'Breaking Bad' Creator Vince Gilligan Is Done With ‘Aspirational’ Bad Guys

One of my kids loves the bad guy characters in anything he watches. He’s a nice kid with good manners who always likes to share his french fries, but he loves The Joker, Petey the Cat (from Dog Man), and Romeo (from PJ Masks). The kid will happily play with a Batman figure but loves his King Shark and Gorilla Grodd toys even more. I don’t blame him. Most of those characters and the toys made of them are rad. Their designs are cool, they have devil-may-care attitudes, and Vince Gilligan is over it!

Gilligan created Breaking Bad, a cultural phenomenon with interesting characters written very well. Walter White, the series protagonist who turned into its antagonist, was beloved by audience members, even though he was an absolute monster. There are plenty of people who abandoned their sympathy for White while continuing to watch the show, whereas the number of people who would outright defend White and his actions or rally against his wife, Skylar, for not supporting his s***, was staggering.

It helped that the chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin was played by Bryan Cranston. The Malcolm in the Middle star brought an instant likeability to the role. Also, early in the show, it’s easy to understand White’s plight. Breaking Bad attempted to shake viewers of their love for Walter as it progressed, but that proved more difficult because my son isn’t the only person with an affinity for bad guys. Now, Gilligan is urging writers to stop writing villains that people like.

The creator received the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television Writing Achievement at the WGA awards and used that occasion to plead with his fellow writers. “But all things being equal, I think I’d rather be celebrated for creating someone a bit more inspiring. In 2025, it’s time to say that out loud, because we are living in an era where bad guys, the real-life kind, are running amuck,” he explained to the crowd. “Bad guys who make their own rules, bad guys who no matter what they tell you, are only out for themselves. Who am I talking about? Well, this is Hollywood, so guess. But here’s the weird irony, in our profoundly divided country, everybody seems to agree on one thing: there are too many real-life bad guys, it’s just we’re living in different realities so we’ve all got different lists.”

Real-life bad guys have always existed, but Gilligan is right about their current prevalence. A Temu Bond villain is currently using a team of dweebs to dismantle the country. Bad people are running amok, so Gilligan called upon his fellow writers to make a change. “As a writer, speaking to a room full of writers, I have a proposal; it certainly won’t fix everything but I think it’s a start. I say we write more good guys,” he said to applause. “For decades we made the villains too sexy… viewers everywhere, all around the world, pay attention. They say here’s this badass, I want to be that cool. When that happens, fictional bad guys stop being the precautionary tales they were intended to be. God help us, they’ve become aspirational.”

I’m sure some would call Gilligan’s pleas half-hearted, given his creation of a character like Walter White, but reasonable people should have turned on White by the show’s second season. He was never meant to be someone to aspire to. He’s a cautionary tale, but people will interpret things how they want to. They will cheer for the s***ty people. Maybe it’s time writers gave them fewer characters to do that with.