The creators of Breaking Bad, Mad Men and Deadwood are this generation’s
auteurs.
Vince Gilligan created Breaking Bad | Matthew Weiner and his Mad Men | David
Milch wrote Deadwood.
In TV, as nowhere else, the writer is king—none more so than those emperors of the
air that control every aspect of an ambitious, ongoing cable drama. The show-runner
is this era’s version of the Creative Titan, and few have done more with the power
than the three GQ recently convened in the Olympian heights of a room at the Soho
House in West Hollywood, to talk deeply about their craft.
The men speak in voices as different as their shows: Matthew Weiner, the man
behind Mad Men, is a high-speed stream of sparkling copy; Vince Gilligan, who
created Breaking Bad, has the straightforward, gracious drawl of a geeky southern
gentleman; and David Milch—who wrote Deadwood, the misbegotten John from
Cincinnati, and Luck, which met an equally early end this spring after the deaths of
three equine cast members—has the baroque gnomic gravity of an archdruid. But
each of these giants expresses, in his distinct way, just how ambitious and deep the
new breed of TV drama has grown.GQ: I think we’ve all gotten used to the idea that television has evolved into its own distinct art form over the past ten years or so, rather than just movies on a small screen.
Matthew Weiner: Seeing movie people trying to get into TV now who don’t
understand that is very interesting.
GQ: What’s the mistake they make?
Matthew Weiner: It’s a different genre. It’s literally comparing a short story to a
poem. Or a play.
GQ: Nowadays nobody would struggle with feeling inferior for working
in television instead of movies, the way someone like The Sopranos’
David Chase once did, right?
Matthew Weiner: Oh, there’s still a hierarchy. Forgetting about remuneration and
public adulation, there’s still a hierarchy in terms of the writer’s Olympic Dream. I
have to warn you, journalism won’t be on this list.
GQ: Thank you for that.
Matthew Weiner: It would start with poetry, then go theater, novel, then film, and
then TV, then maybe radio.
GQ: Why is that still true, when it’s obvious that some of the best work is
being done on TV?
Vince Gilligan: It takes time. It started out when movies were the movies and TV
was this bastard stepchild.
David Milch: The symbol retains its hold long after the substance which the symbol
is supposed to represent has lost its real basis. Look. [pulls a stack of scratch-off
lottery tickets from his pocket] I just stopped and got gas, so, like an idiot, I bought a
bunch of scratch-offs.
[He distributes the tickets. Feverish scratching ensues and continues throughout
lunch.]
Matthew Weiner: If we win, what happens?
David Milch: You keep the money. Please do. What I’m trying to illustrate is that
none of us, thank goodness, needs $10. And yet we willingly submit to the hold the
symbol has on us, associated with luck. In the same way, the mystique of the film
writer holds long after the substance—in which films were a more powerful medium.
That’s not true anymore, but the symbol still has its own autonomous reality.
Matthew Weiner: Part of it is just about scarcity. You can see Jon Hamm thirteen
times a year, and you can see Brad Pitt twice. That in itself creates a magic and a
hierarchy.
GQ: And yet, Vince, you’ve said that Breaking Bad instantly came to you
as a TV show, not as a movie.

Vince Gilligan: Well, if it had been the 1970s, absolutely it would have been a
movie, and I would have had to forgo a lot of fun story, because I would have had to
fit it all in two hours. That’s the first question: Is this two hours’ worth of story or a hundred hours’ worth of story? And in all honesty, I’ve written movies that have been
made, and the process has not been as satisfying as writing for television.
GQ: Clearly a lot of writers—and actors and directors and so on—have
come to realize that.
Matthew Weiner: Who knows where the talent goes? Sometimes it goes where the
money is. Sometimes I think writers are really interested in the glory.
GQ: And the glory’s in TV right now?
Vince Gilligan: It seems like it.
Matthew Weiner: All I know is that at one point they added the word television to
USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Vince Gilligan: Holding their nose.
Matthew Weiner: I’m sure someday they’ll add the word computer too.
Vince Gilligan: But let’s leave aside for a second the idea of glory. TV is where
writers get to tell interesting stories right now.
