Nobel Prize for Gilligan and Simon?
Vince Gilligan and David Simon created our era’s premier works of literature
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Long before I ever took my first economics class, I studied literature and dreamed of writing novels. That didn’t happen, but the passion never left me. In August 2022, Bastiat’s Window, then only a week old, featured, “A Nobel Prize for Vince Gilligan?” Today’s piece amplifies on that one and borrows some text from that earlier piece. And after the essay, I offer my list of greatest TV serials for your bingeing pleasure.
NOBEL FOR A GENRE
The Swedish Academy could do an enormous favor to posterity by awarding the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature to television writers/producers Vince Gilligan and David Simon. Together, these two conjured up worlds entire. The Gilligan canon includes Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, plus the standalone El Camino. The Simon canon includes The Wire and Treme. (Each created other works, but I’ll limit my thoughts to these in particular.)
Breaking Bad’s Walter White is as compelling a villain as Lady Macbeth or Mr. Hyde, and The Wire’s Omar Little is as morally ambiguous as Dr. Frankenstein or Jay Gatsby. The throngs in Gilligan’s Albuquerque are as interconnected as those in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, and Simon captures Baltimore and New Orleans as Balzac and Dickens did Paris and London. The final episodes of Better Call Saul and The Wire were as gut-wrenching as the closing passages of Moby Dick, The Sound and the Fury, A Tale of Two Cities, One Hundred Years of Solitude, or To Kill a Mockingbird.
Sometimes, the Nobel Prize for Literature recognizes a genre as much as it does an individual writer. While we usually associate the prize with novelists, short story writers, playwrights, and poets, other genres have received one- or two-time recognition. Bob Dylan’s 2016 award really recognized not only Dylan, but also the fact that that song lyrics had been a potent literary phenomenon for the previous sixty years or more. Had Dylan not been available, the prize might well have gone to Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, or Joni Mitchell, for Dylan’s Nobel implicitly recognized them, as well. Theodor Mommsen won an early Nobel for his histories of Rome. In large part, Winston Churchill’s Nobel honored his wartime oratory. The Academy recognized Bertrand Russell for his philosophical treatises. Frédéric Mistral was a poet, but his gold also recognized his work in philology. “Literature” is a broad tent.
It’s a bit unfair to refer solely to “Gilligan and Simon.” Their creations did not emerge from the semi-solitary efforts we associate with novelists, playwrights, and poets. Vince Gilligan’s co-creator was Peter Gould, and David Simon’s was Ed Burns; both of those partnerships were flanked by battalions of writers, producers, actors, and other creative personnel. So a Nobel might properly go to the Gilligan and Simon organizations, rather than to those two men alone. The Nobel Peace Prizes offer a precedent: prizes in that category have gone periodically to organizations, rather than to individuals (e.g., International Committee of the Red Cross, United Nations, World Food Programme, Médecins Sans Frontières).
THE URGENCY OF RECOGNIZING TELEVISION-AS-LITERATURE
In 1961, FCC Commissioner Newton Minow declared commercial television to be a “vast wasteland.” Forty years later, Gilligan, Simon, and a host of other visionaries used that same medium to produce the premier literary works of the first quarter of this century. Minow’s address offered his audience, the National Association of Broadcasters, a challenge and a blistering critique:
“When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better. … But when television is bad, nothing is worse.”
He noted the existence of high-quality programming, including The Twilight Zone, CBS Reports, The Fred Astaire Show, and The Valiant Years, but argued that such gems were “very, very few.”
In the late 1990s, my friend Mike—a curmudgeonly and incisive sage—asked me the following:
“Why is it that when there were three TV channels, there was always something good on, and when there were a dozen channels, there was often something good on, but now that there are 500 channels, there’s never anything good on?”
Between Minow’s speech and Mike’s query, television offered a handful of daring serials—programs that demanded that audiences invest weeks or years of deep concentration over complex story lines. The Prisoner and Twin Peaks come to mind. But in this Minow-to-Mike era, such programs were few and far-between. Then, the 1999 launch of The Sopranos spawned a Cambrian Explosion of prestige programming. The fulfillment, at last of Minow’s “When television is good, … nothing is better,” and the reversal of Mike’s “Why is it that … there’s never anything good on?”
