And yet Gilligan initially doubted he could make it as a TV writer. “The thing I was most trepidatious about is, I am so lazy,” he says. Surely, he figured, a guy whose process involved frequent video-game breaks wouldn’t last past his 13-week X-Files probation. “I thought, I don’t really need to clean out my fridge in Virginia. The ketchup will keep 13 weeks.” But to his surprise, he took to the hard work. “The two things about TV that are so great,” he discovered, are that “your writing actually gets produced”—unlike film scripts, which can take years to reach the screen, if they do at all—and “working with smart, talented people you can stand to be in a room with for 12 hours a day, five or six days a week.”
Another aimless period followed The X-Files’ 2002 finale. But Gilligan counts himself, yes, lucky to have been pitching Breaking Bad amid a boom in cable networks making bespoke scripted series, an escape hatch from broadcast’s grueling 22-plus-episode seasons. The 2008 premiere of the show, which follows a terminally ill teacher (Bryan Cranston) who cooks meth to stockpile money for his family, failed to generate the same buzz as AMC’s flagship original, Mad Men. A 2011 New York Times Magazine profile ventured, in an observation that has aged awkwardly, that Gilligan might be “TV’s first true red-state auteur.” Just when it looked as if that crowd might not be enough to sustain it, Netflix licensed the show during its fourth season, driving millions of new viewers to AMC for new episodes.