Matthew Weiner: Without interference.
Vince Gilligan: Because writers, for the most part, run television.
GQ: One unique thing is that you’re creating worlds without a clear
ending. Ideally the story goes on and on and on….
Vince Gilligan: Endings are the hardest part. I find there’s a great relief that at the
end of every episode, every hour of TV you produce, while you want a proper and
satisfying ending, it doesn’t have to end The Story, in capital letters.
Matthew Weiner: And that automatically makes it more real. Because in the end,
there’s things that are hanging, the way they are in real life. And your audience,
you’re actually whetting their appetite for more.
GQ: So do you go into each season laying a certain amount of
groundwork, in case it does get renewed?
Matthew Weiner: The first season, I used everything that I had. I’d been thinking
about it for six years. I used every song I wanted to put in that show. I used every
story line. The only thing I knew that I didn’t use is that there was another Mrs.
Draper. I knew that the real Don Draper’s widow was part of the story and that she
was in California. That and the fact that Don’s wife, Betty, didn’t know who he really
was. That’s all I had left.
GQ: So when you had to do season two, were you terrified?
Matthew Weiner: Yeah! It’s terrifying when you have to do episode two! You think
you’ve used it up! Yes, it was terrifying. And then when season two was over and I
didn’t know if it was gonna get renewed, I thought, “This could be a relief, because I
don’t really have anything.”
David Milch: Hospitality to the theme of change—to change as a theme, not
necessarily to change as the organizing principle of the storytelling—must be present if the show is to continue to develop. Change as a theme. And for work that seems so
disparate, if you think about it, there is exactly that similarity.
Matthew Weiner: And that’s part of what changed in TV, by the way: Guess what,
you don’t know who the show’s gonna be about this week. You don’t know who’s
gonna die and disappear this week, even if you love them. We are not giving you a
formula. I watched the first season of The Sopranos as a viewer, and you literally felt
like you were being dropped out of an airplane every episode. You constantly had the
sensation that you had missed an episode. “Everybody in the story seems to know
that guy! Do I know that guy? Was he on?” No, they just act like they know that guy,
because they have a life that’s without you. Right? When Betty and Don got divorced,
I did it in between seasons. We came back and saw them living in different houses
and that she was remarried. Viewers still did not believe that she was divorced,
because how could you do that with your show? You can’t just—that’s the show! Is
she not gonna be in it anymore? Now it’s the viewers’ problem if they don’t know
what’s going on. And all of a sudden, a world has opened up to us as writers.
GQ: Do you enjoy the physical side of your jobs—actually filming the
show?
Vince Gilligan: It’s wonderful. It’s more fun than writing. Anything is. Writing is
like getting hit in the head repeatedly with a mallet. For me, anyway. I love having
written. You feel good when you have that fifty-page script. I don’t know from
personal experience, but it’s like childbirth: You forget the pain, and then you’re
ready to do it again.
Matthew Weiner: To have your work shot—it’s an experience that nobody else gets
to know. As opposed to piling up scripts, trying to sell a story, getting notes, and then
hoping the execution will happen at all, let alone well. It would be like being an
architect and never getting a building built. Everyone here—we’re drawing plans, and
then we build the building.
Vince Gilligan: I always loved stories of the studio system back in the ’40s and
’50s, where you’d have writers in their individual offices, this one working on a
Humphrey Bogart movie, this one doing something else.
David Milch: Isn’t that nice to think about?
Vince Gilligan: And your movies would get made. Now there’s a kind of hang-fire
misery involved in living the life of a screenwriter in which you get paid a lot of
money, you can write your movie in the South of France or wherever the hell you
wish to work, but it’s very likely your blueprints will never be made into a building.
With TV, you write something, and a week or two later it’s being produced.
Matthew Weiner: Screenwriting is not our end product. I walk on set and I see the
person I cast, and the costumes I went to the meeting for, and the hair, and
somebody’s done something amazing with the set. All these people’s creative input
comes into it.

David Milch: That’s the extraordinary part. How much you learn, how quickly. It’s
like this in-gush of information that modifies your original idea. It’s so precious.GQ: You must have had to learn to work in a different way on Luck, since
you and [fellow executive producer] Michael Mann agreed you wouldn’t
be on the set.
