A weekly recap of AMC’s Breaking Bad (Sundays at 10pm on AMC), now in its sophomore season, may seem like weird idea: The series, which centers on Walter White, a fiftyish high-school-chem-teacher-turned-meth-cook, is far bleaker than your typical watercooler fare, more so than other “smart” shows like The Sopranos or Mad Men (see for yourself in our video here). Walt (Emmy winner Bryan Cranston) is that all-too-familiar figure: the nobody who’s lived life as one long regret. He’s got terminal lung cancer and a complicated family. Who the hell would want to be him?

Well, not us, but the show is worth the ride. Walt and his partner-in-crime Jesse Pinkman (a loser and Walt’s ex-student) are always poised on the event horizon of catastrophe, making Breaking Bad not just a black comedy, but a black-hole comedy.

In the strike-shortened first season, we saw Walt and Jesse take their first calamitous foray into making and selling meth. As season two picks up, they’re mid-deal, watching meth distributor Tuco toss an underling’s body under a pile of rusted-out cars in a junkyard. Now convinced that they are “loose end” witnesses to murder, the two plot to off the psychopathic dealer before he kills them.

Walt and Jesse hatch a plan to slip Tuco a poisoned sample of meth. Unfortunately, before that can happen, all hell breaks lose when the cops discover the underling’s dead body alongside that of another of Tuco’s associates—who, having returned to give his homeboy a proper burial, got crushed by toppling cars.

It is this relentless sense of one fuckup piling on top of another that gives Breaking Bad its bite, and it’s especially relevant now that the American economy is going into the crapper. It’s easy to feel that Walt’s increasingly desperate straits hit a little too close to home, but we’d submit that Walt and Jesse are role models for living with the apocalypse, and learning to love it.