It’s 10 years since Walter White, wearing nothing but underpants and a gas mask, ran screaming from a mobile meth lab into the phantasmagorical haze of the New Mexico desert. With this gonzo flourish the world was introduced to Breaking Bad, the desert noir morality play today regarded as one of the greatest TV dramas ever.

But in 2008 the world was not quite prepared for one of the greatest TV dramas ever and Breaking Bad’s season one ratings were thumpingly modest (in the UK it crept out on the digital channel Fox, to deafening indifference). Your hip, early adopter chum may have been glued to the escapades of school teacher-turned-methamphetamine dealer White (Bryan Cranston) and his tragic bro sidekick Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul). The rest of us were quite a distance from catching on.

Not much had changed 12 months later, when veteran comedy actor Bob Odenkirk was booked to appear in season two as a smooth-talking lawyer with bush-scrub hair. Saul Goodman would change Odenkirk’s life and a decade on he continues to slalom along the character’s unhappy arc, with Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul returning to Netflix for its fourth season.

But boarding that flight at LAX airport in Los Angeles for the Breaking Bad set at Albuquerque, New Mexico Odenkirk had no inkling what lay ahead. As far as he was concerned, he was taking a small gig on a quirky but obscure cable drama.

Waiting to meet him in New Mexico was showrunner Vince Gilligan, who had written the script for Breaking Bad on spec after losing his gig in the writers’ room of The X-Files when the conspiracy drama ran its course. Odenkirk had bad news. He was booked for four instalments of Breaking Bad – but had a prior commitment on sitcom How I Met Your Mother and so would have to leave after just three episodes. That Breaking Bad might one day be regarded as more prestigious than How I Met Your Mother – and that he would stick around for the remainder of its run – would have struck him as absurd.