David Milch: Yeah, it’s been absolutely new. It’s involved the postponement of that
learning experience.
Matthew Weiner: I can’t even imagine what it’s like to just go and see it thrown at
you.
Vince Gilligan: That’s what it’s like to write movies. You write it, and then maybe
you get invited to the premiere, maybe you don’t.
GQ: Was it very awful?
David Milch: No, not awful. Absolutely different. When I was working
on Deadwood, it was understood that the script was a work in progress and when we
got to set everyone would kind of work on it together. This was completely different,
with a different result. But there are compensations for that. Learning to live with the
given is the great humbling educational process of life. And I’ve had a sufficiency of
education this past year.
GQ: You all approach the necessity of collaborating with other writers in
different ways. Can you talk about your approach to the writers’ room?
Matthew Weiner: We all came up in this system. There is something about it that’s
very old and exactly the same as it’s always been. When I watch The Dick Van Dyke
Show, I’m like, Wow, this is the same job. There’s the 12-year-old kid on the staff.
There’s the guy who delivers lunch. I guarantee you I can walk into either of these
guys’ offices and, except for where the snack room is, it’s gonna be similar on some
level.
GQ: There will be snacks, though.
Matthew Weiner: I think that’s a WGA thing. There has to be a lot of food. We
have “fifteen-minute meal leave.” If you haven’t eaten for fifteen minutes, you have
to. Oh, my God, the lunch menu, like, meets you when you’re walking in the door.
You’re making breakfast and they’re asking you what you want for lunch. But I had a
really good writers’ room this year. There are other times when you dread going into
that room. You’re literally, like in a movie, outside the door taking a deep breath
before you walk in. And it’s not them. It’s not the human beings. Sometimes you’re
just distracted by bullshit.
David Milch: You bring the atmosphere with you.
Matthew Weiner: Yes, that’s totally true.
GQ: What do you mean by that?
David Milch: Well, the best situation of all is to come clean in the writers’ room and
discover, through your encounter with your fellow writers, the nature and rhythms of
the story that you’re trying to tell. But if you bring with you resentments or anxieties,
you tend to project and corrupt those natural rhythms, and you wind up with some
very strange hybrid forms.
Matthew Weiner: And by the way, having been on the other side of it, I actually
think that part of my success climbing the hierarchy of the writers’ room was that I knew that when the boss came in, no matter what mood they were in, I was not going
to take it personally. I’d be like, “Okay, okay, you don’t like that? Well, I’ve got
something else. Did you actually say ‘Fuck you’ to me? Okay. Well, you don’t mean
it.”
David Milch: That’s a gift. How did you develop that?

Matthew Weiner: That’s the way my family is. You can’t take it personally.
GQ: Does that mean you have license to say “Fuck you” to your writers in
the room?
Matthew Weiner: No! I am not that person. I’m the time-wasting show-runner. I
will walk in and say, “I’m sorry, I just got off the phone with blank and blank, and
they want this, and blank wants this, and blank wants this…” And they’re all sort of
sitting there like, “We were talking about Peggy.” And I’m like, “Yeah, okay…maybe
we can use this for Peggy!” You’re just hiding the fact that you just want to vent.
GQ: Given all the time in the world, would you choose to work this way
on your shows, or would you prefer to write everything yourself?
David Milch: That’s a good one. All the time in the world? The “B” answer is, I’d
write it all myself. Which is to say that in my vanity and egoism, I would think that
that would be the way to proceed. And I know deep down that the better answer is:
Even having all the time in the world, it’s better to collaborate with your brothers and
sisters. It’s ultimately the richest experience. But there’s a kind of intolerant economy
that happens: “Just let me do the fucking thing myself.”
Matthew Weiner: And it’s wrong.
GQ: To feel that way?
Matthew Weiner: Yeah. What I find at this point is that the room generates story.
