Even as a single hour-long story, Breaking Bad's pilot episode would make for a brilliant short film. It begins with a man in an RV wearing nothing but a gas mask and tighty whities. He's frantically driving through the desert, clearing condensation off his gas mask to see, until he crashes his Winnebago into a ditch. When he hears sirens in the distance, he records a video message to his family, grabs a gun, and points it down the empty dirt road.
That's just the first minute and a half.
Act one begins with a day in the life of Walter White, a brilliant chemist trapped in a monotonous and passionless life as a high school teacher who is marginalized and bullied by his family, colleagues, and students. Then, when Walter White collapses, it moves into act two, where, as an analysis from "Lessons From the Screenplay" points out, it follows this formula: "The protagonist's life is turned upside-down when X happens, so they decide to do Y."
In this pilot, White has lung cancer, so he decides to make meth to pay for his medical bills and provide financially for his family. So, in act three, White changes: He steals from his school, he beats the shit out of some dumb teens in a store. Then, finally, he's actually making the meth, and we find out what brings him to the situation the show teased to in the opening of the episode.
This, of course, was only the beginning to one of the greatest shows of all time. And creator Vince Gilligan only went on to craft 61 more perfect episodes.
