LET’S STEAL FROM THIS! What to Steal from Breaking Bad

LET’S STEAL FROM THIS! is a series of pieces looking at what fiction writers can borrow, craftily, from other sources. I will mostly look at television, movies, and comics, though the occasional literary work may squeak its way in, as will a song or two. LET’S STEAL FROM THIS! finds useful inspiration in unlikely places.

In the weeks both before and since Breaking Bad ended, I’ve been thinking about what made the show work so well. Apart from the first half of season one, and of course the last episode, there seems to be critical consensus that the show was uniformly excellent through and through. Even Jonathan Franzen loved Breaking Bad, and he hates air! As it happens, I rewatched the entire series with my 14-year-old son in the run-up to the final two shows, and have come away with some thoughts about the writing.

1. Season one is better than you remember.

I do remember watching the first episode pretty grudgingly, simply because there was nothing else on at the time and because several reviews kept saying “No, no, it’s good!” These reflected the very same reservations I’d had, which were basically: “Oh, it’s Weeds, but with a guy.” And while the pilot is, as with many pilots, not exactly the same show it would be (as my friend Scott Rosann points out, have a look at the 30 Rock pilot sometime), it’s remarkably consistent with what would follow over five seasons. It doesn’t just feature all the main characters and the setup — dying teacher decides to cook meth to earn money for his family — it contains all the key character relationships. The condescension of Walter to Jesse. The beginning of Walt’s lying to Skyler. Hank’s humoring of his milquetoast brother-in-law. Marie’s self-centered pushiness with her sister. And the ugliest, most destructive relationship of all on Breaking Bad: Walt and his pride.

In other words, it’s all there from the beginning. More importantly…

2. It all comes from Walt.

Yes, you have crucial players in the story: Tuco, Gus Fring, The Cousins, Saul Goodman, Mike, Lydia, Todd, Uncle Jack. But the key to Breaking Bad? As good as all these characters are, they are not what changes the story and makes things difficult for everyone. That would be Walt’s pride. These people are merely the demons summoned by Walt’s pride.

This is not accidental. Vince Gilligan, the creator of the show (but not, let’s remember, its sole author), set out to write about a man “who goes from Mr. Chips to Scarface.” It was never about the conspiracies that put this man there, never about the things that happened in his childhood to make him this way, etc. It was just about Walter White, a man out of control. For this reason, the show never feels like it’s spiraling off into weird tangents. Whether it’s Walt vs. Tuco or Walt vs. Gus or Walt. vs. Hank, what it comes down to is Walt vs. Walt (and whatever damage he himself has wrought this time). In the wake of this show, there will be a million and one “edgy” drug dramas popping up or regular-guy-gone-crazy premises, and they will all probably get it wrong, packing the story with all manner of complicated character problems. Meanwhile, Breaking Bad was the simplest story on television.

How simple? Consider this: even when Walt’s kicked out of his house and Skyler is embarking on an affair with Ted Beneke, Walt never wavers from his “I’m doing this for the family” mission. He never once, in the five-season run of Breaking Bad, has an affair or even gets distracted by another woman. The closest he comes is the hand on his principal’s knee, and that was more a moment of pathetic confusion, of misplaced anger, than anything. The writers had a million chances to introduce another woman to distract Walter or cause him all kinds of complications, but they didn’t, because they knew they didn’t need to.

This is a kind of narrative focus we teach in writing classes, but which is hard to do in practice. There’s a simplemindedness to would have various characters popping up to make trouble for Walter. Obstacles on his road to happiness/redemption. But because Walter is both hero and villain of Breaking Bad, everything has to come from him. Well, guess what? In the best fiction, this is how it works. I’ve said here before (in different wording) that the best protagonists are driven and damaged. Driven meaning there’s something they want; damaged meaning they’re fundamentally unable to see (or at least reconcile) the real reason why they want that thing. (Guaranteeing the thing will never be enough.)

