Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad

by Brett Martin

  And Mad Men used the ongoing, open-ended format to approach a kind of radical realism that went way beyond whether, say, the refrigerator in the Draper home was the perfect shade of 1962 olive green. The show, in a wildly un-TV-like way, insisted on portraying how the passage of life feels.

  “The first season of The Sopranos, you literally felt like you were being dropped out of an airplane every episode,” Weiner said. “You constantly had the sensation that you missed an episode: ‘Everybody in this story seems to know that guy. Do I know that guy? Was he on last week?’ No, they act like they know that guy because they have a life without you.”

  This ethic came to the fore, especially, at the outset of Mad Men’s season three, when all the initial mysteries that animated the first two seasons had been resolved—Don’s true identity, the fate of his and Betty’s marriage, what Peggy would do about her baby—and the show became more about life simply happening, much the way it actually does, tough truths included: First wives become small, distant chapters of a person’s life. People leave to take new jobs. Hurts are forgotten or else harbored much longer than necessary. Sometimes there are both a Bert and a Burt in an office (just as New Jersey had a Big and Little Pussy); sometimes a man named Don winds up with a secretary named Dawn. What other show would have thought to devote an entire season—its fifth—to the problems of having a happy marriage?

  The ethos extended perhaps most of all to the insight into what it means to live through momentous periods in history—when it’s not clear which side is the right side or which events will later be important. “If you’re in the middle of a divorce, and there is the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Weiner said, “your problem is bigger.”

  Mad Men is about a transitional generation—caught between the upheavals of World War II and the youthquake of the 1960s—written by another such generation, one growing up under the shadow of the baby boomers’ self-mythologizing, but too near to claim something new as their own. As much as it is an act of obsession with the 1960s, the show is also a thrilling Oedipal demystification of The Sixties and what it meant to live through them. What it meant, Weiner seemed to be saying, was waking up every day struggling with the exact same things, making the same mistakes, and missing the same big pictures as any generation before or after.

  If much of Mad Men feels like a child’s rapt view of his parents’ glamorous, mysterious doings (“I’m often in the role of Sally,” Weiner said, referring to the Drapers’ daughter), it is because that insight applies as much to the personal sphere as to the public. To imagine your parents as real people—to truly investigate the question “How are they like me?”—is an act of empathy, adoration, and also murder.

  It is such truths that become the chief pleasure of watching Mad Men, more than the specific twists and turns of what can at times feel like contrived “action.” (Though the occasional foot being cut off by a lawn mower doesn’t hurt.)

  “I always thought it would be the experience of a human life,” Weiner said. For that goal, serialized television turned out to be the perfect, if accidental, instrument—and its perfect artist a man who could say with total confidence, “I’ve always assumed that people have the same feelings as me. And I’m usually right. They just won’t admit it.”

  Thirteen

  The Happiest Room in Hollywood

  It was an all-time record hot day in the San Fernando Valley. On West Burbank Boulevard, lined with offices and strip malls, the air shimmered; people took pictures of their cars’ temperature displays: 110, 112, 116. In an anonymous building across from an AutoZone, the lobby directory showed the offices of a private eye, a dental supply company, a handful of financial companies, and, in suite 206, something blandly mysterious and vaguely sinister called Delphi Information Sciences Corporation. The plastic nameplate on the suite’s door did little to illuminate the nature of what such a corporation might do. Certainly it offered no clue that behind the door, under the dropped ceilings, the fluorescent lights, and the hum of air-conditioning of the onetime data services office, was the most coveted workplace in Hollywood: the Breaking Bad writers’ room.

  It was so not only because Breaking Bad was arguably the best show on TV, in many ways the culmination of everything the Third Golden Age had made possible, but because its creator and showrunner, Vince Gilligan, was known as a good man to work for—someone who managed to balance the vision and microscopic control of the most autocratic showrunner with the open and supportive spirit of the most relaxed. He was a firm believer in collaboration.

  “The worst thing ever the French gave us is the auteur theory,” he said flatly. “It’s a load of horseshit. You don’t make a movie by yourself, you certainly don’t make a TV show by yourself. You invest people in their work. You make people feel comfortable in their jobs; you keep people talking.”

