The Dark Art of ‘Breaking Bad’

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.”