But the actual writing and the consistency of it—in the end, I will probably have to do
it myself. And I want to. And I think they want me to. I think it’s demoralizing, on the
one hand, to not see a lot of your stuff shot, but I keep telling them, when I was [a
writer and executive producer for] The Sopranos, nine times out of ten somebody
would come up to me and say, “That line was so great.” And I’d say, “That’s David
Chase.” It’s hard for writers to understand that when you sign off on an outline, they
feel it’s finished. And you know it’s just a stab at it. Actually, I don’t think they could
even work if they knew how unfinished you know it is.
Vince Gilligan: We work a little different, it sounds like. There are seven of us,
total, counting myself. And we spend at least two weeks, sometimes three, on just the
outline. Every detail we can think of, down to the color of the dress, is in the outline.
That’s the heavy lifting. I liken it to a sequestered jury that never ends. The verdict is
never announced; we’re just in there forever. When we finish breaking a story, we
actually have this little ceremony where we write the number of the episode and we
thumbtack it up, and everybody claps. It’s very sort of corny, but the understanding
is that, at that point, if any one of us, including me, were to get hit by a train or come
down with the flu or whatnot, any other of these writers in the room could deliver,
could turn that into a screenplay.
GQ: David, your approach is more cryptic.
David Milch: Yeah. I think it’s more of an osmotic and less cognitive process. We knock stories around, and then we sort of give them out haphazardly. It’s much less
of a coherent approach. What you’re hearing described in one way or another is an
organism which is constantly transforming itself, which at one moment is one thing
and at another moment is something absolutely other and different. Hospitality to
that fluidity is what makes for a wonderful show-runner. The blessing—and we’ve all
had the experience—is when you meet a writer who can do it, and you get this stupid
look on your face…
Matthew Weiner: It’s like falling in love. Understand that we’re living in that
world twenty-four hours a day. David Chase would always come in and say, “I think I
fixed it. I was in the shower and it came to me.” And I’d think, “Why is he always in
the shower?” Then I got this job, and I was like, “Oh, my God, you’re always thinking
about it.” You get to the point where you’ve run through almost everything that could
possibly happen, and then all of a sudden somebody will say something that you
didn’t think of—
David Milch: —that’s totally different from what you thought.
Matthew Weiner: And you’re just like, “Wow! I love you!”
David Milch: And quite literally that’s the truth. That’s the definition of love, that
going out in spirit to a separate and other soul and being received similarly. It’s a lot
of fun.
GQ: What’s the opposite? What makes a toxic writers’ room?
Matthew Weiner: People fighting for control. People fighting for Daddy’s
attention. I write about it all the time. We have that scene in the episode “The
Suitcase” with Don yelling at Peggy for complaining about not getting enough credit.
I tried to explain to people that I was both of those people.

GQ: I thought that scene was specifically about the question of putting
your name on so many Mad Men scripts, which has been somewhat
controversial.
Matthew Weiner: I don’t know why anyone would want their name on something
that they didn’t write. I don’t want to discredit somebody for taking the first swing at
something, because that’s huge. Even if I throw out the whole thing, they’ve helped
me. But over 80 percent of it is rewriting and I’m going to put my name on it. If I
keep more than 20 percent of your script, I’ll leave your name alone. Basically, it’s a
question of ego. I can’t stomach the idea of someone not knowing that I was involved
in it. For the well-being of my daily interaction with the people I work with, I felt it
best not to have to watch somebody go up and get an award for something I had
written every word of. I’m not Cyrano de Bergerac.
GQ: The counterargument is that your involvement is implied by the
show-runner position.
Matthew Weiner: I am breaking with tradition on some level. And immediately
I’m defensive. David did do it on The Sopranos. He did it less than I do, but he did do
it. And I felt it was better for our relationship. I tell my staff that my response wasn’t
“Well, he’s just going to rewrite what I do anyway.” It was “I’m going to write a script
that he will not be able to change.” And I got there.GQ: Do you other guys put your names on scripts you’ve done extensive
rewrites on?
Vince Gilligan: Not typically.
David Milch: Not typically.
Matthew Weiner: They’re classier than me.
