A Nobel Prize for Vince Gilligan?

Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and El Camino are the pinnacle of contemporary literature

Note: This essay does NOT contain any spoilers.

Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie is as deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature as any past recipients. More than many, perhaps, as he created our era’s most powerful and coherent work of fiction in a medium that has rarely achieved, or even aspired to, such literary heights. This week’s final episode of Better Call Saul was as profound as the final passages of Moby Dick, The Sound and the Fury, A Tale of Two Cities, One Hundred Years of Solitude, or To Kill a Mockingbird. In its final moments, Better Call Saul very much echoed the ending of at least one of those books.

In creating the Nobel Prizes, Alfred Nobel sought to honor those who “shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." Of the Literature Prize, he specified that it be awarded “to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction … .” The expression “ideal direction,” is subject to interpretation, but Gilligan’s oeuvre—”the Gilliverse,” as some call it—offers several candidates. These works spawned nearly a decade-and-a-half of multicontinental, multilingual, multicultural debates over profound and subtle ethical questions and literary techniques. Each episode spawned volumes of essays and videos and threaded discussions—branching off from the episode in a manner reminiscent of the commentaries surrounding the core text on a page of the Talmud. The best of these responsa are equal to the finest disputations I have ever witnessed in an adulthood spent around universities and religious institutions.

From Breaking Bad 1:1 to Better Call Saul 6:13, dozens of fully fleshed-out characters and hundreds of auxiliary denizens grappled with the themes of love, hate, betrayal, vengeance, truth, moral decay, and redemption. As surely as in the Bible or Shakespeare, actions in the Gilliverse always had consequences. Characters faced choices with open eyes, and the likely consequences of those choices were known in advance.

Quantitatively, Gilligan’s output is formidable. There were 62 episodes of Breaking Bad, 63 episodes of Better Call Saul, plus El Camino—126 units in all, comprising roughly 127 hours of performance. By comparison, all of Shakespeare’s plays total just over 108,000 lines—108 hours or so of performance time. No, this does not make Gilligan a greater writer than Shakespeare, but it is quite a thought experiment to imagine a Shakespeare whose 39 or so plays were all segments of one sprawling, intricately woven story.

In fact, one of the best literary analyses written midway through the run of Breaking Bad argued that program defied the usual pitfalls of television writing by adopting Shakespeare’s specific take on the nature of free will. In the spoiler-laden essay How Breaking Bad Broke Free of the Clockwork-Universe Problem, Emily St. James compares the program’s structure to that of Greek tragedies and writes:

“To my mind, Breaking Bad is structured like a great Shakespearean tragedy, complete with a hero defined more by his flaws and petty resentments than his positive qualities and a five-season plot that corresponds almost exactly to the structure of one of Shakespeare’s five-act tragedies, right down to the series’ climax arriving in the final moments of season three’s finale.”

St. James argues that, as in Shakespeare, characters have “rich inner lives” and free will but are ultimately revealed to be helpless cogs in a great clock relentlessly ticking away. As St. James wrote:

“In Shakespeare’s best tragedies, the characters all seem dimly aware they’re trapped in a Shakespearean tragedy and don’t know how to get out. That’s true on Breaking Bad, too … .”

This clockwork universe recalls a theological question that hangs over the story of Pharaoh in the book of Exodus. Pharaoh is usually portrayed as the villain of the story—a tyrant who enslaved the Israelites until the plagues and the Red Sea put paid to his grip on them. But some commentators question Pharaoh’s culpability, as Exodus 9:12 says, “And the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh.” Were the events that ensued actually the work of Pharaoh, or were they the work of God, who merely used Pharaoh as an unwitting instrument? I have no idea whether this debate was on the minds of Gilligan and his crew when they portrayed a desert wasteland overdubbed by Walter White reading Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias. This poem describes Rameses II, who is often assumed to be the Biblical Pharaoh.

One of the hallmarks of the Gilliverse is the richness of its characters, who are as fleshed-out, three-dimensional, and complex as any characters in literature. There are many interpretations of Walter White. For me, he is a Lucifer figure—a fallen angel who creates a Hell into which he irresistibly draws other characters; as with Lucifer, one can ask, was he actually good at the beginning of his story, or was he predestined for evil? Though he ultimately went in a different direction, Saul Goodman at one point reminded me of Fred C. Dobbs from B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre—a man who is initially both sympathetic and pathetic, but whose greed and fears erode his decency and humanity until his virtues fall away like dead leaves. As fine a character as Dobbs is, Goodman proves an infinitely richer vein to mine. Dozens of other characters are equally loaded to bear with moral ambiguity.

