The TV Showrunner's Roadmap

by Neil Landau

  No one wants to watch a TV series about a freshly paved smooth road. We’re drawn to the potholes and speed bumps and perilous curves. We like our series characters to zoom through the intersection as the traffic light turns from yellow to red. We’re drawn to characters who are, at the very least, tempted to speed up. Some characters will get a moving violation ticket; others will get a lucky break; others will be able to talk themselves out of trouble; and still others will get into a wreck and face the consequences.

  In True Blood, Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) desperately wants to be with vampire Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) despite admonitions and interference from friends, family, Bill’s powerful cohort of vampires, and other antagonistic forces, including Bill’s sire Lorena (Mariana Klaveno) who’s still hung up on him. Sookie never takes the path of least resistance. That’s her thing. That’s what defines her.

  In a perfect TV universe, no two characters will react exactly the same in the same situation. Who they are dictates how they’ll behave—and if they’re compelled to act out of character, our investment in them will spike our curiosity and cause us to wonder why.

  That’s what good TV series do: they show us how beloved characters perform under pressure. Based on their backstories, we try to anticipate how iconic characters will behave in a given situation. But the trick is to avoid predictability and to find highly specific small moments that serve to intensify the situation and surprise us. And so, the bigoted Archie Bunker may reluctantly acquiesce to having his picture taken with an African American celebrity (Sammy Davis Jr.), but the writers push the envelope and blind-side Archie—and us—by having Sammy plant a kiss on Archie’s cheek as the photo is snapped. It’s one small step forward for Archie’s tolerance, but he’s so out of step with the ever-changing world that he’ll never be able to catch up— and we don’t want him to.

  There’s a purity and integrity to all iconic characters whether we like them or not.

  All great sitcom characters suffer from myopia because they’re limited by their past experiences and project the past onto the present and future. They fear the unknowns of a strange new world. Better and easier to stay within the relatively safe confines of the show’s universe than to break out of its bubble and start anew. We’ve seen evidence of this when sitcoms spin off supporting characters into their own brave new world—with mixed results. Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) successfully managed to quit his day job and segue from the Boston bar called Cheers into his Seattle-based radio psychologist career on Frasier—but mainly because Frasier stayed fundamentally rooted in his Crane-ness. The locale and supporting characters may have changed, but Frasier was still the same persnickety yet loveable gasbag he’d always been.

  Creating Antiheroes

  While most TV series leads are iconic heroes and heroines who struggle to be trustworthy, well-intentioned, dependable spouses, parents, friends, neighbors, and colleagues, there are many cable series that feature antiheroes who test the limits of society. If you’ll notice, virtually all “groundbreaking” TV series are about rule breaking characters: Walter White on Breaking Bad was a mild-mannered science teacher turned megalomaniacal drug lord; Dexter Morgan is a vigilante serial killer; Carrie Mathison (on Homeland) not only consorted with a suspected terrorist and got him to let his guard down but she also fell in love with him; Don Draper appears to be the idyllic family man and knows how to sell the perfection of the American Dream to his advertising clients (on Mad Men), but in actuality, Don is a lying, cheating manipulator; Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) was supposed to be a law enforcer, but in the pilot episode of The Shield, Vic shot an unsuspecting undercover cop in the face, point blank.

  In Justified, deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) breaks the law, as much as he enforces it, in his Kentucky hometown. In the pilot, Raylan gives a criminal an ultimatum: “If you don’t get out of town in twenty-four hours, I’m gonna shoot you on sight,” and he delivers on his promise.

  In some of the preceding examples of antiheroes, the characters’ ends serve to justify the means. Dexter seeks justice. Vic Mackey feels he needs to break the rules in order to defeat the scumbags on the streets of Los Angeles and to overcome the restrictive bureaucracy within the police department.