Vince Gilligan: But that said, every single thing Matt just said is bulletproof. I
guess I don’t do it because Chris Carter didn’t do it, and I learned everything I know
from working with Chris on The X-Files. But I recall times when I would rewrite
someone else’s script and I would miss out on some money but, worse, know that the
world wasn’t going to know the work I’d done. If you’re going to stick to tradition and
suffer in silence and it’s going to give you an early heart attack, why do it? So I’m
impressed. Hats off to you, Matt.
David Milch: I think it can be a sign of mental health. Ego suppression can be an
act of ostentation.
Matthew Weiner: Well, I’m very healthy.
GQ: Do we all agree that The Sopranos was an important moment in the
transformation of TV?
Vince Gilligan: Oh, absolutely. Breaking Bad couldn’t exist without The Sopranos.
Matthew Weiner: I feel like David Chase died for my sins. Do you know how many
decisions were based on some meeting when he was on Northern Exposure or The
Rockford Files or some show you never heard of that he worked on for three years?
Somebody saying to him, “You can’t do that,” and him saying, “Why not?” And them
saying, “Because you can’t.” We were exorcising those demons. He wouldn’t do a
walk-and-talk, which is two characters being covered in one shot, talking. He
wouldn’t do that, because it was something NBCUniversal used to do to save money.
Sometimes you’d be at this amazing location with a strip club on one side, an abattoir
on the other—spectacular. You’d say, “Can’t they just walk down the highway?” And
he’d say[sarcastic], “Sure. Let’s just lay some track, walk backwards, and we can get
out of here by four.” I knew it was some network executive he was punching in the
face thirty years later.
Vince Gilligan: Now, I think The Sopranos couldn’t have existed without Hill
Street Blues.
GQ: Did you sense that, David, when you were working on network
shows like Hill Street or NYPD Blue? Was there the same kind of
excitement you feel now?
David Milch: There was excitement, but it was not articulate. It was like everyone
felt as if he or she had been caught doing something wrong.
Matthew Weiner: The antihero, even though it’s such a big part of the American
tradition, was something people thought no one wanted in their living room. They’d
go to the movies and watch Gene Hackman in The French Connection, but when they
got home they didn’t want to watch Sipowicz.

GQ: And yet that antihero character—the charismatic monster—has
become the signature of this TV revolution: Don Draper, Walter White,
Al Swearengen, to name three. What changed?
David Milch: The whole idea of going out to a movie was really a secularized
version of going to church. And there was a certain expectation you brought to a
movie which, as we’ve said, has taken all this time to be demystified. Commercials
were once TV’s version of the church. Which is to say, you couldn’t offend the
sponsor, therefore certain values had to be underscored in the subject matter. Now,
with the move to cable, we’re in the process of exploring the anti-versions of all these
forms.
Matthew Weiner: I think we’ve always been a subversive culture—poking at
authority, being a gangster, breaking the rules. That’s Antihero America. At the same
time, there’s a lot of guilt and shame that goes along with our basically criminal
mentality. Wasn’t that a lot of what Deadwood was about? “Why do I get the land?
Because I was here first!” So when a character like Tony Soprano comes along, you’re
saying, “This is a real criminal. I wish I could be that way. I really do.” And at the
same time: “I hope something bad happens to him, because it’s probably wrong to
feel that way.”
GQ: But why so many antiheroes now? Other than the fact that you can
get away with it on cable nowadays?
Matthew Weiner: We like to see it that way and pat ourselves on the back,
but Twelve Angry Men was made for TV. Requiem for a Heavyweight, Marty,
Patterns, The Bachelor Party, all were made for television. I mean, The Twilight
Zone! There’s nothing that’s ever been more counterculture thanThe Twilight Zone.
It was literally saying, every week, America is fucked-up.
GQ: But Rod Serling had the form of science fiction as a kind of Trojan
horse—just like tits and violence on The Sopranos, or the genre of the
Western, or pretty 1960s clothes…
David Milch: It works, that Trojan horse shit. It really works.
GQ: At the same time, a show like Luck doesn’t seem to need that
recognizable genre. Nor did Breaking Bad. Are we in a new phase?
Vince Gilligan: Going back to film: Because it was, as David said, a kind of church,
a special place, it carried with it all sorts of conventions. If there was going to be a
horror film, it was advertised as a horror film. You knew what your expectations were
going to be.
