For AMC's Breaking Bad, Life Is Good

The high New Mexican desert. A pair of khakis floats into frame, billowing in the wind as they descend and are flattened by a rocketing camper van, which crashes hard. A man in white briefs and a gas mask, clearly in extremis, jumps out, pulls a shirt from a hanger on the rear-view, videos a desperate message to his wife and son, then stands in the middle of a dirt road holding a gun he's retrieved from an indistinctly bloody, body-strewn scene in the van.

This is the opening of the quickly popular (its first two episodes were among the most downloaded shows on iTunes this week) AMC series, Breaking Bad. The man is Walter White (played with expert and endless flop sweat by Bryan Cranston, of Malcolm In the Middle), and his creator is Vince Gilligan, a veteran writer for X-Files (and its spin-offs who also has a shared screenplay credit on the forthcoming Hancock as well as his own quirky scripts, Wilder Napalm and Home Fries. Clearly, author and actor know how to embrace a certain comic darkness.

"A guy in his underwear in a gas mask," Gilligan told me in his folksy Virginia accent the other day, "that kind of stuff came to me pretty early on--and then I had to go back and figure out why he was in his underpants out in the middle of nowhere, I kinda came up with the image first and had to reverse engineer it to figure out why."

Without spoiling the fun--if that's the word for a show that often dips out of comedy into pathos and violence and then back again--Walter White is a high school chemistry teacher with a moonlighting job at a car wash (getting respect at neither, and just hitting age 50), with a drolly game wife and a son afflicted with cerebral palsy. When he stumbles into the disintegration of a meth-cooking ring (riding along with his brother-in-law, a DEA agent), he takes up the trade in the company of a smart-ass, screw-up kid who once studied with him.

All this is made duly logical by Gilligan's reverse engineering in the pilot episode--crucially, we discover our anti-hero has lung cancer--at the end of which this writer, along with a sudden cult audience on AMC who perhaps began paying attention to the channel after its much-laudedMad Men attracted them, couldn't wait to see the second one. (Mad Men, like Showtime's Weeds, is from the television arm of Lionsgate, whose recent agreement with the WGA means, as discussed in the Los Angles Times, they're in a position to cherry-pick a great deal more of the town's writing talent.)

The idea for the show--whose title is a Southern term for a straight arrow who goes astray--had come to Gilligan during a chat with a college buddy, right down to Walter's terminal prognosis of two years. His longtime colleague Mark Johnson (who with Barry Levinson produced the 1998 Home Fries) took a hand in developing it to bring to Sony Television and ultimately, AMC. Gilligan's grateful that cable shows like The Shield and The Sopranos have paved the way for such edgy fare. The show's hopeful element is found in the fiercely loyal family trio, and the reinvigoration that comes to Walter as he becomes a criminal to keep them afloat. As Gilligan puts it, "The irony is that at the verge of death he really comes to life for the first time; this idea of coming to life in the face of death is an important one for the show...if we can in any way, compare ourselves to a show as good as The Sopranos, in the sense that Tony Soprano was getting the life sucked out of him over the course of many seasons, by his family and what not, in some ways we're the flip side of that."

After being greenlit, Gilligan and his staff began creating their order of eight shows to follow the pilot episode, but were interrupted by the writers' strike with just six in the can. That's the down side--but a big plus, Gilligan agreed, is that they've come into a much slimmed-down marketplace: "It's hard to get an audience's attention nowadays, because there's so much stuff being premiere'd week in and week out. I'm terribly sorry there's a strike that's hurting people, but it's given us some breathing room we otherwise wouldn't have had."

Given the warm reception thus far, has he had second thoughts about diagnosing his male lead as having just two years to live? And is there a way to fix that?

"You can really piss off your audience, really alienate them if you quote, unquote, pull a Dallas, like that season that turned out to be a dream. If you let your character off the hook too easily, the audience will bite ya in the ass for it ,and rightly so. That would be a major shark jump at that point and so I might have written myself into a corner. But I'm just taking it day by day at --this point I just really hope for the show to reach an audience and be well received."

Finally, the show's one-sheet, of a half-clad Cranston standing stricken in the desert clutching a gun--did Gilligan recognize that as the key image the moment he saw it?

"Nope, I didn't. I should have seen that coming because the whole time I was there on that location out there in those boondocks west of Albuquerque shooting that stuff, I was thinking `What's the poster gonna be? It never dawned on me it was it was standing in front of me sipping on an iced tea."

(See a sneak peek of the show's third episode, to air at 10 P.M. Sunday, February 10, here)

(Bryan Cranston as Walter White in Breaking Bad;Photo courtesy AMC)