A mere decade behind everyone else, I am catching up with the US TV show Breaking Bad, which originally ran from 2008 to 2013. As some readers will doubtless be aware, the series follows the moral decline of Walter White, an intelligent but unfulfilled and somewhat embittered chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with terminal cancer on his 50th birthday. Ostensibly as a way of providing for his family after his death – his teenage son, Walter Junior, has cerebral palsy and his wife is pregnant – he uses his scientific knowledge to become a manufacturer of the dangerous illegal drug methamphetamine.