David Milch: Now all the conventions have been hollowed out and revealed as
barren. And that’s ultimately the transposition of “the story” from the church of film
to an entirely different world in which the story declares itself on its own terms, with
no preexisting expectations. In fact, the expectations are there to be deconstructed.
GQ: The other side of having a strong central characters is that you end
up, on some level, sharing authorship with an actor. Does that cause
problems?
Vince Gilligan: I’m so very lucky to be working with Bryan Cranston, an actor who
is not afraid to look bad. We all have stories of actors who will come to you and say,
“Gee, this scene you’ve written here, don’t you think my character would have more dialogue?” They’ll give you artist pretenses, but the nut of it is “My character is too
much of a shit here.” Or “He’s too weak here.” Bryan isn’t afraid to be photographed
in his underpants time and time again. That’s a pretty good physicalization of his
fearlessness.
David Milch: As soon as you say “My character…” you don’t have to finish that
sentence. You’re wrong.
GQ: How important is it that you get to work in short seasons of ten,
twelve, or thirteen episodes?
Matthew Weiner: There are two people here who would do twenty-two episodes a
year! I did that in comedy, never drama, and you know what it meant? It meant there
was a minimum of seven crappy ones a year.
Vince Gilligan: I’ve forgotten how you’d do that. I say to my network friends all the
time, “I have the greatest respect for what you’re doing,” because the grind…it’s
inhuman. And I was never the boss on a big network show. I don’t think I could have
done it.
GQ: So, David, how did you do it?
David Milch: Well, loaded.
GQ: Were you constantly frustrated, creatively?
David Milch: No, because you’re so hungry. You’ve been out in the cold so long.

Matthew Weiner: Got to eat with both hands.
David Milch: That’s right. But I guess I’ve written 300 scripts, and I couldn’t write
the first 250 again. No way. It’s a younger man’s game.
Vince Gilligan: I agree. I couldn’t go back and do the seven years on The X-Files.
GQ: Why has the particular structure of around thirteen one-hour
episodes turned out to be so good for telling these kinds of stories?
Matthew Weiner: I was really curious about that. This is just amateur archaeology,
but I think it’s related to British series, which were often six episodes long, plus a
pilot. So the first series would be seven, and the second would be six.
Vince Gilligan: Thirteen’s also one quarter of a year, right? Thirteen times four is
fifty-two. That might have something to do with it.
GQ: I was wondering if there’s something more abstract, even mystical,
about those numbers.
Matthew Weiner: I think you can cover a year in twelve or thirteen episodes. I
break this all the time, but I try to make each one about a month apart.
David Milch: To the extent that the theme is what we learn or fail to learn over the
passage of time, form and content inform each other. So twelve [Deadwood was
three seasons of twelve episodes each], which is formally just an attribute of the
calendar, becomes a thematic principle.Matthew Weiner: I think plus or minus three is a gift. Thirds are great for
storytelling: beginnings, middles, ends.
GQ: Does that throw off your storytelling metabolism?
Matthew Weiner: It’s an organic human thing. If we meet for a drink and you tell
me what happened today, you’ll tell a story that goes like this [traces an arc in the
air]: There will be a climax, and then we’ll talk about the ending and what it means.
You try and fuck with that, but it’s still based on that shape. It’s like playing jazz.
David Milch: When Adam and Eve are in the garden, she says, “What are you
gonna call that?” And he says, “A hippopotamus.” And she says, “Why?” “Because it
looks like a hippopotamus.” We’ve integrated our expectations about form, so you
think in the shape of twelve. You couldn’t say why or how.
Matthew Weiner: You cannot exaggerate the value of experience in storytelling
and your gut feeling of what is a good story.
GQ: Vince, you have sixteen episodes to go in Breaking Bad’s final
season. Do you know your ending?
Vince Gilligan: We have a rough idea. I’m very fortunate, because most TV
producers don’t have the luxury of knowing when their show is going to end. But in
some sense, some small part of you wishes you had the choice denied you. If, at the
end of season four, I had been told that forces beyond my control were ending my
show, I would feel pretty good about the ending we had, and I’d be able to say,
“Whoops. Not my call. We gave you the best we could, and hope you enjoyed what
you saw.” Now there’s an element of “It’s really mine to fuck up.”
