Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Mike Redmond | News | April 13, 2026
Throughout Breaking Bad’s juggernaut run, the show received accolade after accolade as the Vince Gillian crime drama unfolded its ruinous tale of a high school chemistry teacher turned meth dealer. To be clear, Bryan Cranston’s Walter White was a monster. But just like with the male leads in The Sopranos and Mad Men, viewers were rooting for the monster. So much so, that the door was wide open for sexism to rush in and make Anna Gunn’s life a living hell.
Gunn portrayed Skyler White on the hit series, and it’s no secret that people hated her. Why? Because she tossed up understandable roadblocks as Walter put their family in extreme risk to ultimately feed his ego. She also didn’t buy his bullsh*t and saw right through his lies in the early seasons when he was still hiding his meth operation from her. Wives tend to notice things, and the Breaking Bad writers kept that dynamic very real. Do men like seeing that play out on their TVs? No. No, they do not.
One of those men is Cranston’s Malcolm in the Middle co-star Frankie Muniz. To promote the new revival series, the two faced off on Hot Ones Versus where Muniz got schooled over his shockingly visceral take on Skyler.
While his face turned red with anger, Muniz told Cranston, “I wanted to kill Skyler to make your life easier. Your life would’ve been so much easier. You were such a bad guy, you could’ve just gotten rid of her. All she did was complain. Look at the money!”
Cranston kept things light, but he was not letting this train of thought go unanswered. “Now, see, she got a lot of blowback from that. Well, first of all, Anna Gunn is a superb actor, but she got like, ‘Oh, why don’t you get off his back?’”
Muniz, not realizing he’s being corrected here, says, “That’s how I felt.” Yikes, buddy.
Cranston continues, “Wait a minute. Let me understand this. Her husband leaves without any explanation. She’s pregnant. He’s making crystal methamphetamine and people have died, and she’s the b****? We couldn’t understand [that reaction].”
While Muniz eventually laughs and agrees that, “OK, when you put it like that,” clearly, he doesn’t fully grasp where he went off-course. But his reaction is why Vince Gilligan is done writing “aspirational” bad guys and moved on to Pluribus where Rhea Seehorn isn’t letting an alien invasion walk all over her.
You can watch Muniz and Cranston’s exchange below, and fair warning, be prepared to get the “ick,” as the kids say, over Muniz’s face when he talks about killing Skyler:
