SERIELAND COULISSE - To make sure he is credible while not allowing his viewers to synthesize methamphetamine, the creator of "Breaking Bad" called on agents from the DEA, the American agency in charge of the fight against drugs.
PODCAST
A spiraling chemistry teacher, a perfectly tied scenario and top actors ... This week, in SERIELAND, Clémence Olivier takes you behind the scenes of the "Breaking Bad" series
In the series, the teachers are often people apart.
They are mentors, executioners, confidants.
They are idealized, or ridiculed ... Me, there is a teacher who particularly marked me, he is a chemistry teacher in a high school in the State of New Mexico, in the United States.
His name is Walter White.
He's the hero of
Breaking Bad.
Breaking Bad
is a series launched in 2008 that quickly became cult. It tells the story of a chemistry teacher, Walter White, played by actor Bryan Cranston, who spins when he finds out he has incurable lung cancer. To prevent his family from going without money after his death, he uses his knowledge of chemistry to manufacture and sell drugs: "crystal meth". And to make it happen, he enlists one of his former students, Jesse.
Walter White is awesome.
In his makeshift laboratory in a trailer, he handles chemicals like no one else.
He perfectly masters the dosages and predicts the reactions of organic matter.
We see it weighing, mixing methanol, phosphorus, filtering, distilling, letting it settle… It's very realistic!
However, if you were wondering, you will never learn to manufacture drugs thanks to the anti hero of
Breaking Bad.
DEA agents and a chemistry teacher
In fact, if you try to make HIS recipe for crystal meth, you might have some trouble!
Well, already because it's totally illegal;
but also because Vince Gilligan, the creator of the series, made sure that the steps taken by Walter White in Breaking Bad do not result in getting hard drugs at the end of the course!
To make sure he was credible while not allowing his viewers to synthesize methamphetamine, he called in agents from the DEA, the US agency in charge of the fight against drugs.
These experts, who dismantle illegal drug labs across the country, have helped him both to make the kitchen scenes realistic but above all to erase certain key stages in the creation of crystal meth.
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So ok, Walter White will never teach you how to make drugs, but he's a very good chemistry teacher nonetheless. I'm not saying it, it's Donna Nelson, a chemist with the American Chemical Society. She was hired from the first seasons as scientific advisor on the series. In an interview on American public radio NPR, she explains how she gave the hero of the series scientific thickness. His role was to read the scenarios and complete them so that the chemistry shown on the screen was as precise as possible.
And that's not all.
In the series, the scenes with a table and chemical formulas scribbled on them, well she also imagined them!
Proof that if
Breaking Bad
remains a fiction, it still offers viewers an original initiation to the main principles of chemistry!
breaking Bad
It's a series in 5 seasons, 62 episodes
They are all available on Netflix