nihilistic intentions

Well I run the writers room, which I liken to being on a sequestered jury that never ends, because what it entails is a bunch of people sitting around and arguing constantly. We basically sit around this table and ask our selves the same few questions day in and day out. Where is Walt’s head at? What is he afraid of right now? What does Jesse want? In finding the answers to these questions we create the plots for each episode, and I’m always there in the room. Only at the point when each individual episode is completely figured out does an individual writer go off and write it into script format. Primarily they’re creating the dialogue that you hear. Once they have created a finished script, they give it to me and I read it and I give them notes.

I have very good writers who are very adept at finding the voices of characters, and with every season that we shoot I typically have fewer and fewer notes for each individual writer. Anyone who is a showrunner on a TV show is a control freak to a certain extent, but the truth is you have to allow other people into your creative process, you’d be a fool not to. One big thing that needs to feel continuous from episode to episode are the voices of the characters. Saul has to sound like Saul, Skyler has to sound like Skyler. And that’s the big thing on my part, giving some guidance to the writers to make sure our characters sound like our characters.

—Vince Gilligan, showrunner of Breaking Bad. This is why I want to be a television screenwriter.