Much goes wrong for Walter in that first hour of television, and at one point, he strides from a patch of New Mexico desert to a stretch of nearby pavement to confront what he believes are police officers racing to the scene of his crime. (They’re actually firefighters, headed somewhere else.) As Walter braces for what he thinks are his final minutes of life, we see him tucking a handgun into his waistband, readying himself for a shootout. It’s a move we’ve seen from a few hundred TV perps, but this perp isn’t wearing pants. So he uses the waistband of those tighty whities.

Though the sequence lasts a matter of seconds, it promised everything that “Breaking Bad” would deliver: a taut narrative of one man’s journey from geek to gangster, told with an eye for the droll and a maestro’s sense of cinematic history.

That maestro is Vince Gilligan, a veteran writer of “The X-Files,” who conceived the framework of “Breaking Bad” on the phone with a friend as they discussed their seemingly moribund careers. The show earned some critical acclaim but little buzz in its first few seasons. Perhaps that is because on paper, it sounds like a total downer: lots of chemotherapy and lots of meth, possibly the grubbiest, most wretched of all recreational drugs.

But “Breaking Bad” has since achieved the kind of cultural-landmark status not seen since “The Sopranos” and “The Wire.” How Mr. Gilligan and his writers, producers and stellar cast pulled this off comes down to a mysterious alchemy that will be studied by aspiring television makers for years.

At least part of that alchemy, this exhibition suggests, is Mr. Gilligan’s fanatical eye for detail, particularly when it comes to colors. Included here are palettes from the wardrobe of some of the show’s main characters. For Hank (Dean Norris), Walter’s brother-in-law and a drug enforcement agent, this includes shades called Tuscany, Fired Earth, Rawhide, Pale Clay and Nut Brown.