  Other shows have an array of dissolute characters, but they remain empathetic because of a relatable code of ethics. In Sons of Anarchy, Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam) has committed assault, extortion, murder, and even injected his reformed addict ex-wife with heroin to ensure custody of his son, and he’s arguably the moral compass of the show! However, Jax would do anything to protect his family and his motorcycle club.

  In The Wire, Omar (Michael Kenneth Williams) is a shotgun-wielding outlaw whose specialty is robbery, but he only steals from drug dealers.

  However, in the case of Breaking Bad, as the series has progressed, empathy for Walt has become more dicey. Walter White may have started off as a terminally ill, high school chemistry teacher, loyal husband, and loving father of two (including a handicapped son), but Walt has evolved into a self-centered, greedy, power-obsessed criminal mastermind. The only thing stronger than Walt’s convenient self-delusion is his hubris. Even his mountains of wealth have become immaterial. What Walt loves most is being feared and respected. Any shreds of human decency that Walt may still possess have been overshadowed by his need to stay at the top of his game.

  What’s most fascinating with the case study of Breaking Bad is how the audience continues to root for Walter White—even as he’s progressed from white knight family man into a pitch-black murderous monster. This raises the question: Is Walt just an anomaly expertly crafted by showrunner Vince Gilligan and portrayed by the brilliant, supremely likeable actor, Bryan Cranston? Or is there something else that compels us to continually root for such a bad guy?

  I believe that all iconic characters need to possess both positive (+) and negative (–) characteristics. This +/− polarity provides all series with the right amount of dramatic heat to sustain it over many seasons.

  Walter White begins as a novice in the crystal meth drug trade, but he’s also an expert chemist with a unique skill set. He’s simultaneously naïve and smart.

  Walt has strong leadership qualities, but he also grows increasingly paranoid and is unable to trust anybody, so he becomes a lone wolf.

  Walt is a loving family man who will say anything to hold his family together, but his actions become more and more dangerous and reckless, placing his wife and kids in greater danger.

  Walt is greedy and power hungry, but his secret double life prohibits him from showing off his power and wealth, so despite his growing ego and fortune, he continues to live small.

  Perhaps we root for him—and Archie Bunker, Frasier Crane, Vic Mackey, Nancy Botwin, and dozens of other iconic series leads—because we all possess both light and dark impulses—and there’s a vicarious thrill to watching characters veer into the dark side. Some of our rooting interest might come from wanting to see just how much they can get away with or from our desire or curiosity to see if they will find redemption or a tragic demise.

  We dread driving past the destruction of a train wreck, but somehow we can’t look away. Our interest isn’t in the carnage. Our rooting interest is in the survivors. We all know that life is complicated, difficult, heartbreaking, relentless, and precious. Great iconic characters engross us because no matter how many times they get knocked down, they never give up.

  Interview: Vince Gilligan

  Vince Gilligan Credits

  Best known for:

  Breaking Bad (Executive Producer/Writer/Director) 2008–2013

  Emmy Nominated (Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series) 2008; 2012

  Emmy Nominated (Outstanding Drama Series) 2009–2010; 2012

  WGA Award Winner (Drama Series) 2012

  WGA Award Winner (Episodic Drama) 2009; 2012

  WGA Nominated (Drama Series) 2010–2011

  WGA Nominated (Dramatic Series) 2011


  WGA Nominated (New Series) 2009

  AFI’s Top 10 TV series 2009, 2011–2013

  TCA Award 2010, 2012

  Peabody Award 2008

  Hancock (Film) 2008

  The X-Files (Executive Producer/Co-Producer/Supervising Producer/Writer/Director) 1996–2002

  Emmy Nominated (Outstanding Drama Series) 1997–1998

  Emmy Nominated (Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series) 1997

  The Lone Gunmen (Executive Producer/Writer) 2001

  NL: The toughest thing for most screenwriters is creating original characters. People come up with ideas for what might be an interesting show, but creating complex characters is extremely difficult to do. What’s your process when you’re starting with the pilot? Walt (Bryan Cranston) is all about the choices that he makes in life. How do you make your creative choices?