The structural cohesion of both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul is stunning. With over five dozen episodes each, it is difficult to name any episode that was not essential to the final dispensation of the series, and it is difficult to name any significant plot questions that were left unresolved. In Peru, the ancient Incan citadel of Sacsayhuamán is constructed of gigantic boulders, fitted together without mortar, cut so perfectly that one cannot slide a sheet of paper between any two stones. The 126 episodes of the Breaking Bad universe fit as tightly and perfectly as the stones of that citadel.

One of the hallmarks of great literature lies in its quotability—snippets that become the catchphrases and epitaphs of the language. “To be or not to be.” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” “Call me Ishmael.” “Do not go gentle into that good night.” “Out, damn spot.” The Gilliverse has provided much fodder for this arena:   “I am the one who knocks.” “Perhaps your best course is to tread lightly.” “Say my name.” “You can’t help yourself, Jimmy.” In Henry VI, part 2, Dick the Butcher says, “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.” In Better Call Saul 2:5 (“Rebecca”), Jimmy McGill (a.k.a Saul Goodman) says, “Why do they bury lawyers under 20 feet of dirt? Because deep down, they’re really good people.”

All this said, it’s legitimate to ask whether television writing can qualify as literature—and literature lofty enough for a Nobel. Around two-thirds of the 118 literature laureates have been novelists. Laureates have also produced works of poetry, short stories, essays, memoirs, philosophy, history, law, and philology. Winston Churchill won his prize largely for his wartime oratory. The precedent for television writing can be viewed as an extension on the one-third or so of laureates who were dramatists; some, like Eugene O’Neill were known primarily as playwrights, while others, like Sinclair Lewis, were better known for their novels or other media. Around a dozen laureates were screenwriters, though none was known primarily for that medium. (Screenwriters included Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Jean-Paul Sartre.) Teleplays are obviously analogous to writing for stage or big screen.

Of course, the Nobel Prize in Literature should not simply serve as a supercharged Emmy Award. But Bob Dylan’s Nobel doesn’t make the Nobel into a Grammy, either. In some sense, Dylan’s award served not only as an award for his personal accomplishments, but also as recognition that songwriting has become an elite and essential mode of communication in our time—literature in and of itself. A Nobel for Gilligan would say the same about the medium of television.   

Another worthy consideration for the Nobel Committee is a question asked by critic Sonny Bunch: “Overload: Will any shows from the Golden Age of TV endure?” Bunch notes the enormous number of hours required to watch a prestige TV serial. As we have noted here, watching the entire Breaking Bad canon consumes around 127 hours. Bunch notes that watching the entirety of HBO’s The Wire requires around 60 hours—during which time Bunch says he could alternatively read War and Peace, Don Quixote, Moby-Dick, and Crime and Punishment. Or, he says, one could watch all of Stanley Kubrick’s films—twice. Part of the thrill of TV serials is sharing thoughts in real-time with others watching the series. The thrill of awaiting Better Call Saul week-by-week was similar to the sensation that readers had waiting for serialized installments of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers. To watch Saul or to read Pickwick in real-time was to share an historical moment. In contrast, however, The Pickwick Papers today requires only a day or so to read. Anyone in the future wishing to watch the Gilliverse will still require 127 hours. Perhaps watching these series will prove to have been a one-time affair—like the intricate mandalas (sand paintings) that Tibetan monks make, only to blow them to the winds once they are completed.

Throughout this essay, I’ve referred to Vince Gilligan as the hypothetical recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Far more than any prior recipient of the prize, however, the production of these shows was a corporate effort, with Gilligan at the apex of a massive enterprise. Perhaps the prize should go jointly to Gilligan and to his co-creator, Peter Gould. Or perhaps it is properly bestowed upon the whole production company—as the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to corporate entities like the International Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières.

William Faulkner, winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, spent most of his career writing of the intertwined lives of the citizens of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. “I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it,” he wrote. Since 2008, Vince Gilligan and his colleagues have likewise built a world entire on the postage stamp that comprises Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is worth recognizing that in doing so, they have reached the loftiest heights of literary achievement.

Afterthoughts:

·       As a native of the Richmond, Virginia area, I unabashedly note my pride that Gilligan is also a native of my home turf.  

·       Gilligan has said that for now, the Breaking Bad universe has come to an end. If he or any of his associates read this piece, let me suggest what would be the single most interesting extension of that universe—an origin story for Ed Galbraith, the Disappearer. I would love to know how he came to be.

·       For those who have already watched Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, I would highly recommend the spoiler-laden YouTube commentaries of Pete Peppers, Wow Lynch Wow, Teflon TV, Brain Pilot, The Vivid KiWi, Heavy Spoilers, Cortex Videos, and Scott Newhouse. After watching the shows, it’s also worth watching videos on Gilligan’s use of detail, color, visual storytelling, and cinematography.