This show on AMC is only seven episodes long, or so I am told; I am beginning to think it might have a nightmare quality to it – a black, black comedy becoming a black hole of “Whoa, what we do when things go not just south, but to the South Pole.”

In the extensive promotion for the show, interviews with the main character indicated it would show a nice man becoming a “bad” man. Well, I watched this show about a man with lung cancer deciding he could make a bundle of money for his family when he brother-in-law, a DEA agent, said there might be around $700,000 that was recovered in a drug raid.

Ah, I forgot to mention that Walt – that’s his name – is a chemistry teacher, and, apparently, a smart one.

Without going into every twist and turn of the plot, in the beginning you found yourself laughing as you would at an outright comedy and then it creeps up on you that these are things are not pratfalls – a bathtub full of hydrofluoric acid and a body does fall through the seeing. However what falls through does not resemble a bathtub or a body; it is red goo.

In the next episode they clean it up, with sponges and buckets and gas masks. In the teaser for next week, the doctor tells Walt’s wife that it is lung cancer and tells them both that it has spread.

Four episodes to go. What happens? Will she become a partner in crime. Will they murder together? And if they do make money, will the DEA guy figure out it is drug money and seize it?

Oh, by the way, the wife is pregnant.