Twenty-five years later, however, the press is aflutter with warnings that television’s Golden Age may already lie behind us. In “Overload: Will any shows from the Golden Age of TV endure?” critic Sonny Bunch noted the enormous number of hours required to watch a prestige TV serial—an investment that future generations may be unwilling to bear. Bunch notes that watching the entirety of 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, he could watch all of Stanley Kubrick’s films—twice. Bunch also notes that part of the thrill of TV serials has been sharing thoughts in real-time with other viewers. I imagine that watching Better Call Saul week-by-week was similar to the sensation that readers had waiting for serialized installments of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers.
Perhaps watching these series will prove to have been one-time affairs—like the intricate mandalas (sand paintings) that Tibetan monks make, only to blow them to the winds once they are completed. A few decades from now, will anyone even remember that television was once remarkable? The Swedish Academy has some say in that.
THE LITERARY HEIGHTS OF GILLIGAN AND SIMON
In awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy’s charge is to recognize “the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction.” In general, the prize is awarded not for individual works, but rather for the entire sweep of an author’s work. And in this, few if any literary figures of our time can challenge the output and impact of Gilligan, Simon, and the collaboratives that they oversaw.
These works spawned two decades of multicontinental, multilingual, multicultural debates over profound and subtle ethical questions and literary techniques. Each episode presented by Gilligan and Simon spawned volumes of essays and videos and threaded discussions—branching off from the episode like 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.
In the spoiler-laden essay, “How Breaking Bad Broke Free of the Clockwork-Universe Problem,” Emily St. James compelling compared the program’s structure to that of Greek tragedies and Shakespeare’s five-act tragedies. My 2022 essay compared Walter White with one critical aspect of Pharaoh in The Bible—free will or the lack thereof—a comparison that the Biblically-literate Gilligan perhaps considered in the episode Ozymandias.
The structural cohesion of Gilligan’s canon is stunning. It is difficult to name any of the 126 episodes that was not essential to the final dispensation of the canon, 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 episodes of the Gilligan canon fit as tightly and perfectly as the stones of that citadel.
Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and El Camino comprise a vast set of interlocking morality tales—falls from grace, punishment for sin, and struggling for redemption. The same can be said of Simon’s The Wire and Treme, though the emphasis is different. Gilligan’s world is populated by hundreds of fully fleshed-out characters who happen to live in or around Albuquerque, but could have lived elsewhere. (Originally, Breaking Bad was to have taken place in Riverside, California, but tax subsidies drew the show to the infinitely-more atmospheric New Mexico.) Gilligan’s characters and hundreds of auxiliary denizens grapple with the themes of love, hate, betrayal, vengeance, truth, moral decay, and redemption.
The Wire also features an astonishing number of three-dimensional, living, breathing characters, but the true star of the show is the City of Baltimore itself, and the program could have been set nowhere else. Similarly, the star of Simon’s Treme is post-Katrina New Orleans, which, like The Wire, happens to be home to an endless array of fascinating characters.
As surely as in the Bible or Shakespeare, Gilligan’s characters face choices with open eyes and actions always have consequences. Simon’s characters also face known choices, but institutional inertia often override just deserts. Gilligan’s focus is on the fallibility of individuals, whereas Simon’s is on the fallibility of civic institutions—legal and illegal.
One of the hallmarks of great literature lies in its quotability—snippets that become the catchphrases and epitaphs of their time and for the ages. “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.” Gilligan provided much fodder for this arena: Walter White’s “I am the one who knocks;” “Perhaps your best course is to tread lightly;” “Say my name.” Chuck McGill’s, “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.”
The Wire’s Omar Little was infinitely quotable: “You come at the king, you best not miss;” “It's all in the game, yo—all in the game;” “Man, money ain’t got no owners. Only spenders;” “I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase. It's all in the game though, right?” “How you expect to run with the wolves come night, when you spend all day sportin' with the puppies?” And then there was Marlo Stanfield’s terrifying “My name is my name;” Frank Sobotka’s tragic “We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket;” Ervin Burrell’s fatalistic “This is Baltimore, gentlemen. The gods will not save you;” and Clay Davis’s canonical “Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeit!”
