A Career Spent Breaking Good

When he receives the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for television writing achievement, the occasion will not be Vince Gilligan’s first dance with the Writers Guild Awards. Not even close. 

As a writer and producer on Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and the TV movie El Camino, Gilligan is a 19-time Writers Guild Awards nominee and three-time recipient dating back to 2009 when he took home the Writers Guild Award for episodic drama for the pilot of Breaking Bad.

Asked whether he remembers much about his first ceremony as a nominee and winner 26 years ago, Gilligan demurs.

Vince Gilligan in 2013. Photo by Tom Keller.

“I know I was very excited. It was kind of a blur, but it was a wonderful evening,” Gilligan says during a recent interview with Written by. “The WGA has always been very good to me. That night was very special. I hope I made sense when I was up there.”

According to Vince Gilligan, being a member of the WGAW is to enjoy the feeling that you are “part of something bigger, that you’re not just alone in the wilderness.” The profession can be lonely when one is not part of a writers’ room, but hearing from the Guild made him feel connected to the greater writing community. 

The Virginia native who went to film school at New York University convinced he would create the robots and spaceships he saw on Star Wars changed course when he realized his talent lay in storytelling. He wrote the screenplays to the films Wilder Napalm and Home Fries, and shifted to television when he moved to L.A. to work on The X-Files, starting in the series’ second season. He followed as co-creator (with Chris Carter, John Shiban and Frank Spotnitz) and executive producer of the spin-off The Lone Gunmen followed by a couple more series and the screenplay for Hancock (with Vy Vincent Ngo) before the premiere of Breaking Bad in 2008.

To Gilligan’s mind, the success of Breaking Bad is an example of the oft-cited William Goldman truism “nobody knows anything.” Multiple studios turned down the concept of a show revolving around a bland high school chemistry teacher who turns to cooking crystal meth, until AMC took a chance. 

“Everybody looked at it and said, ‘This is never going to work,’ and I thought at the time that they were right,” Gilligan says. “They weren’t dumb for saying that. If we have a story like this, we have a tendency to say, ‘Everyone was wrong, and I knew all along.’ I didn’t know all along. I thought this thing’s going to be a disaster, but nobody knows anything.”

Somebody clearly knew something. Over the course of its five-season run, Breaking Bad won 16 Emmy Awards and six Writers Guild Awards. Its subsequent prequel, Better Call Saul, charting the rise of the lawyer who would become Saul Goodman, earned three Writers Guild Awards (out of 18 nominations) and 53 Emmy nominations over six seasons. The success of those shows has given Gilligan a pathway to try a new idea (more on that presently), but turning out quality TV hasn’t gotten any easier.

“The failures are the ones you learn from more than the successes,” he says. “I can’t tell you much about the success of Breaking Bad. It just hit in the right place at the right time. We did our best to tell a good story, but everyone is always doing that. From the failures you can usually diagnose. You go to the crash site and examine the pieces, so to speak, and say, ‘Well, this didn’t work because of thus and so.’ Success teaches you basically nothing.” 

The Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television Writing Achievement is given to that member of the Guild who “has advanced the literature of television through the years, and who has made outstanding contributions to the profession of the television writer.” As honored as he is at the recognition, Gilligan shares the credit with the creatives who were his collaborators on the series—both those in front of the camera and those at the keyboards. Gilligan has also been the solitary scribe working solo, but nothing tops the creative energy of a talented writers’ room. 

“If you’re lucky enough to last this long, you wind up interacting with some truly wonderful people who help make you who you are and help get you to where you’re going,” he says. “That’s definitely my story.”

Read a scene from "Felina," the series finale of Breaking Bad, written by Vince Gilligan.

Gilligan spoke to Written by from familiar territory: Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he is completing the first season of his newest series for Apple Plus. He can’t share details about the new venture beyond the fact that it has a science fiction component, that it features Better Call Saul alumni Rhea Seehorn, and that it has no connection to any of his previous shows.

Oh, and that he’s been having a great time shooting the first season while also sweating out the notion that this could be his final opportunity to give the creative landscape something new.

“I don’t kid myself. It was the success of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul that allowed me to do this,” he says. “Nowadays you might only get the one shot at a new idea, and then they tell you, ‘How about this reboot the next time around?’” 

Further discussion of the next series is for the future, a subject that Gilligan admits “scares the shit out of me.” 

“I am the most sentimental person who has ever lived, and that is not anything I point to as a positive attribute,” he says, laughing. “If I had a time machine, I would break the part of the dial that went into the future. We’re already going into the future one second at a time and that’s more than fast enough for me.”

By sharp contrast, he harkens back to the members of his writers’ rooms who, Gilligan claims, are unfailingly more positive and forward-thinking than he is. He cites Better Call Saul co-creator and showrunner Peter Gould who drew plenty of friendly ribbing for his eternally upbeat personality and his tendency to exclaim “Good things are happening!” Gilligan made a practice of filling his room with writers he believed were smarter and more talented than himself, “and then you reap the benefits.”

“Some of the very best moments that came our way on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul were group efforts,” Gilligan says. “A couple of moments, I came up with, but more often than not, it was another writer in the room and you’re all working together as this sort of mass, this group mind. When it’s really working well, you don’t remember who came up with what, you just feel this shared sense of accomplishment.”