; she wants to be a writer. Walter has no money and a second job at a car wash. Here he is, and this is degrading enough, supposed to run the till, but every shift involves his bully of a boss making him wash cars.
Walter is spared no humiliation. Neither are we. The cool kid from one of his classes, who belittles him as a teacher, takes his car to be washed. And there is Mr White, on his knees, shining hubcaps. This seemed the most humiliating moment of the night, and that's saying something.
We'd seen Walter, after his diagnosis, sitting by the dregs of the American dream: on his neglected deck, by the side of a slimy, nasty, plastic swimming pool lighting matches and throwing them into water where it's obvious nobody frolics.
We'd already seen what must be the most depressing, unsexy sex scene in the history of telly sex scenes: this involved his wife bidding in an online auction during the tedious act.
All of which should have added up to the bleakly unwatchable. So there has to be transformation. And, having dragged us all down with Walter, this has to be spectacular. Walter has to leave his family money so of course he becomes a meth cook.
He turns out to be an artist. His sidekick, Jessie, a former loser student, said: "This is art, Mr White ... You're the god damn Iron Chef!"
"Actually, it's just basic chemistry," Walter said.
And unlikely telly chemistry.
Will Walter turn out to be a hero? He wears beige and grey; he looks like death barely warmed up. He cooks P wearing a pinny. The real art, the chemistry, will be in making Walter turn himself into somebody he respects before he dies - so that we do too.
"Walter. Oh. Walter, is that you?" his wife gasped at the very end. Hours before she'd ticked him off for using a $15.88 credit card bill for printer paper. Now he's behaving in, well, quite a manly way. In those undies? So far the ride in the Winnebago has been worth even the price of having to see those jocks.