With Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad, Gilligan has demonstrated how well he is able to capture the essence and nuance of bad guys. In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Gilligan admitted that he now wants to create a story about a well-intentioned protagonist, or more plainly, “a good guy.”

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Gilligan first gave a description of what he thinks makes someone a good guy in his interview. “I’d like the lead character to be an old-fashioned hero, an old-fashioned good guy. Jim Rockford is kind of rough around the edges, but he always does the right thing.” Gilligan then admitted that the reason why he wants to do a story about a good guy is that television has currently become populated with bad guys, which was not the case when he started Breaking Bad over a decade ago. “Fifteen years ago, when I was conceiving of Walter White, I looked around and thought, Well, what is current TV? It’s mostly good guys. But now I’m looking around, thinking, Gee, there’s an awful lot of bad guys on TV, and not just on shows but on the news. It feels like a world of s***heels now, both in fiction and in real life. I think it’s probably time again for a character who doesn’t go for the easy money.”

There is a lot of truth to what Gilligan is talking about. These days, television is packed full of protagonists who have a lot of nuances to their characters, but when it comes down to it, they are bad guys, as he describes it. Gilligan created two of the most well-known examples of this with Walter White and Saul Goodman. He was not the first show creator to revolve his show around an ill-intentioned protagonist, but he helped set the template for main characters who fit that same mold in popular and well-received shows that came after, like Bojack Horseman, Barry Berkman, and The Boys’ Homelander, among others.

Gilligan’s words also reflect how much television has changed since 2007. Over the past decade and a half, we have seen a lot more protagonists who are bad people at heart who audiences don’t root against because their flaws are human. That wasn’t the case back in the 2000s. We had compelling, nuanced protagonists who were good people, like Jack Shephard, Michael Scott, and Dr. House. Among the few main characters who fit the mold that Gilligan would popularize thereafter was Tony Soprano, which was why The Sopranos was insanely popular back then.

So the question is, what will Gilligan do now that he’s going in the opposite direction from what he was so good at in the past? Gilligan was in his wheelhouse when he created the nuanced bad guys that he made in Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. Now he wants to do something that won’t be in his comfort zone. Other filmmakers like Jordan Peele have proved they can make good stuff outside what they’re best known for. Gilligan pulled off the impossible when many thought he couldn’t make Saul Goodman’s backstory captivating. By trying to create a good guy from scratch, he’s got an even bigger challenge now than he did back in 2015.

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul can be streamed on Netflix

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Source: The New Yorker