BY DAVID KRONKE>TV WRITER

With "Breaking Bad," American Movie Classics (AMC), the folks who brought you 2007's best series and Golden Globe winner "Mad Men," throw down the gauntlet. HBO, Showtime, FX - you think you're edgy? We'll show you edgy!

Sure enough, "Breaking Bad" has stuff you've never seen before on TV. Showtime's "Weeds" comes closest to its themes - both concern heretofore suburban banalities forced to think outside their cozy boxes and rebel against the man, on the wrong side of the hopeless War Against Drugs. But where "Weeds" peddles the notion that pot numbs people to the pangs of suburbia, "Breaking Bad" deals out the blackly comic question of 2008: How much worse is crystal meth to the hell we're already living in?

Tonight's episode grabs your attention in its first sequence:

Bryan Cranston, the affably inept dad on "Malcolm in the Middle," feverishly drives an RV wearing nothing but tighty-whities and a gas mask, while bodies, guns and money slide about on the floor of the RV with every frantic turn.

How did he get to this desperate point? Cranston will variously shock and delight those who can vaguely recognize him behind his wizened visage with his turn as Walt White, a one-time chemistry genius resigned to teaching Albuquerque high-school students who have no interest in his informed inanity.

While it's hinted that we'll be clued into Walt's career's downward spiral in future episodes, when we meet him, he's semi-pathetic: His younger, doting wife (Anna Gunn) is pregnant, though they've already had a son born with cerebral palsy (R.J. Mitte), and must work a part-time job at a car-wash.

Walt discovers he has a terminal disease. He keeps the information from his family. He decides to provide for their future by hooking up with a former student and current scumbag (Aaron Paul), putting his chemistry expertise to profitable use creating methamphetamines.

OK, championing the downtrodden-turned-anti-hero is a Hollywood staple. But "Breaking Bad" creator Vince Gilligan (a writer on "The X-Files") plunges far below the generally accepted level of transgressive behavior and forces audiences to consider how bad is too bad and suggests a whole lot of leeway.

Still, Walt has a lot of come-uppance-threatening problems facing him in future episodes, including the inept disposals of unwanted bad guys -one, an epically hilarious gross-out sequence, the other, perhaps the most draining act of violence committed to film since Paul Newman finally offed that Commie in Hitchcock's "Torn Curtain." And Walt's wife is uncomfortably close to figuring out what he's up to, as well. As for viewers, we have no idea where this might end up, which makes "Breaking Bad" an exhilarating tightrope act.

David Kronke, (818) 713-3638 david.kronke@dailynews.com www.insidesocal.com/tv/