In the first three seasons of the AMC series “Breaking Bad,” Aaron Paul —
or rather, his meth-dealing character, Jesse Pinkman — has been
slapped, mauled and beaten purple by, respectively, a hit man, a
sociopath and a federal drug-enforcement agent. If he were a piñata, the
candy would have poured out of this guy long ago. And apparently there
is little mercy for Paul in the new season on the way. For there Paul
was, one day in late May, standing on Tijeras Avenue in downtown
Albuquerque, being tasered by a brawny man in sunglasses.
The street had been blocked off, and a crew of dozens waited as the
actors rehearsed the assault with Vince Gilligan, the creator, head
writer and show runner, who was also directing the episode.
“Maybe we play this moment just a little longer, so we know for sure he
got zapped,” Gilligan said. “Otherwise, Jesse would fight back more.”
“Yeah, I like that,” Paul said.
“And let’s go back to the brass-knuckle-looking taser,” Gilligan said.
“Fly in the brass-knuckle taser!” a nearby crew member shouted into a walkie-talkie.
As the cameras were moved into place, Gilligan, who is 44 and speaks in a
lyrical Southern drawl, reminisced fondly about some of the torments he
has inflicted on Jesse Pinkman. One of the most gruesome was a plunge
through the roof of a Port-a-Potty in a junkyard in Season 2.
“The original version was that he was going to get bit by a guard dog,”
Gilligan said, leaning up against a rail and squinting against the New
Mexico sun. “But the guard dog would have cost us $25,000, and we didn’t
have the money. So we came up with the $5,000 outhouse gag. Which is
quite a bit more memorable.”
Mordantly amusing ordeals are a specialty on “Breaking Bad,” which
begins its fourth season on July 17. Credit the show’s forbiddingly grim
premise: A 50-year-old high-school chemistry teacher named Walter White
(played by Bryan Cranston) finds out he has terminal lung cancer and
starts making crystal meth, hoping to leave behind a nest egg for his
son and pregnant wife. Walter, it emerges, is a chemistry wizard, and
after teaming up with Pinkman, a burnout student he once flunked, the
pair drive a ramshackle R.V. into the desert and confect the purest,
most coveted meth that local dealers have ever known. With the death
penalty of his diagnosis looming, Walt wakes from the slumber of an
unfulfilling life, evolving from feckless drudge to reluctant part-time
criminal, then gradually to something worse.
In its first season, “Breaking Bad” seemed like the story of the
nuttiest midlife crisis ever, told with elements that felt vaguely
familiar. The structure — felonious dad copes with stress of work and
family; complications ensue — owed an obvious debt to “The Sopranos,”
and the collision of regular people and colorfully violent thugs nodded
to Tarantino. The story and setting were an update of the spaghetti
Western, minus the cowboys and set in the present.
But it was soon clear that “Breaking Bad” was something much more
satisfying and complex: a revolutionary take on the serial drama. What
sets the show apart from its small-screen peers is a subtle metaphysical
layer all its own. As Walter inches toward damnation, Gilligan and his
writers have posed some large questions about good and evil, questions
with implications for every kind of malefactor you can imagine, from
Ponzi schemers to terrorists. Questions like: Do we live in a world
where terrible people go unpunished for their misdeeds? Or do the wicked
ultimately suffer for their sins?
Gilligan has the nerve to provide his own hopeful answer. “Breaking Bad”
takes place in a universe where nobody gets away with anything and
karma is the great uncredited player in the cast. This moral dimension
might explain why “Breaking Bad” has yet to achieve pop cultural
breakthrough status, at least on the scale of other cable hits set in
decidedly amoral universes, like “True Blood” or “Mad Men,” AMC’s
far-more-buzzed-about series that takes place in an ad agency in the
’60s. The total audience for “Breaking Bad” is only slightly smaller
than that of “Mad Men” — 19.5 million versus 22.4 million cumulative
viewers in their respective third seasons — but the top three markets
for “Breaking Bad” are Albuquerque/Santa Fe, Kansas City and Memphis;
neither New York nor Los Angeles are in its top 10. The show, in other
words, doesn’t play on the coasts. It gets chatter, just not among what
has long been considered the chattering class.
Which might make Gilligan TV’s first true red-state auteur. His
characters lead middle-American lives in a middle-American place, and
they are beset with middle-American problems. They speak like middle
Americans too, and they inhabit a realm of moral ambiguities that’s
overseen by a man with both a wicked sense of humor and a highly refined
sense of right and wrong.
