Screen in All The Right Places - Pt. 2: Breaking Bad

It started with a joke. Vince Gilligan had finished working as a writer and executive producer on The X-Files in 2002. He was looking for a new project. A friend quipped that they should follow the example of a man who had put a meth lab in the back of a Winnebago and driven around the American south-west. It became a pitch: “We’re going to take Mr. Chips, and turn him into Scarface.”

Television executives were less than impressed. Gilligan says: “all you need is one ‘yes’ and luckily, once Sony signed on, that one yes came from AMC. I’m surprised we’ve got this far, I’m surprised as many people watch this show as they do. It’s been a wonderful experience and I’m really gonna miss it. I already do.”
He’s not the only one. Breaking Bad began as one of the unlikeliest things on television; a drama charting the moral decline of a chemistry teacher-turned-violent drug lord, starring that goofy Dad from Malcolm in the Middle. However, the oddly compelling relationship between meek, cancer-ridden family man Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and petty criminal Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) caught the imagination of everyone who recognised the seductive lure of power. Soon Breaking Bad became a cult.
Only it’s not so cultish anymore. The final eight-episode run began with 5.9 million viewers in the U.S.; a huge audience for a cable channel. This was four times the number who watched the first episode five years ago. Thanks to the pervasive, almost obsessive, coverage the show received from critics and fans, who analyse each episode with eagle-eyed insight and unwavering adoration, word-of-mouth was key to its success. Gilligan also acknowledges the roles online platforms played attracting an international audience.
“I’m very old-fashioned in my understanding of the television business. I’m not an early adopter in terms of technology and whatnot,” says Gilligan. “I’m not much of a computer guy. I feel like I’m too old! I have to say, God bless Netflix because they really saved our bacon! It is very likely Breaking Bad would have been cancelled after Season Two if it were not for the streaming Video on Demand.
Because our first season, certainly in the States had very low viewership, the numbers were pathetic. The people who did watch it would tell friends, ‘Hey you should check out this new show.’ If Netflix and VOD and that technology were not around, they would have been hard-pressed to find the show and catch up. And we would have failed. We would have been cancelled. We would have never reached the threshold of viewership that was needed to stay on the air.”
Refreshingly, Gilligan also acknowledges, rather than demonises, the role that piracy and illegal uploaders had to play in the success of the show.
“They probably did help as well, if I’m honest. Piracy is certainly a double-edged sword. It does disincentivise companies from making their product if they feel they can’t earn an honest living off of it, but there is an upside to the piracy in that it got the word out in regards to Breaking Bad. For a long time before Netflix, it was the only way folks around the world could catch up with the show at all, and so there has to be a bit of gratitude on my part for that having happened.”
Gilligan explains that his desire to write a two-hander was inspired by his work on The X-Files, where the evolution of Mulder and Scully’s relationship became the axis of the drama.

“That was what I knew,” says the writer. “If I had worked on a different story, if I had worked on The Sopranos instead, Breaking Bad would have taken a very different shape”.
It would also have been different had Gilligan not found Cranston and Paul. Cranston’s work has been a rightly lauded tour-de-force of stunningly nuanced acting, as his mild-mannered character slowly but inexorably submits to his deeply hidden desire for power and dominance.
However, as his foul-mouthed side-kick Jesse, it was Paul who utterly changed the trajectory of the plot. Originally written as a one-season regular destined to die, Paul’s sensitivity and vulnerability were instantly striking. As Walter White turned vicious and depraved, it was Jesse who became the show’s beating heart and moral compass.
Then,subversion and transformation have been the trademark of Breaking Bad since the very first episode, where Walter explains to a high-school class that chemistry is the “study of change. It’s all of life, right? It’s the constant, it’s the cycle, it’s solution and dissolution. It is growth, then decay, then transformation”. Gilligan’s characters have always followed this immutable law. It’s why we see Hank, Walt’s knuckle-headed alpha-male brother-in-law, transform into a perceptive and worthy adversary who could be the key to Walt’s downfall. It’s why Skylar, the bland and boring housewife, has morphed from a traumatised victim into a determined Lady Macbeth, with ambitions all her own. For Gilligan, it’s about grounding the characters in real, complex emotions and journeys.
“The years I spend cooking crystal meth helped, obviously!” he jokes. “Sometimes I’m being facetious when I say ‘write what you know.’ I’ve never sold meth, I’ve never tried it – but neither had Walt. Walter White is very much a nerdy, middle-aged guy and I feel I can understand that, I can write to that. The more Walt becomes a drug kingpin, the further removed he is from my reality. But at that point, 60-something episodes in, I feel like I know him well enough that coming up with the drug deals or other things I’ve never lived through in my own life are not as hard, because I understand his character pretty innately, even though his character has diverged from mine. That idea of being a middle-aged guy facing a pretty serious mid-life crisis was pretty relatable to me.”

