The author sees lots of cultural metaphors surprisingly expressed in a TV series--and they ain't pretty. It's about a high school chemistry teacher who is faced with an expensive battle with lung cancer and turns to making methamphetamine to pay his medical bills.
He just has to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Which he does, simply by discarding his persona as an earnest schoolteacher and entering the ranks of illicit drugdom. Of course, the series is mostly concerned with the twists, turns, and torments of that transition, and the metaphors in that are also rich as to what America has lately become.