“If there’s a larger lesson to ‘Breaking Bad,’ it’s that actions have
consequences,” Gilligan said during lunch one day in his trailer. “If
religion is a reaction of man, and nothing more, it seems to me that it
represents a human desire for wrongdoers to be punished. I hate the idea
of Idi Amin living in Saudi Arabia for the last 25 years of his life.
That galls me to no end.”
He paused for a moment and speared a few tater tots in a white plastic-foam tray perched on his lap.
“I feel some sort of need for biblical atonement, or justice, or
something,” he said between chews. “I like to believe there is some
comeuppance, that karma kicks in at some point, even if it takes years
or decades to happen,” he went on. “My girlfriend says this great thing
that’s become my philosophy as well. ‘I want to believe there’s a
heaven. But I can’t not believe there’s a hell.’ ”
‘Breaking Bad” was born out of a conversation in 2004 between Gilligan
and a friend named Thomas Schnauz, who is now a writer on the show.
Schnauz had just read a story about a man cooking meth in an apartment
complex, which had sickened kids in apartments above. Saddam Hussein’s
putative mobile chemical-weapons labs came up in the conversation, too.
“Neither of us were working,” Schnauz says, “and we were like two
70-year-old men who like to complain about the world. And somehow we
spun off into the idea of driving around in a mobile lab, cooking meth.
It was a joke and not something I would have ever thought about again.
But a couple days later Vince called back and said: ‘Remember we were
talking about that mobile lab and meth? Do you mind if I run with that?’
”
A show about a very smart middle-aged guy who hadn’t quite achieved his
dreams had a faintly autobiographical whiff for Gilligan at the time. He
grew up in Farmville, Va., a town of roughly 6,000 people, not far from
Appomattox, the site of the South’s surrender in the Civil War. His
father was an insurance claims adjuster, and his mother was a
grade-school teacher who had a brief career as a wing walker. “Vince was
an acolyte in the Catholic Church,” Gail Gilligan says, though she
notes that he also played Dungeons and Dragons. “There was certainly a
lot of evil in that game, but it never seemed to affect him adversely.”
Gilligan earned a partial scholarship to attend New York University’s
film program, where his instructors included Jesse Kornbluth, who
remembers a polite kid who was so good at drawing bent, violent
characters that Kornbluth initially pegged him as the “go postal” type.
“In the end, he turned us all into his audience,” Kornbluth said to me.
“We were all just mesmerized. Attendance was unnaturally high on days
when he was reading his scenes.”
After graduating, Gilligan won a screenplay contest in 1989, and one of
the judges, a producer named Mark Johnson (now an executive producer on
“Breaking Bad”), helped him find an agent and sell scripts to Hollywood.
Two of them, “Home Fries,” starring Drew Barrymore, and “Wilder
Napalm,” starring Debra Winger and Dennis Quaid, were turned into films.
It was a promising start. Gilligan bought a house outside Richmond,
assuming that he would keep lobbing movie scripts to Los Angeles, which
would keep lobbing money back. That did not happen. By 1994, the money
dried up and he lost his writer’s guild health insurance. That year, his
agent got Gilligan a meeting with Chris Carter, the creator of “The
X-Files.”
“I pitched them an idea about a guy whose shadow comes to life and sucks
people in like a black hole and kills them,” he recalls. “They bought
that as a freelance episode, and then I moved to California.” He spent
seven years as a writer and producer on “The X-Files,” his first
full-time TV job. The gig died with the show in 2002, and what followed
was another succession of false starts and disappointments. There was
“Lone Gunman,” a show for Fox, which expired after one year, and one for
CBS called “Battle Creek,” which failed to ignite.
“I’ve had two fallow periods in my life,” Gilligan said. The first one
was after his two movies were made. “The second was the five years after
‘X-Files.’ Money wasn’t as big an issue as it was the first time, but
as a writer you always want to be working on something that has a hope
in hell of being made.”
In its basic outline, “Breaking Bad” — the title is a Southern phrase
for going wild — also seemed destined for rejection. Its concept sounded
a lot like that of “Weeds,” Showtime’s suburban pot-dealer series.
Plus, its lead character is given a diagnosis of cancer within the first
20 minutes, and the action centers on one of the most destructive (and
unglamorous) drugs known to man. Not to mention that the show ditches
Rule No. 1 of series TV: the personality of the main character must stay
the same.
“Television is really good at protecting the franchise,” Gilligan said.
“It’s good at keeping the Korean War going for 11 seasons, like
‘M*A*S*H.’ It’s good at keeping Marshal Dillon policing his little town
for 20 years. By their very nature TV shows are open-ended. So I
thought, Wouldn’t it be interesting to have a show that takes the
protagonist and transforms him into the antagonist?”
