BREAKING BAD

 “Breaking Bad” to AMC, he presented a mission statement, which amounted to a monumental spoiler: he would turn Mr. Chips into Scarface. The show’s protagonist was Walter White, a high-school chemistry teacher who had a wife, a disabled teen-age son, and a baby on the way. Given a diagnosis of late-stage lung cancer, Walt took up cooking meth to build a nest egg and, later on, to pay his medical bills. When faced with the dilemma of whether to kill a menacing thug, he scribbled down a panicked moral calculus. Con: “MURDER IS WRONG!” Pro: “He’ll kill your entire family if you let him go.”

Ah, those were the days. Nobody could fault Walt when he strangled Krazy-8 with a bicycle lock, only two hours into the series. If television shows have conversion moments, that was mine. This was back in the chaotic, improvisatory days of Walt’s entry into the drug business, when the acid he’d intended to dissolve a tattooed corpse ended up eating right through a bathtub, so that the “raspberry slushie” of those human remains seemed as though it might leave a stain on the whole world. In a way, it has. Each season, Walt has made far less justifiable choices, each one changing him, with a throb of arrogance here, a swell of egotism there. We’re deep in the Scarface stage; the hero of the show is now its villain. There are only ten episodes left, eight of them due next summer, a welcome deadline that has allowed Gilligan to shape his ending without the vamping that mars so many multi-season dramas. But, even if his show ends brilliantly, he’s already told us that it won’t end well.

Walt hasn’t been the only one making choices, of course; the audience has, too, particularly the choice to keep tuning in. “Breaking Bad” is an explicitly addictive series, full of cliffhangers, with a visual flair that is rare for television. (Its directors this season have included the independent-film auteur Rian Johnson.) At once humane and nastily funny, it is full of indelible characters, such as Jesse, Walt’s student turned tragic dupe, and Hank, Walt’s blustery brother-in-law, who works for the D.E.A. And yet, for all the show’s pleasures, its themes can be irredeemably grim, particularly now that the crutch of our sympathy for Walt has been yanked away. Each new episode arrives fraught with foreshadowing, with betrayal on the way—we know what has to happen, but not how. The show has shed its original skin, that of the antihero drama, in which we root for a bad boy in spite of ourselves. Instead, it’s more like the late seasons of “The Sopranos,” the first show that dared to punish its audience for loving a monster. This makes “Breaking Bad” a radical type of television, and also a very strange kind of must-watch: a show that you dread and crave at the same time.