This is what’s behind the best of Shakespeare’s characters, it’s behind Humbert Humbert, it’s behind McNulty from The Wire. And, of course, it’s behind the drive for celebrity. We watch as people sell themselves for a piece of the fame they believe will fill whatever hole’s inside them, only to find out nothing will ever be enough to fill that hole.

3. Breaking Bad is simple but never simplistic.

So, yes, everything comes from the nexus, the toxic nucleus that is Walt. But Breaking Bad, while keeping its story clean and simple, was never simplistic. I’ve heard Vince Gilligan use the word “evil” in interviews about the show, but I’ll argue that the show itself never believed in the word.

Here’s my belief: I don’t believe in Evil. It’s a pretty pointless concept. It’s also harmful to good writing. If you believe that people are evil, then you are denying the complicated nature of the human being. Complicated humans are one of the most important tools a writer can have. But evil’s always been a handy concept for society, until the day when it isn’t. If you believe that James Holmes, the shooter in the Aurora, CO movie theater massacre, was evil, then you don’t have to consider the problem of mental illness. You also don’t have to consider the issue of guns in our society, as an evil person will use anything for evil purposes. Everything, then, is out of our hands — Evil made it happen! — and this is, as I say, handy. Until all those other issues come busting down our door.

Evil characters are the same. If you think of a character as evil, without a shred of nuance or complexity, you’ve already ruined the batch. And people will still buy that batch from you! But I tell you this: You will pay the price in the long run.

Here’s an example from NCIS: Los Angeles, a show which is the exact opposite of Breaking Bad. Not long ago, I was flipping past when I came upon a pair of long scenes where guys with automatic weapons were cackling as they sprayed two sets of cops with assault weapons. That’s as deep as it got with those bad-guy characters. Because they were bad guys, right? And I get it: There’s a kind of storytelling we like sometimes where it just feels good to have good guys vs. bad guys. But does anyone think about NCIS: Los Angeles ten minutes after it’s over? Meanwhile, Norm MacDonald tweeted nonstop for forty days and forty nights about the finale of Breaking Bad.

Simplistic storytelling, simplistic character work — we obviously like these things because they help us deny, for just a little bit, our complicated world. This thing happened because these people were evil. This girl hasn’t noticed me because I haven’t made a Big Gesture. Southerners are all chuckling racists. Obama wants to destroy the Constitution.

But the world is complicated, always has been, and our simplistic smokescreen isn’t as thick as it used to be. I think this is why certain pockets of society are getting so extreme in their views and behaviors: There’s so much technology and media and access to all aspects of the world that it’s getting harder to deny that the poor countries of the world might have some legitimate gripes, or that gay people’s love may not be different than yours, or that your ideas about class and race may be bullshit. So we either accept and adapt, or we double down on the most simplistic ideas we can find to reaffirm our original beliefs. I’m not the first to say all this, obviously, but it bears repeating in the context of storytelling.

We read to find connection — with the characters, with the author, with ideas. When we find only confirmation of the party line — good vs. evil! Muslims are terrorists! — it can bring momentary satisfaction but never anything more. Therefore, it’s important to bring complexity to every character, so that:

• women are not always dependent on love
• men are not always obtuse
• Asian-Americans are not always sexless careerists
• black people are not always either criminals or selfless truth-tellers
• lesbians are not always either criminals or selfless truth-tellers
• gay men are not always cheerful and randy or sexless and wise
• people who live in the suburbs are not always dead inside
• people who work in advertising/marketing/finance are not always dead inside
• people who are not writers are not always dead inside

See, it’s not just writers in genre who are being simplistic. In fact, there are a good many “genre” writers who are careful to avoid easy answers. Yet in literary fiction, there are tropes upon tropes upon tropes that pop up all the time. In Breaking Bad, no one was simple. Not even Krazy 8, who was in the pilot and proved to be a nuanced, interesting “villain” by the time Walt killed him in episode 3. Again: It was all there, right from the start.