Breaking Bad’s fandom represents the transformation of the televisual experience. In this age of social media, being a viewer is no longer a passive activity. There’s a sense that you are in a two way dialogue. A feeling of contribution and collaboration.
Reddit’s ‘Hunter-Gatherer’ theory (that has been partially confirmed by Gilligan) gloms onto the way Walt always takes on a trait of the people he kills – ordering his drinks ‘on the rocks’ like Mike Ehrmantraut, laying down towels on the bathroom floor like Gustavo Fring.  
A piece on Slate maps out the colours each character wears during each act of every episode, suggesting that their moral trajectory can somehow be discerned according to whether Walt dons his faded, unhip jeans or his humble, Grandpa khakis. Gilligan admits he’s endlessly curious by the fan theories – and says he had to force himself not to read them while writing the show.
“Most of what I hear is anecdotal; I really stay away from the internet in regards to Breaking Bad. I stay away not because I’m not interested, but because I’m scared it’s a rabbit hole I would disappear down forever. I’m very flattered and blown away by the amount of very smart people who spend time analysing the show and parsing every last detail of it. When the writers’ room was up and running, I’d strenuously avoid it, because you and the writers are on a path and you kind of have to stick it out, and you don’t want to get knocked off course. A great deal of people have given me credit for very interesting ideas that weren’t even remotely on my mind, so I’ll take that!”
This constant state of interaction and inclusion; this shift from viewing a show as a private story to an all-inclusive experience, has also transformed what it means to end a show. No longer is a finale merely a time to bid good-bye to the characters. It’s a representation of how the show reflects the world; the mirror the writers hold up to us as a society. For Lost, the (much-maligned) finale ended on a shot of blinding white light: the universal symbol for religious transcendence and a spiritual home-coming. Contrast this with shock ending of The Sopranos, a fade to black that brimmed with ambiguity and nihilism. Understandably, Gilligan is reluctant to reveal what moral messages Breaking Bad may contain. He will reveal only that there will be “lots” of bloodshed, and that he cried writing the final episode. He is keenly aware of the balancing act between a resolution that aligns with his worldview, while never letting “the message” interfere with the natural arc narrative.
 “You can get bogged down in a great many ways. The writers and I have spent the best part of a year trying to come up with this ending,” Gilligan says. “You come up with everything under the sun. You think of what is a fitting ending to the show, what would satisfy us as writers, what is the ending that we think will satisfy the viewer – and whether that’s the same thing. You’re trying to play a very deep game of chess, and the trouble is I’m not a very good chess player! You’re trying to think 20 moves ahead. It was a tough year and a half. There were very dark days when I’d have an anxiety attack and turn to the writers saying ‘Is it too late to go back and reinvent?’ Luckily, my writers would talk me off the ledge! But now that all is said and done – and I may get the shock of my life, people may turn around and say ‘that’s not the ending we want at all!’ – but right now, I feel very satisfied.”
The beauty of Breaking Bad’s constant subversion of expectation is that at this point no eding feels predictable or inevitable. But regardless of the strength of the conclusion, it’s clear that the fervour surrounding the show won’t dissipate after that final shot. For fans left feeling particularly bereft, they can console themselves with the promise of both foreign adaptations and a spin-off featuring lawyer Saul “Better call Saul!” Goldman, played by fan favourite Bob Odenkirk.
“There is a Colombian version called Metastasis that’s based on the pre-existing American scripts. They’re shooting episode six as we speak. I’ve also heard talk of a Turkish version. I’ll have no involvement with them. I’d love to see as many versions as anyone would care to make! I also have a great hope that we will do a Saul Goodman spin-off; I’m working on it with a writer called Peter Gould. We’re waiting to see if it will happen. I’d work on that personally.”
It seems like Walter White, Vince Gilligan is constantly pushing product. And like Walt, he’ll forever have a loyal consumer base, just dying to do business with him.