"Anna Gunn, my wife on 'Breaking Bad,' gave me a beautiful hardcover of 'The Dangerous Book for Boys.'"

"A perfect book to flip through to get back in touch with the little boy within. It inspired me to create a concept for a TV show. . . . Stay tuned," says Bryan Cranston, answering questions about books in the NYT Sunday Book Review.

As Meade and I approach the last few episodes of the series — which we've been catching up on at a rate of about 1 episode a day — I'm glad to see Bryan Cranston has a new show in the works. Here's the whole series on Blu-Ray and here's "The Dangerous Book for Boys." I wonder how the "Dangerous Book for Boys" idea became a new TV show. Is it a show for boys (and girls) or is it for adults finding their inner little boy?

I take it Anna Gunn must have thought that Cranston's "Breaking Bad" character was getting back in touch with the little boy within, that it was an actor giving another actor a resource for understanding the character. How does a woman feel when she finds her husband getting back in touch with the little boy within? It may have been Gunn's way of saying: This is how my character sees you, in pursuit of a boyish need for danger. Perhaps Cranston's new-show idea has something to do with the way this need can be repurposed in a positive and productive way in adult manhood. The Walter White character hurls himself out into a quest for manhood that is horrifically destructive. As Cranston puts it in the interview at the top link: "The depth of this tragic story made it feel like the character reached Shakespearean level."

What if it were not a tragedy but a comedy? That's my guess at what the new TV idea is. By the way, I just discovered yesterday, that Cranston was Tim Whatley, the dentist character on "Seinfeld."