Watching the success of the television show “Breaking Bad” has been a guilty pleasure for the chemical industry. It is a show that wows audiences by explaining how a battery can be jury rigged with potassium hydroxide and spare change, and how hydrofluoric acid eats through bone but not plastic.
With an eye for the smallest technical details, “Breaking Bad” has made it cool to like chemistry again. That explains in part why chemical industry executives, academics and shareholders are addicted. The show chronicles the downward spiral of Walter White, a 50-something high school chemistry teacher in the throes of a mid-life crisis who is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. To leave a nest egg for his wife and two children, White, who is played by actor Bryan Cranston, uses his chemistry knowledge to make and sell methamphetamine, an addictive street drug also known as crystal meth.
More than 1.6 million people watched the third-season finale in June 2010, solid numbers for any cable show.
White and cohort Jesse Pinkman, played by fellow Emmy winner Aaron Paul, return this Sunday for the fourth season of “Breaking Bad.” Some members of the $674 billion U.S. chemical industry are cautious about professing their love for such a dark show. A senior executive at a major chemical producer raved privately about the show.
But the executive did not want to talk openly about “Breaking Bad,” worrying that liking a show about crystal meth might not gel with the broader public. For Donna Nelson, an adviser to “Breaking Bad” and an organic chemistry professor at the University of Oklahoma, the show does anything but make crystal meth look cool.
“I don’t think it’s glamorizing the drug industry at all, or that anybody would walk away from the show thinking, ‘Yeah that’s how I want to live,'” said Nelson, who has a cameo appearance in the fourth season as a nursing home aide. Nor does “Breaking Bad” tell viewers how to make crystal meth. Different sequences of more than one process to make the drug are used in the show, Nelson said. “It’s like putting the head of the horse on the tail of a tiger,” she said. “There’s no way that anybody could follow what’s on television and have an authentic synthesis.”
What it does do, she said, is get more people excited about chemistry. Nelson organized a panel on science and television at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting last March. When writers from “Breaking Bad” showed up to give the keynote speech, they met a standing-room-only crowd. “For decades, chemists have been wringing our hands about how we could reach the general public,” Nelson said. “Lo and behold, we get a prime-time television show.”