Quantitatively, the outputs of Gilligan and Simon are formidable. As noted above, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and El Camino comprise roughly 127 hours of performance. By comparison, all of Shakespeare’s plays fill around 108 hours. This doesn’t make Gilligan a greater writer than Shakespeare, but imagine a Shakespeare whose roughly 39 plays were all segments of one sprawling, intricately woven story.
For all these reasons and more, there is an urgency for the Swedish Academy to act as soon as possible to remind posterity that classic literature once came into the world through glowing screens in our living rooms.
LAGNIAPPE
MY TOP DOZEN SERIES
Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul / El Camino: A meek school teacher deteriorates into a murderous drug lord, and his sleazy-but-well-meaning lawyer descends into poisonous amoralism.
The Wire / Treme: the interconnected worlds of Baltimore’s police force, shipyards, schools, press, and politics; the re-emergence of post-Katrina New Orleans. While these are two separate programs, they are thematically similar enough that I’ll count them as one. Both series were peppered with actual local figures of note. The Wire’s cast includes real-life politicians and criminals. In Treme, many of New Orleans’s finest musicians make cameo appearances or assume regular roles.
Rectify: Exculpatory evidence vacates the murder conviction of a Georgia man who has languished for 19 years on Death Row—though neither he, his family, the victim’s family, the townspeople, or the police know whether he did or did not commit the murder. As one born and raised in a small Southern town, I can say that this is one of the few television or film productions I have ever seen that actually understood the dynamics and personalities of Southern towns. The program shared the same executive producers as Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
Six Feet Under: An ordinary, sympathetic, and somewhat dysfunctional family own and operate an independent funeral home. Each episode offers remarkable insights on death, mortality, and the complex business of caring for the dead and for their bereaved families.
The Americans: A family of deep-cover Soviet sleeper agents (“illegals”) living and operating near Washington, DC during the Reagan era. As with The Sopranos or Six Feet Under, what really makes the show is the fact that the central characters are a rather ordinary family, grappling with normal family issues—but who happen to be employed in endeavors that involve daily encounters with death.
Justified: A colorful U.S. marshal battles crime in the coalfields of Kentucky. The series is based on the novels of Elmore Leonard, but the plots are different enough from the novels to categorize the series as an original work.
The Prisoner: Patrick McGoohan’s revolutionary 1967-68 serial about a British spy whose sudden, angry resignation leads to his kidnapping and imprisonment in a surreal, maddening village, where a succession of bureaucrats aim to break his will.
Twin Peaks: David Lynch’s gothic and mystical masterpiece about a murder that begins to unravel a town’s dark secrets.
House of Cards (UK version): Shakespearean drama about the rise and fall of a ruthless British Prime Minister who believes he is the only force that stands between Britain and the abyss.
Babylon Berlin: A dark journey through the end-times of Weimar Germany. The star of the show was the set, as the crew essentially reconstructed a full-scale model of late 1920s Central Berlin.
Hannibal: The young Hannibal Lecter begins his ghastly career as a serial murderer and cannibal while working as a psychiatrist for the FBI in Quantico, Virginia. Some scenes are staged as, essentially, a perverse cooking show (with the gorgeous actual dishes prepared by master chef José Andrés). The cinematography is among the most artistic I have ever seen in a television production.
The Good Place: Four dead characters in the afterlife wonder how their deeply flawed souls made it to Heaven rather than to Hell, and explore questions of life, death, morality, ethics, theology with a snarky and mysterious “architect” of their afterlife. Hilarious, but serious questions are probed, and the writers were constantly guided by an actual professor of moral philosophy.
On some other day, I might have included Boardwalk Empire, The Shield, Bosch / Bosch Legacy, Fauda, The Alienist, The Knick, Arrested Development, Australia’s The Librarians, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, or a number of other high-quality serials. But today is January 19, 2024, so those numbered above are the dozen that made the list.
And now, having said all of this, Alanna and I are about to embark upon The Sopranos, which aired before we had cable.
Fascinating read. I’m more inclined toward movies (like a great short story) than television. As good as it is, I usually don’t want to commit the time. But it makes sense to treat it seriously as literature.
So glad you mentioned The Prisoner. One of my all time favorites and few people (outside of British writers) seem to have seen it. Great great show with both an amazing beginning (replayed at the start of nearly every episode) and one of the best final episodes ever.