  In his room, he said, all writers were equal, an approach that he insisted had less to do with being a Pollyanna than with pure, selfish practicality. “There’s nothing more powerful to a showrunner than a truly invested writer,” he said. “That writer will fight the good fight.”

  On this day, a Monday, he sat at the head of a conference table as his writers gathered for work after the weekend, chattering about the heat. Forty-three years old, he wore light jeans, an orange T-shirt, and silver sneakers; his face, with its goatee and glasses, was poised at a precise fulcrum between relaxed southern gentleman—a young Colonel Sanders, maybe—and eager fantasy geek. You could easily see a shadow of the young Gilligan who had showed up in Washington Square to be an NYU undergraduate film student.

  Gilligan, surprisingly, was the only major showrunner of the Third Golden Age to have started his path to TV with a semisuccessful, if frustrating, career in feature films. On the strength of a script he completed at NYU—which would much later become the movie Home Fries—he spent five years writing screenplays back home in Virginia. One, Wilder Napalm, a romantic comedy about pyrokinetic brothers vying for the same woman (sort of The Fabulous Baker Boys bred with Firestarter), actually got made, starring Dennis Quaid and Debra Winger, in 1993.

  That was also the year that The X-Files, Chris Carter’s latter-day incarnation of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, debuted on Fox. Gilligan was an immediate fan and arranged to meet Carter, who then offered him a freelance episode. The experience turned out to be satisfying and fun enough to lure him across the country to relocate in L.A. By the end of The X-Files’ run in 2002, Gilligan had risen to executive producer and penned some thirty episodes.

  The X-Files was about two FBI agents, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, he a true believer in the supernatural, she a skeptic, assigned to investigate paranormal activity. It was a notable waypoint in the evolution of quality TV. Faced with the network necessity of seasons in excess of twenty episodes, Carter made an ingenious adaptation: half of the series consisted of tightly wrought, often funny stand-alone episodes, while the other half was an ever more recondite “mythology” of aliens, secret agencies, and other conspiracy theories.

  Ironically, given that he would become a master of serialized TV, Gilligan’s specialty on The X-Files was the stand-alone episodes. One of his most memorable was called “Drive.” In it, Mulder ends up trapped in a car with an ugly, anti-Semitic character who is afflicted with a condition whereby he must keep driving west or his head will explode. It was a difficult role to cast. “You needed an actor who could play this guy who is an asshole, an unpleasant redneck creep, and yet at the end of the hour, you need to feel bad when this guy dies,” Gilligan said. “Casting bad guys is easy. Casting a bad guy you feel sympathy for is much trickier.” The actor he found, Bryan Cranston, would eventually perform the same tightrope act as Walter White, the antihero of Breaking Bad.

  Near the end of The X-Files, Gilligan spent one season on a spin-off, The Lone Gunmen. It was a project so patently doomed that Gilligan said the fellow Fox show King of the Hill featured a character wearing a “Bring
Back The Lone Gunmen” T-shirt that was scripted before the spin-off ever aired. He then spent four years becoming reacquainted with the frustrations and snail’s pace of feature-film making, working on Hancock, a movie about a surly, alcoholic superhero. “There’s a weird kind of hang-fire misery involved in living a life in which you get paid a lot of money, you can go write in the south of France if you want, instead of a crappy little stiflingly hot office in Burbank, but there’s a very good chance that what you’re working on may never get made,” he said. “In television, at least, you write something, and a week or two later it’s being produced.”

  In the midst of the endless rewrites, in 2005, Gilligan was on the phone with an old friend and fellow X-Files writer Thomas Schnauz. The two were complaining about the state of the movie business and wondering what they might be qualified to do instead.

  “Maybe we can be greeters at Walmart,” Gilligan said.

  “Maybe we can buy an RV and put a meth lab in the back,” said Schnauz.