  VG: It’s interesting because each new project is a bit like a snowflake. It has its own shape. The best way to explain it is to talk specifically about Breaking Bad. When the idea first struck, it intrigued me. I think in hindsight what struck me in one of those rare Eureka moments of inspiration was not a plot or a big idea; it was a character who I found very intriguing—the character I didn’t even have a name for who became Walter White. The idea of a previously good man—an inherently good man—a guy who is a loving husband and father who works hard for his family—who strives to do the right thing and does not break the law. Who suddenly, for external reasons, decides to very much veer off course off the path of goodness and become a bad guy. That intrigued me. It wasn’t the idea of cooking meth or putting a lab in the back of an RV; it was the interesting trappings that came with it. What intrigued me was the possibility of telling a story where the protagonist, by force of will, decided to become bad and would eventually become the antagonist, that idea of sand shifting beneath the character’s feet via a process that he put in motion. I’d love to say that it always works out that way. You start with a blank pad of paper and a pencil, your chin in your hand, saying, “OK, what interesting character can I write about today?” The trouble is they don’t appear to you that often, unfortunately. But when they do, it’s a wonderful thing.

  NL: Some writers construct these lengthy backstory biographies for their nascent characters before they even know how they’re going to fit into a show—which can feel arbitrary, and yet also necessary. I’ve read in other interviews that you started with the idea of turning Mr. Chips into Scar-face. When you’re trying to develop his character and put him into a world, choices of making him a chemistry teacher, and when did you hit upon the idea that he was going to cook meth? And, setting it in Albuquerque and choices about his family and son?

  VG: I was on the phone with a buddy of mine that I’ve known since NYU Film School back in the mid-1980s who is actually one of my writers on Breaking Bad now. He was a writer on The X-Files with me. This was a year or two after The X-Files had ended and we were talking about what we were going to do next because good writing jobs were hard to find at that point. He told me a story that he had read in the New York Times, I think, about a guy who had been caught with a meth lab in the back of a Winnebago going around cooking crystal meth. My friend Tom [Schnauz] said, “Hey, maybe we should try that and make a little dough.” At the moment he made that joke, a character who would do such a thing flashed in my mind and became very interesting—the idea of a good man willfully going bad. This was a man who was doing bad things for ostensibly good reasons. It’s interesting if you had told me in that first week or so to sit down and write a biography of this man, I would have written something very different from who Walt ended up being. Not to say that that’s a bad exercise. Anything that you can put on paper that can help focus your thinking and gets you closer to the goal of creating something is to the good. If it’s looking through a phone book until you come up with the right combination of first and last names that helps you picture the character, so be it. But, you have to stay flexible. The really interesting things about Walter White only came to me a season or two later once the show had progressed and once I had the benefit of working with Bryan Cranston who truly helped create the character and embodies it. And once I started working with my excellent writers who helped me see the potential in what it was that I had come up with and helped me make it so much better than what it would have been if it was just me alone working on it.

  In those early days for instance, I realized what Walt’s superpower is. I didn’t realize what a world-class liar he would be. That’s really his super-power. He lies most ably to himself. He is able to convince himself of anything. First and foremost, that he is a good man, that he does what he does for his family—the huge, awful lie that’s at the center of Breaking Bad, long past all reason and any evidence to the contrary.

  NL: Like any superhero, they have a superpower, but then they also have an accompanying weakness or Achilles’ heel. In his case, it appears that they are one and the same.

  VG: Indeed. His Achilles’ heel is his pride. His ability to lie is his power. He has made so many bad choices out of a sense of pride, when his ego is wounded, and it’s a very fragile ego. There’s a great expression I heard years ago when someone was described to me as being “the piece of shit at the center of the universe.” When I heard that, it stuck with me. I think it describes Walt. He does not see himself as the piece of shit. He sees himself as the center of the universe, but it’s a very fragile universe that can crack very easily when he is presented with evidence that he is not the be all and end all.