That was the pitch to AMC executives in 2007. The network was searching
for a second original series, to go along with “Mad Men,” which made its
debut that year. The goal was to find something set in the present, so
that AMC wasn’t pigeonholed as the home of period television. And
management wanted a conceit that would skew male and complement the
network’s library of antihero action movies, the kind that star Clint
Eastwood and Charles Bronson. Sitting in his Manhattan office, Charlie
Collier, the president of AMC, recalls his introduction to Gilligan’s
work: “Our development team put the pilot script on my desk and said,
‘Just read this.’ ”
At the time that Gilligan conceived “Breaking Bad,” his past success,
plus all the hackwork offers that could have kept him busy for years,
fortified his sense that only a show built to his iconoclastic
sensibility was worth doing. He wanted a show devoid of snappy banter
(of the kind that Aaron Sorkin writes), and one that doesn’t flatter you
for getting its winking references (as Matthew Weiner does in “Mad
Men,” with his chain-smoking doctors and kids playing with dry-cleaning
bags). And he wanted a leading man who would not only change over the
course of the series but also suffer crushing reversals with lasting
impact.
That is something new. The depravities of leading men in TV dramas
traditionally don’t leave permanent scars. Don Draper of “Mad Men” is
still pretty much the tippling rake he has been from the start, despite a
flirtation or two with confession and reform. Tony Soprano tried,
through therapy, to improve as a human being, but he didn’t get very
far. Dr. House of “House” will always be a brilliant cuss. Walter White
progresses from unassuming savant to opportunistic gangster — and as he
does so, the show dares you to excuse him, or find a moral line that you
deem a point of no return.
In 2007, if you needed an actor to dramatize so profound a
transformation, Bryan Cranston would have seemed an unlikely choice.
Before “Breaking Bad,” he was known as the dad in “Malcolm in the
Middle,” a broadly comic role. When Gilligan told AMC executives that he
wanted Cranston to play Walter, they initially were baffled. Then
Gilligan explained that years earlier, he cast Cranston in an episode of
“The X-Files.” “We had this villain, and we needed the audience to feel
bad for him when he died,” Gilligan said. “Bryan alone was the only
actor who could do that, who could pull off that trick. And it is a
trick. I have no idea how he does it.”
Meeting Bryan Cranston only deepens the mystery. He is Walter’s
opposite. The character is coiled and burdened, while Cranston in person
is buoyant. Walter’s default facial expression is a rictus of angst,
while Cranston’s is a mischievous smile. Cranston looks at least five
years younger than the character, and his co-stars say, he often behaves
like a 10-year-old. Aaron Paul described Cranston as “a kid trapped in a
man’s body.” Anna Gunn, who plays Skyler, Walter’s wife, says that she
has never seen an adult more amused by stuffing fruit down his pants.
But Cranston’s performance as Walter White has made history, winning
three Emmys in a row for outstanding lead in a drama series, the first
actor to do so since Bill Cosby in “I Spy” in the mid-’60s.
“Physically, to create Walter White, I use my dad,” he said one night
over dinner. “My dad is 87 years old. I’m not going to dodder, but
Walter is always a little hunched over, never erect. The message to the
audience is that the weight of the world is on this man’s shoulders.”
Cranston is from the total-commitment school of acting, and he once
famously did a scene in “Malcolm in the Middle” while covered head to
toe with bees. When Gilligan declined to fill in large holes in Walter’s
back story, Cranston sat down and wrote out one of his own. On a
handful of occasions, he has flagged lines in the script that felt false
to him. Cranston reads each episode about a week in advance so that
these bumps can be smoothed over before it’s time to start shooting.
When he can’t resolve the issue with the writer on the set that week, a
call is placed to Gilligan, who is usually in the writer’s room in
Burbank. “It’s up to them, but I won’t bend unless I’m convinced it’s
the right thing to do,” Cranston says. “Convince me and I’ll do it. I
have a theory — our job isn’t to lie to the audience, our job is to find
the truth in the character. If we lie, we’re giving the audience a
little pinch of poison. They won’t even know they ingested it. But if
you lie again and again and again, all of a sudden, your audience is
going, ‘This isn’t working for me.’ They just feel sick, and they turn
you off.”
Cranston has found many nuanced ways to enact Walt’s many miseries, the
most wrenching of which was the loss of his wife’s love. There is a long
history in art of foisting suffering on characters who sin, but it
seems to have fallen out of favor. As awful as Tony Soprano was, it’s
left purposefully unclear at the end of “The Sopranos” whether he paid
the ultimate price. Or consider the “simple chaos” take on the universe
as represented in movies by Woody Allen, a director whom Gilligan
admires. “And Woody Allen may be right,” Gilligan says. “I’m pretty much
agnostic at this point in my life. But I find atheism
just as hard to get my head around as I find fundamental Christianity.