  “As he said that, an image popped into my head of a character doing exactly that: an Everyman character who decides to ‘break bad’ and become a criminal,” Gilligan recalled. It was a powerful enough image that he got off the phone and began jotting down notes. The heart of the show came together in a hurry. The main character, Walter White, is a mild and beaten-down high school chemistry teacher who finds himself diagnosed with lung cancer. Inadequately insured, with a baby on the way, he is desperate to provide for his family when he’s gone and hits on the idea of going into the crystal meth business with a junkie ex-student named Jesse Pinkman, played by Aaron Paul. Thanks to White’s chemistry expertise and relative (by the standard of meth dealers) discipline and devotion to quality, Walt and Jesse’s product becomes much in demand. Legal, familial, and moral complications ensue.

  The underlying project Gilligan had in mind, though, was something deeper—a radical extension of the antihero trend that had by then become the signature of the decade’s TV. The idea was to convincingly transform a milquetoast into a monster or, as Gilligan often put it, “Mr. Chips into Scarface.” As the series progressed, he would take away Walt’s justifications for his criminal behavior one by one—starting with the cancer, which quickly went into remission. At the same time, Gilligan, more than any other showrunner except maybe David Simon in The Wire, gave Walt adversaries the viewer actually cared for—foremost his own brother-in-law, Hank, a DEA agent with whom Walt ends up locked in a zero-sum game. This was not The Shield; it was not at all clear whom to root for. The series became a study in empowered masculinity run horribly amok, without even the compensatory wish fulfillment granted Tony Soprano or Don Draper. This made the challenge even more direct: Why did we still want Walt to win? Effectively, it was a five-season-long “College” episode.

  Walt’s journey to darkness was not the only way in which Breaking Bad would come to seem like both an echo of and an answer to The Sopranos, The Wire, and other shows that had ushered in the Third Golden Age. Walter’s wife, Skyler, played by Anna Gunn, would end up as a distant sister-wife to Carmela Soprano, grappling with her husband’s crimes and their implications, especially for her children, to a degree that her predecessor never did. More important, whereas the antiheroes of those earlier series were at least arguably the victims of their circumstances—family, society, addiction, and so on—Walter White was insistently, unambiguously, an agent with free will. His journey became a grotesque magnification of the American ethos of self-actualization, Oprah Winfrey’s exhortation that all must find and “live your best life.” What if, Breaking Bad asked, one’s best life happened to be as a ruthless drug lord?

  • • •

  One of the first things you do, when you have an idea like this, is ask yourself, ‘Is it a TV show or a movie?’” Gilligan said. Twenty years earlier, there would have been no question that it was a movie. In 2005, though, he quickly decided that cable TV was his only hope.

  Which didn’t mean that, about halfway through his pitch to executives at Sony Television, he didn’t hear himself talking and think, “Gee, this is crazy.” Against the odds, Sony bought the idea and arranged a pitch meeting at TNT. It was, Gilligan remembered, the best meeting of his life. The TNT execs were at the edge of their seats, asking what happened next, laughing at all the right places. When Gilligan was done, they looked at one another, crestfallen. “We don’t want to be stereotypical philistine executives,” one finally said, “but does it have to be meth? We love this, but if we buy it, we’ll be fired.”

  Still, Gilligan remembered the meeting fondly. “I give them great credit for not leaving me hanging,” he said. “The best meeting of all is when they buy your story in the room. A close second is when they turn you down quickly. And the third way is you do your song and dance and go away and never hear from anybody again.”

  That was the meeting he had with Carolyn Strauss at HBO. “I couldn’t tell whether she was loving it or hating it or even listening. We got to the end, and she stood up and said, ‘Well, thanks for coming in.’ I said to my agent, ‘Oh boy. I guess this isn’t going to be an HBO show.’” Indeed, HBO never gave them an answer of any kind.

  At the next meeting, with FX, another potential obstacle presented itself. John Landgraf listened to the pitch and said, “Sounds a little like Weeds,” the recently debuted Showtime series about a suburban mom who becomes a pot dealer. Gilligan, who didn’t have Showtime, felt his stomach fall into his crotch. “What is Weeds?” he asked.

