One of each. Breaking Bad celebrated the tenth anniversary of the broadcast of its last episode on September 29. In the last minutes, Jesse (Aaron Paul) managed to escape alive and Walter White (Bryan Cranston) died among the machinery necessary to cook drugs to the sound of My baby blue by Badfinger, a song with a key lyric: “I guess I got what I deserved.” On the occasion of the farewell, creator Vince Gilligan gave an interview to Variety where he dropped two curiosities for fans: what element he would change if he could in the ending and what invention of his had him restless until the last moment.
“I think where we went wrong was Aaron Paul’s teeth,” he confessed. He considers that they were “too white” for “a guy who received so many beatings and smoked so much glass.” But he also acknowledges that, despite failing the audience with this implausible portrayal of an addict as a character, “Aaron is good looking, so this also works for the people who watched the series.” The character of Jesse Pinkman, in fact, was revived when The Road was released in 2019, a sequel focused on his kidnapping in the hands of an Aryan brotherhood and his first steps after escaping from it.
The other significant element he mentioned was not so much something he would change about the scripts he wrote in the writers’ room with Peter Gould, Sam Catlin, George Mastras, Gennifer Hutchison, Thomas Schnauz and Moira Walley-Beckett but a detail he regretted during weeks: that Walter White bought a machine gun at the beginning of the fifth and final season from the trunk of a car.
“One of the stupidest things I’ve done in my career is commit to the idea of Walter White buying a machine gun when we didn’t know what to do with it. We had no idea. There were literally months when he was terrified,” he admits. They could spend entire days in the writers’ room butting heads because they couldn’t think of a plot or situation that would lead them to that point: to justify why the hell they had created excitement around that weapon.
They didn’t know what they would do until they were writing the ninth or tenth episode of the season, which had a total of sixteen installments. Until that moment he had considered eliminating the scene but his colleagues helped him think and consider how Walter could get to that point. “To anyone reading this who wants a career as a showrunner, don’t do it this way! It was painful and scary,” he jokes about his creative process.
However, these statements help put the craft of the script and, above all, Vince Gilligan’s very television mentality into perspective. Others would sell that everything was tied up from the beginning, and he instead shows how his writers room works: with multiple people planning and writing the scripts, and a process that involved making decisions on the fly, often without knowing how they would turn out. that mess.
The effort also had its reward: the end of Breaking Bad was the most watched episode in its entire history with 10.3 million viewers watching the episode live (and remember that 1.4 million had seen the first one) and The last season won two Emmy Awards for best drama series, when it was broadcast in two batches that qualified for two different editions.