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“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.
David Segal is a reporter for the Business section of The New York Times. His most recent article in the magazine was about the New York Cosmos. Editor: Adam Sternbergh (a.sternbergh-MagGroup@nytimes.com)
