We used to want heroes. Sure they had their flaws, but they remained the good guys. Now we’re securely in the Age of the Antihero, particularly in television, where many of the best recent dramas are carried by characters whose moral choices are suspect at best—The Sopranos, Sons of Anarchy, Mad Men. In all those cases, though, the antihero is conflicted about the criminal world in which he lives (mobs, motorcycle gangs, ad agencies). Even Dexter’s title character is aware of his own psychopathy—the serial killer who wants to be a boy. It can be uncomfortable for the viewer when, week after week, the character that you’ve come to know, come to identify with and sympathize with, makes terrible moral choices. We squirm when we realize we’re cheering on a murderer, a gangster or a chemistry teacher who makes meth.
With Breaking Bad, creator Vince Gilligan takes us on his character’s journey from protagonist to antihero, but doesn’t stop there. The revelation at the end of Season 4 that Walter White, the once mild-mannered high-school chemistry teacher, had resorted to poisoning an innocent child to deceptively win back Jesse’s trust, left “antihero” in the dust. We’re now in villain territory. This is a five-season arc of a man becoming spiritually bankrupt. And yet it’s the best drama on TV since The Wire.
Of course, it’s not the only show on TV whose central character is something of a villain. William H. Macy’s Frank Gallagher on Shameless has few redeeming qualities. Weeds even has a similar plotline—the desperate parent who turns to the drug biz to make ends meet and ends up swirling deeper into the abyss. But where Weeds spent so much time taking cheap shots at moral certainty—any character without enormous vices was quickly revealed for his or her hypocrisy—Breaking Bad never gets unmoored from its moral anchor. Gilligan surrounds Walter White with a cast of deeply flawed but ultimately redeeming individuals.
Most importantly, there’s never a question that Walter is a victim of his own hubris. “I won,” he tells his wife after bombing a nursing home to destroy his nemesis. It was a chilling moment that had the audience wondering if it might have been better for everyone if he lost.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to feel sympathy for him anymore,” says Bryan Cranston, the actor who so convincingly plays White, at this year’s Comic-Con in San Diego. “When I first met with Vince, we talked about how this show would be the journey of a man completely losing his soul.”
For four seasons, Cranston had to walk that tightrope as each choice his character made led him down darker and more desperate paths—helping us sympathize and relate to a man who’d been beaten down by life while recoiling at his actions. It was a surprising task given to an actor best known for his comedic turns as the bumbling father in Malcolm in the Middle. But Gilligan had seen his range in an episode of The X-Files, where the former was a writer and executive producer. Even though Breaking Bad lost one of its strongest characters in that nursing home explosion, Gilligan isn’t worried about replacing him.
“Gus Fring had some very large shoes that are very hard to fill,” he says. “My writers and I got together at the beginning of this season and asked ourselves if we should try to find a bad guy that is even worse than Gus Fring. Can we find an actor to portray him or her that is going to do an even better job than Giancarlo Esposito? That set an extraordinarily high bar. Luckily we already have a wonderful actor and character that is even more formidable than Gus Fring, and that is Walter White. I think we’re going to see, as the posters indicate, ‘All hail the king.’ We have our bad guy, and we’ve always had him. Not to say that he won’t face many challenges along the way and that he won’t find himself in some very sticky situations. But he’s it. He’s the king.”
Walter’s first murder in Season One—of Emilio, who was planning on killing both Walt and Jesse—was essentially self-defense. And back then he seemed desperate for an alternative to killing Emilio’s cohort, Krazy 8. Since then, though, killing has become easier. It’s that gradual easing of conscience that’s so disturbing to watch. In a recent episode, he consoles his wife, who’s beside herself with remorse for her part in her husband’s madness: “You know, it gets easier. I promise you it does.”
But even as the audience finds itself cheering for our antihero to evade both his enemies and the DEA, it’s never less than clear that Walt “losing his soul” is the real tragedy.
“I believe we should all try to do the right thing, as simplistic as that sounds,” Gilligan says. “I think the world works best when people of good will try to live their lives in as good a manner as possible. It’s not a morality tale, per se, but as a long-time consumer of television, I’ve watched thousands and thousands of hours of TV in which the good guy shoots somebody dead in the last five minutes of an episode, and then in the next episode it’s like it never happened.”
From the very beginning, Gilligan created the show with the premise that this would be about one man’s journey. “What I pitched to executives was that I want to take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface,” he says, “so we try to abide by that original mandate. To that end, we try to let nature take its course. We don’t work to make him unlikable. That may be funny to say and yes, absolutely, with every episode he is becoming more unlikable. But to me that feels like a natural extension of the choices the character made, to be a criminal. If you’re going to walk that path and go from being a mild-mannered high-school-chemistry teacher to a drug kingpin, your life is going to get darker. The choices you make are going to get darker. You’re going to do questionable things, and then outright criminal and outright evil things.”