The Dark Art of ‘Breaking Bad’

“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.”