Breaking Bad, season 1

Walter White is fifty, underpaid, and working a car wash on top of teaching high-school chemistry when a scan finds lung cancer he cannot afford to treat. What he decides to do about it is not tell his family - it is to find a former student, Jesse Pinkman, who already knows the trade, and offer a partnership: Walt cooks, Jesse sells.

The first cook produces the purest product anyone in the state has seen, and the first sale goes wrong immediately. The season's spine is the two of them discovering, body by body, what the business actually costs. A man dies in the basement because letting him go is not survivable. Walt says a name out loud - Heisenberg - to a man named Tuco, who is volatile in ways that make every meeting a coin flip.

At home, Skyler knows something is wrong and keeps being handed smaller lies. Hank, her brother-in-law, is a DEA agent working - without knowing it - the very product his brother-in-law makes.

It ends with the operation working: a distributor, a price, a supply arrangement sealed in a junkyard. Walt has told himself it is all for the family, and by the last hour the claim is already wearing thin.