Walter White is a chemistry genius but works as a chemistry teacher at a high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His life drastically changes when he's diagnosed with stage III terminal lung cancer and given a prognosis of two years to live. To ensure that his pregnant wife and disabled teenage son have a financial future, he uses his chemistry background to create and sell the world's finest crystal methamphetamine. To sell his signature 'blue meth,' he teams up with Jesse Pinkman, a former student of his. The meth makes them very rich very quickly, but it attracts the attention of his DEA brother-in-law, Hank. As Walter and Jesse's status in the drug world escalates, Walter becomes a dangerous criminal, and Jesse becomes a hot-headed salesman. Hank is always hot on his tail, forcing Walter to devise new ways to cover his tracks.
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During the filming of 'Grilled,' Raymond Cruz (Tuco) threw Aaron Paul through a screen door so hard that Paul cracked his head on the frame and briefly blacked out. Cruz thought he was still acting and kept the scene going until a medic stepped in.
While a Marvel production was shooting nearby, Samuel L. Jackson wandered onto the Los Pollos Hermanos set fully dressed as Nick Fury and asked if he could sit in the background as a joke cameo. Vince Gilligan had to turn him down — no Nick Fury eating fried chicken while Walt and Gus have their standoff, sadly.
The wardrobe on this show is never random. In the pilot, Walt swaps his beige clothes for a green apron the moment he starts cooking meth for the first time — green being the show's colour for money and transformation. It's basically the visual moment he starts becoming someone else.
That half-burned pink teddy bear that keeps turning up after the plane crash is loaded with meaning. Fans generally read the bear's missing eye as a stand-in for Walt's own moral blind spot — he only ever seems to notice the damage he causes when it's impossible to ignore.
The 2007 Writers' Guild strike hit right as the show was getting off the ground, chopping the first season down to just seven episodes and forcing a much more abrupt ending than originally planned.
Cranston wasn't just carrying the show as an actor — he stepped behind the camera too, directing three episodes across the series. His directorial debut was Season 2's 'Seven Thirty-Seven,' and he later directed the Season 3 premiere as well.
When Vince Gilligan was shopping the idea around, he summed up the entire concept in one line: a mild-mannered chemistry teacher turning into Scarface. Somehow that tiny pitch became one of the most acclaimed shows of the century.
While he was still playing Walter White on Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston actually auditioned for the role of Jerry Smith. He lost out to Chris Parnell, which honestly feels like the universe course-correcting, because it's very hard to imagine Heisenberg's voice coming out of Rick and Morty's most useless dad.
Dan Harmon has said the whole concept behind Pickle Rick was directly inspired by the Breaking Bad episode 4 Days Out, where Walt and Jesse get stranded in the desert and have to survive using nothing but their wits and whatever junk is lying around. Swap the desert for a sewer full of rats and you've basically got Rick's version of the same survival story.
