In addition to being showered with accolades from Hollywood insiders, this year’sEmmy Award-winner for best television drama, “Breaking Bad,” has been alsopraised by members of the scientific community.

“To us who are educated in science, whenever we see science presented inaccurately, it’s like fingernails on the blackboard,” the AMC show’s science advisor Dr. Donna Nelson, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Oklahoma, tells the American Chemical Society’s Bytesize Science series in the video above. “It just drives us crazy, and we can’t stay immersed in the show.”

Fortunately for Nelson and like-minded scientists, “Breaking Bad” gets the science mostly right in its tale of chemistry-teacher-turned-meth-overlord Walter White.

Nelson actually works with the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, to fact-check scripts. She even suggests chemical structures for Walter to draw on his blackboard.

But Nelson did identify one glaring inaccuracy.

“The powder blue meth that you see is really sort of like Walter’s trademark,” Nelson explains in the video. “In real life, meth would not be powder blue like that. The meth would be colorless.”

The show’s series finale will run on AMC this Sunday.

 

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