Having seen the show twice through now, I never once believed the show bought Walt’s bullshit. At the same time, it never said: Here is an evil person. That phone call from Walter to Skyler is the closest Walter gets to pure evil, yet look what happens: He’s bawling. He means it all, and he doesn’t mean a word of it.

4. The finale was not a 100% face-value proposition.

I think what threw people about the finale of Breaking Bad was that it seemed to jettison all the character nuance of the 61 previous episodes. I would argue that there are two ways to read the finale (SPOILERS AHOY):

• Everything after New Hampshire was Walt’s fantasy of how he’d “fix” everything he’d set in motion. This was popular on Twitter, and not without some great evidence.
• The whole thing was real, but it was still kind of a Walt fantasy. The entire episode, in a way, is told in close third person. Think about it: the whole series has been about how Walter White, a driven and damaged character, sees the world. Well, part of how Walt sees the world is this idea that at any time he can use his brains to make it all right, no matter how wrongly he’s already steered things. So while Walt does “fix” everything, he fixes it all in a typically self-centered way, which is to say: rather than make things right with the world, Walt makes things right with himself. So that he can die peacefully. Thanks, Walt!

Yes, he sets up Skyler and Walt Jr. with money via the Schwartzes. But he doesn’t un-rob them of a husband and father, nor do we know whether he’ll actually be able to keep Skyler out of jail. He just thinks he will, and that’s enough for Walt. He finally tells Skyler the truth about why he did what he did, but that doesn’t erase all the lies. If anything, it only makes them that much more awful. Yes, he frees Jesse, but he doesn’t un-kill Jane, un-poison Brock, un-kill (by association) Andrea, nor un-enslave Jesse. And he kills Uncle Jack and the gang, but that doesn’t un-kill Hank and Gomey. That’s the thing about half-measures and full measures. Half-measures can sometimes be stopped, reversed, fixed. Full measures? Not a chance.

In its final 90 minutes, Breaking Bad gave us this: a talented but tragically deluded man, blinded by pride, doing what he thinks is right (by his definition of right) and disregarding the full consequences of his actions. Which is exactly how it began. Simple, but never simplistic, and left for us to fully untangle. Like the best fiction.

What to steal: Uh, all of it? Not helpful, I guess. Here are some particulars:

Steal the humor. I didn’t talk about the humor in Breaking Bad, but there it was in every single episode, if only a look on Jesse’s face or an overly earnest line from Badger. So necessary, not only because it adds balance while making the dark stuff that much darker, but also because it keeps a story from lapsing into self-seriousness.

Steal the messy characters: Skyler White, who was every bit as driven and complicated as her husband, much to the dismay of certain viewers. Steal Hank Schrader, who was a loudmouth and a bully, but also loving and terrified and stubborn and brilliant. Steal Jesse Pinkman, who through almost everything maintained a child’s belief in the workings of the world. Steal Walt Jr., who could be heartbreaking and petty all in the same scene. (Just like real kids!)

Steal the care with which this story was told. You are not a writers’ room, but you can employ the same techniques: think about your characters first, and why they’re doing the things they do. Think about the consequences of those actions. Think about their reactions to those consequences. And every now and then, put a little plate of donuts in the middle of your table.

Steal the simplicity of the Breaking Bad story. A writing teacher once told me, “Whenever you’re thinking of adding another character to make the story better, don’t. In fact, see what happens when you take a character away.” I love Dickens, but not every story needs to be a Dickens novel. Or Cannonball Run.

Steal that golden, golden premise. Not “dying teacher decides to cook meth to make money for his family,” but the real premise: “Talented, ambitious person sets out to battle for what they believe is theirs, losing sight of what matters and always unaware that the real enemy is inside them.” It’s literally an ancient premise and Breaking Bad is just the latest piece of fiction to put it to good use.

Now you.