  NL: I was thinking about the film The Social Network, and how Mark Zuckerberg gets that rejection from that girl early on in college, which shapes all of his grandiosity and ambition. In your pilot, Walt hits that rock bottom moment with, besides his illness, when he’s at the car wash and the student from school shows up with the girl and Walt’s scrubbing a tire rim. He feels so completely humiliated and it’s like his Scarlett O’Hara, “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again” moment. No matter how much he has, Walter seems to have this insecurity when it’s ill-gotten and you’re fearful that it could all be taken away. The last episode that aired, your mid-season cliffhanger, when Skyler (Anna Gunn) says, “How much is enough?” It’s not about the money. What would you say he’s afraid of?

  VG: That’s a good question. The obvious answer would be death. The motivation that got him off his keister in the first place to becoming a criminal was the fear of imminent death. He was facing an end-of-life crisis. It’s a very existential show. Walt faces many existential moments that he so far has managed to surmount. And, yet, he doesn’t seem to spend a lot of time pondering death—maybe in the early going in the first season he did. He’s gotten past that. We even had an episode a few seasons back where he said to his brother-in-law, “You know, I used to worry about everything, it used to keep me awake at night. But, since I got my cancer diagnosis, I sleep like a baby.” I think Walt’s big fear is insignificance. Whether he’s here or not, that’s not the issue, but once he’s gone, he fears he’ll be instantly forgotten—that he won’t have mattered or counted for anything. This is a man who in a later episode lets Jesse [Aaron Paul] and the audience know that he could have been somebody. He could have been a billionaire or at least a millionaire many times over as a founding partner of Gray Matter. This company that his girlfriend and his best buddy from college founded with him. He stepped away from that and he has intense regret about it. The stock price every week shows him how much money he could have had, if he had stuck with the program. This is a very damaged man who fears that he is irrelevant and insignificant. And decides ultimately, I think it’s from Paradise Lost that Satan says, “It’s better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” It’s the realization that Walt can stand being a criminal. It wouldn’t have been his first choice, but it gives him something that he needs. It gives him power and potency and relevance. It’s better to be somebody negative than nobody.

  NL: There’s a great line at the
end of season 4 where he says to his wife, “I’m not in danger, I am the danger.” He never thought he could become this guy. He’s cooking meth, but he has his own addiction to this power.

  VG: His addiction to power and the money, I think, becomes a yardstick of sorts. That huge pile of cash that we see in that eighth episode of season 5 is a yardstick nothing more. Walt and Skyler could never spend it all without garnering the unwanted attention of the IRS and the feds. It’s just an enormous pile of paper in a U-Store-It facility. That scene you mentioned earlier shows Walt’s ability to lie to himself. When he says, “I’m not in danger, I am the danger,” he could not be more wrong.

  NL: How much research did you do going into the pilot? Do you have meth consultants? How do you come up with some of this stuff?

  VG: The thing I loved about this show when it first started was that Walter White was essentially me. In other words, the thing that held me in good stead when I wrote the pilot before I had a staff, including folks with the DEA and oncologists and professors of chemistry. All these folks that help us out with the various facts and information. Before we had any of that, Walter White was just a guy who one day woke up and decided I’m going to start cooking crystal meth. He was very much me at that point in the sense that he didn’t know any more about a life of crime than I did. So, as a writer, it worked out very well for me. I do not have any of the chemistry knowledge Walt possesses. He is a brilliant chemist and I barely know how soda pop is made. Having said that, the thing that held me in good stead in those scenes where he was teaching chemistry is that he’s talking to a bunch of knuckleheads and they’re barely listening. He has to dumb it down and speak in laymen’s terms. That got me through—the ability of Walt to pick his audience. And then, Walt bumbling his way into a life of crime is pretty much the way I would have done it, if I had the desire and I wasn’t too scared of the police which is what made it so fun to write. I’m better with writing characters who are a little closer to me because I’m not very good at research.