Vince Gilligan, the creator/executive producer of AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” appears to have prepared for the show’s second season by having his directors watch the best parts of “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood.” The early episodes of season two, which begins at 9 p.m. tonight on Sunflower Broadband Channels 50 and 250, often echo those movies’ lengthy dialogue-free scenes and widescreen desert vistas.

The first two episodes begin with striking images — an object floating through a pool, a car bouncing up and down — that immediately grab your attention without putting any actors onscreen. In other scenes, actors are often shown in long shot, dwarfed by expanses of Mexican desert. It’s not that the episodes are completely without dialogue, but it is used sparingly in terms of television.

“Breaking Bad” had a good first season, mostly because it was pulled along by a great lead performance: Bryan Cranston, doing a 180-degree flip from his goofy “Malcolm in the Middle” dad to play Walter White, a mild-mannered, if sometimes petulant, New Mexico high-school chemistry teacher who discovers that he has cancer and then goes off the deep end, getting involved in the Albuquerque meth trade with one of his former students (Aaron Paul as Jesse, a guy with street smarts but not many of them).

Season two’s early episodes, rather than being pulled along by Cranston’s performance, rise to its level. The directors — which include Cranston, who handled the season premiere — continually provide a sense of danger. Like Mary-Louise Parker’s pot-dealing soccer mom in “Weeds,” Walt stumbles into a profession that mixes him up with some volatile people, including Tuco, a hot-tempered drug dealer (“The Closer’s” Raymond Cruz, doing his own reinvention with a performance laced with unpredictable rage). Tuco’s dealings with Walt and Jesse drive the first two episodes, which get intense enough that the third episode sometimes feels like it’s pulling back, just to give you a respite.

When Cranston’s offscreen, “Breaking Bad” sags a little bit, although it does feature good moments from Anna Gunn as Walt’s mystified and increasingly suspicious wife and Dean Norris as his brother-in-law, a crass but effective Drug Enforcement Administration agent. But mostly the show just crackles, thanks to Gilligan’s writing — a mix of existential drama, crime suspense and dark humor.

One of the movies showing on AMC is “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” another film that used long silences and broad landscapes. It’s one of the few “classics” airing today on a network that used to have “Movie Classics” as part of its name. Now two TV series — “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” — supply AMC with some of its most cinematic material. “Breaking Bad” goes into season two wide awake, with its eyes and ears open, and finds big moments in things as small as one ring of a bell.