Creator Vince Gilligan’s much-lauded meth lab saga “Breaking Bad,” which is back for what looks to be another superior season Sunday night on AMC, is one of those shows that comes from such a dark hole of the American cultural psyche that you sometimes have to wonder how it ever made it on TV. (Besides the fact that it is terrific award bait, including lead actor Bryan Cranston’s astounding — and frankly deserved — three Emmys in a row.)

“Breaking Bad” has been on since early 2008, and even now viewers have to be all but dragged to it and forced to look. The drug metaphor holds pretty firm here: A little taste and you’re hooked.

Any homework?

Watching the first few episodes of this new season as objectively as I can, I feel fairly confident that a curious viewer could skip the homework of renting previous seasons and just start with Sunday’s episode. In this burdened era of engorged Netflix and DVR queues, that news should come as some relief, and I think it’s the true test for one of these deeply textured, pathologically unhappy cable dramas: Could you start up with it late and not be completely lost? Might you go ahead and simply appreciate it in the moment?

With “Breaking Bad,” the answer is strangely yes. The story remains conscientiously anti-epic and rooted in its premise. No tapestry-weaving here — time moves slowly, and only a few extra characters have climbed aboard.

Cranston is Walter White, an Albuquerque high school chemistry teacher who became a cooker and dealer of methamphetamine. It all started when Walter learned he had advanced cancer at age 50. The dour prognosis caused him to obsessively mull ways to provide a secure future for his wife and disabled teenage son; meth was the only alluring (and most sinister) answer.

What makes Walter bad? It’s the eternal rumination here and, by design, it refuses to flesh out into a full portrait of Walter. It’s like a series of charcoal drawings that never become a painting — courtroom sketches of a man who has so far eluded punishment. At its most grisly or brutal, “Breaking Bad” is still a study in understatement, as with a scene early this season involving the dunking and dissolving of a drug thug’s corpse into a drum of acid.

Relationships

From the beginning, Walter enlisted the help of a former dropout student and heroin addict, Jesse (played with wounded beauty by Aaron Paul), and the two quickly cooked up the purest meth in the West, attracting the ire and envy of competing dealers and cartels. This led to what would resemble — in synopsis, anyhow — other morally bankrupt crime sagas: Walter and Jesse descend into the underground; they barely skirt death and destruction, yet their lives fell apart anyhow. They also repeatedly engage in a twisted take on the father-son dynamic.

Potential explosiveness is continually presented as a literal threat to the meth business but also a subtextual theme to the relationships in “Breaking Bad.” Chemistry is everything.

Season 4 picks up with Walter and Jesse’s disastrous confrontation with the brutal Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), a local restaurateur who runs an aggressive drug trade. They killed his meth cook and are now beholden to work for Gus. It’s a nightmare.

“Breaking Bad”

(one hour) returns Sunday at 10 p.m. on AMC