Because if there is no such thing as cosmic justice, what is the point
of being good? That’s the one thing that no one has ever explained to
me. Why shouldn’t I go rob a bank, especially if I’m smart enough to get
away with it? What’s stopping me?”
On a cloudless day in May, five members of the cast and a scrum of crew
members were shooting in what is referred to as “the Schrader house,”
the home of Walter’s in-laws, Hank and Marie Schrader. It’s rented from a
local couple and sits in the shadows of the type of steep, reddish
mountains that Wile E. Coyote tumbled off chasing the Road Runner.
Gilligan was the ringmaster of this circus, standing on the balcony and
sipping a jumbo-size and constantly refilled McDonald’s container of
unsweetened iced tea, which he calls brain juice. He was wearing what
turned out to be his first pair of designer jeans. They were acquired
during a recent shopping spree urged upon him by his girlfriend of 20
years, Holly Rice. His go-to pants have been $12 Wal-Mart jeans, he
said, which is what he wore the following day.
He watched as a crew member put a series of sunglasses on the face of a
20ish Latino man with a nonspeaking background role.
“I like that one,” he said when the first pair of dark wraparounds were put on the actor’s face.
On went the second. “Not as good as the first,” Gilligan said.
Then the third. “Not as good as the first,” Gilligan repeated.
A fourth. “Let’s go with the first.”
This, it turns out, is an abbreviated version of a process that Gilligan
goes through with virtually every article of clothing, every choice of
color, every prop and every extra who appears in “Breaking Bad.” “You
see this shirt?” said Dean Norris, who plays Hank Schrader, as he sat on
the veranda between takes. He spoke in a stage whisper, out of the side
of his mouth, like an inmate describing a warden who has gone insane.
“Vince had to see five versions of it before he chose it. Five different shades of a gray T-shirt. That’s unique,” he said, heading into the house. “That’s beyond.”
Perfectionists often don’t play well with others, but Gilligan seems
eager to accommodate everyone with an idea. It’s a running joke in the
cast, the disconnect between Gilligan the person and Gilligan the
writer. The former is sweet-tempered and polite; the latter strapped a
character’s severed head to a tortoise, which was then rigged with
explosives and blown up as D.E.A. agents swarmed around it.
During a break in the shooting, I asked Gilligan if, now four seasons
into his show, he could explain the gulf between his manners and his
material.
“I’m not the happiest person,” he said. “But I respect this crew and
these actors. I try to be as cheerful as possible. I fake it pretty
well.”
Well, a lot of people can fake cheerful. But how does such a
benign-seeming person come up with such malign tales? Gilligan thought
for a moment, then quoted Flaubert. “I’m not going to get this exactly
right, but it’s something like, ‘You should be neat and orderly in your
life so you can be violent and original in your work,’ and there’s
something to that,” he said. “It’s fun to explore that darkness and that
criminal behavior on the page, but I’m too timid to do it in real
life.”
The pilot of the show opened, memorably, with just such a burst of
darkness and violence: Walt driving that R.V. through a desert in a
crazed dash, wearing nothing but tighty-whitey briefs and a gas mask.
Two male bodies roll in a soup of liquid, broken beakers and cash in the
cabin. Cut to three weeks earlier. Walt is a regular schlub, in an
unremarkable house, on his way to a mundane job. Gilligan slyly signals
his overarching theme when Walter stands before his class and tells his
students, “Chemistry is . . . well, technically it’s the study of
matter, but I prefer to see it as the study of change.”
When you give your lead character a terminal illness, usher him into the
underworld and embroil him in ever bolder and more ambitious criminal
plans, you create a man who is rushing toward the ultimate change — from
being alive to being dead. Walter White is surely the most doomed
character on television, meaning that, just as “Breaking Bad” is finally
winning acclaim, the end of the series is in sight. Which is just fine
with Gilligan. He can imagine a fifth season of “Breaking Bad,” but
that’s it.
Driving to the set after lunch one day, he told me that Walter White had
started off as a person he could imagine chatting with over a beer.
“Now he’s not quite at the point where I’d cross the street if I saw him
coming,” he said, with a smile. “But I wouldn’t want to be stuck in an
elevator with him too long.” Plotting Walt’s transgressions has proved
wearying enough. “It’s hard to write a character that dark and morally
ambiguous,” he said. “I’m going to miss the show when it’s over, but on
some level, it’ll be a relief to not have Walt in my head anymore.”