GQ: But you always had a certain arc in mind, right? You’ve said the
project was always to see if you could convincingly turn a character
“from Mr. Chips to Scarface.”
Vince Gilligan: In very general broad terms, we had a sense of Walter’s fate. But
God is in the details. (I love that there’s two expressions: “God is in the details” and
“The devil’s in the details.”) Anyway, when you do a show about a man who’s been
diagnosed with cancer in the first episode, a very likely possible ending presents itself
pretty readily. But the details of that ending are really where the art’s at, if there’s art
to be found.
GQ: David, you didn’t get a chance to end Deadwood on your own terms.
Or John from Cincinnati, for that matter.
David Milch: You try to live your creative life in the way you would try to live your
real life. Which is, if it turned out to be your last day, you wouldn’t be ashamed of the
way you finished up. In the case of Deadwood, I had enough time to mourn but not
enough time to really shape the material towards a conclusion. But if you go back and
look at the concluding episode, there is a provisional sense of an ending there. Some
series end halfway through and just don’t know it. So it’s not a question that I allow
myself to linger over.

GQ: Do any of you have a Great Lost Series that you wish had gotten
made or had more of a chance?
Matthew Weiner: I loved Andy Richter Controls the Universe. When I got there as
a writer, it was D.O.A. They were like, “They’re letting us make a few more, and they’re giving us a chance.” Really? They put us on Sunday night against The
Sopranos in December. I don’t think they’re interested in us succeeding.
David Milch: It was a sacrificial lamb.
Matthew Weiner: Yeah, exactly. Why not just run a Magic Bullet commercial?
Vince Gilligan: I had this show called The Lone Gunmen. It was an X-Files spinoff, and it only lasted thirteen episodes. I remember the writing room on King of the
Hill put in a joke where one of the characters is wearing a T-shirt saying “Bring
Back The Lone Gunmen.” And you know the kind of lead time animation has. They
animated it before the show had even aired!
Matthew Weiner: That’s a vote of confidence.
Vince Gilligan: Well, you didn’t have to be Nostradamus to see that one coming, I
guess. But that was a fun damn job. I enjoyed the hell out of that. I love Breaking
Bad, but it’s tough being in Walter White’s head twenty-four hours a day. It was
much more fun—not as satisfying, perhaps, but more fun—to be in the heads of these
goofy Don Quixote types, always tilting at windmills.
Matthew Weiner: Thirteen times it was more fun. See how you would have felt if it
had stayed on.
GQ: Where are we going from here? Is this window to do good work on
TV going to stay open?
Matthew Weiner: My kids don’t know the difference between what they’re
watching that’s TV and what’s a movie. It’s all on the same-size screen.
Vince Gilligan: There’s also movement toward nonwriting producers coming in
and running shows.
Matthew Weiner: Part of that is making the people with the money feel more
secure, because those of us who are artistic aren’t to be trusted with budgets and so
forth.
Vince Gilligan: I’ll tell you what I worry about. Being a student of TV history, I
know that in the early days, advertisers had much more of an impact on what you
could do and what you couldn’t do. Now with TiVo, with DVRs, consumers of TV are
skipping the very thing that allows TV to exist in the first place—at least in
commercial television, which accounts for most of it. It makes me think a new
paradigm is in the offing—a new paradigm that in fact is the oldest paradigm—in
which each TV show is individually sponsored.
David Milch: The avatar of that is product placement.
Vince Gilligan: I worry that that will potentially put the kibosh on a lot of edgy, fun
storytelling.
David Milch: We’re in such a state of fluidity in terms of the changing of the market
and form that in five years something absolutely different is gonna be going on. Hey,
did we win any money?

Vince Gilligan: I have a couple of winning tickets, actually.
David Milch: I say we give them all to the waitress. I’m telling you, in five years this
conversation is going to seem childish.

Brett Martin sits them down to discuss the future of television
CQ – June 2012