  In the end, Landgraf judged Breaking Bad different enough to order a pilot. But by the time, two months later, that Gilligan handed it in, there was yet another problem. The network was committed to making only one new series that year, and it had come down to Breaking Bad and Dirt, starring Courteney Cox, fresh off the juggernaut run of Friends, as the editor of a tabloid gossip magazine.

  “Nobody had a crystal ball, but at the time it made perfect sense to go with Dirt,” Gilligan said, though the show would be canceled after two seasons. “I think they were trying to expand their female viewership, and Dirt came with a bona fide television star. I don’t blame them a bit.” Breaking Bad, however, he assumed was “dead as a doornail.”

  So gracious was Gilligan about these and most other matters that one had to remind oneself he was the author of some of the most harrowing, grisly, gleefully sanguine scenes ever to appear on television of any kind: a human body dissolved by acid in a bathtub, for instance, the acid subsequently burning through both tub and floor, so that the entire pink, swollen mess came crashing down in a magnificent sploosh. In case that somehow slipped your mind, the writers’ room was peppered with further reminders—most strikingly, a clay model of a tortoise on whose back rested a decapitated, mustachioed head. It was a reproduction of an indelible image from season two.

  Yet even in the midst of great violence, a certain gentlemanliness reigned. In the script for one of the tensest episodes of the series, in which Jesse and Walt are being held captive in a desert hideout by a psychotic dealer named Tuco, a stage direction contained a parenthetical that would be hard to imagine in a Sopranos or Mad Men script: “Tuco lunges at Jesse, grabs him by the collar (or hair, if we can make that work without hurting Aaron).”

  Gilligan had been justified in assuming, when FX passed on producing Breaking Bad’s pilot, that none of this would ever see the light of day. FX owned the show outright, and networks were generally disinclined to see shows they had developed become hits on other channels. That was what had happened to a pilot Gilligan had shot for CBS. “They said, ‘We’re not going to let you make it. We bought it and now we’re going to keep it in a file cabinet somewhere,’” Gilligan said. “At a corporate level I understand those kinds of decisions, but they’re hard to justify in any moral way.”

  In any event, the question was moot. HBO, Showtime, TNT, and now FX had passed on Breaking Bad. “There was no place left in the known universe,” Gilligan sai
d. With a TV veteran’s stoicism, he stopped thinking about the show and turned to yet another rewrite of Hancock.

  By that time, however, Jeremy Elice, who while working at FX had watched the show’s development process excitedly and then disappointedly, had landed at AMC. He certainly remembered it when ICM agent Mark Gordon called to say it might still be available. He and Christina Wayne set up a meeting with Gilligan at the L’Ermitage Beverly Hills hotel. Gilligan was dubious but agreed.

  “I figured I’ll go to the meeting, get flattered for a half hour, drink a $14 Scotch, and that’s all fine with me. Just another jerk-off meeting.”

  Wayne and Elice laid out what was going on at AMC, where the pilot for Mad Men had just been shot. Gilligan, in turn, impressed them by sketching out a multiseason, detailed arc for the show. “Christina and I were getting more and more excited,” said Elice. “We’re like, ‘He’s really going to have cancer! Not like Beverly Hills, 90210 cancer. Real cancer!’”

  As for Gilligan, “I liked what I heard. I never thought they were bullshitting. But I have to confess that I also left thinking, ‘Man, this is never going to happen.’”

  Back in New York, the script stalled on Rob Sorcher’s desk. “I didn’t want to read it,” he admitted cheerfully. “I didn’t want to read the fucking script about the meth dealer with cancer.” For two weeks, Elice and Wayne urged him to pick it up. “This is fucking great,” he said, once he finally did. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  It still remained to cut a deal with FX and with Sony. Nine months of negotiations passed, during which Elice and Gordon, the agent, spoke nearly every day. In the end, only one hurdle remained: a $5,000-per-episode royalty on “new media”—a term that was beginning to mean more and more—that Sony was demanding. Sorcher used the company helicopter to fly out to Cablevision’s Long Island headquarters and made the request personally. Finally, the deal was done and Breaking Bad became the property of AMC.