Without its head writer at the helm, a TV show can lose its direction fast. One need look no further than Twin Peaks' disastrous second season after David Lynch left the show. Since then, the 2007 writers' strike saw several fresh favorites such as Heroes and Pushing Daisies follow up their successful first seasons with lackluster returns as a result. Some shows were saved from collapse in interesting and creative ways, such as when production on The Office (US) was set to continue but its star Steve Carrellcalled in sick with "enlarged balls" in a show of solidarity. Some shows were arguably better off as a result of the strike, however, and not just in the sense that it led to its writers being better paid. One such example is perhaps one of the greatest shows TV has to offer; Breaking Bad.
Breaking Bad follows the story of Walter White (Bryan Cranston) an undervalued chemist working as a high-school chemistry teacher. When he's diagnosed with terminal cancer, he teams up with ex-student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) to cook and deal meth in order to leave money for his pregnant wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) and son Walter Jr. (RJ Mitte). The show develops over its five-season run to reveal Walt as the primary antagonist, fully adorning his kingpin persona, Heisenberg, and overthrowing other villains such as Tuco (Raymond Cruz) and Gus (Giancarlo Esposito). His street thug assistant Jesse becomes the surprise hero of the show, and the emotional core to contrast Walt's downfall, but that wasn't the original plan, according to creator Vince Gilligan.
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Jesse Pinkman Was Originally Going To Die
During its first season, Vince Gilligan and his team of writers had an idea for the season's climax and the series as a whole. With Jesse having served his plot-related purpose of introducing Walter to the criminal world of Albuquerque, the show would no longer require his existence. Gilligan has long admitted that Jesse was to be killed early on to heighten the stakes for Walt. It's hard to believe it now after the show's enormous success has cemented it in pop-culture history, but Breaking Bad was to become a very different story. But then came the 2007 Writers' Strike.
With the first seven episodes written by the time of the strike, it was still possible for this outcome to happen upon the writers' return, even if it had been as part of Season 2. As a result of the strike, Season 1 ended on a regular episode, as opposed to a climactic finale, in which Walt and Jesse find themselves as new partners of the hotheaded Tuco. During the break, however, Gilligan and his team were given time to re-evaluate. While some sources state Gilligan changed his mind before the strike, they all agree that it was Aaron Paul's performance that led them to keep the character alive. Having seen his layered and sensitive performance, it became clear to Gilligan that Jesse was destined to become a second main character in the story. This was no small change, though, as Gilligan had planned another major character death as a result of Jesse's demise.
Walter Jr. Would Have Died As a Result Of Jesse's Death
On the fantastic resource that is the Breaking Bad Insider Podcast, hosted by the show's cast and crew, Gilligan details that the plan to kill Jesse would have resulted in the show making a darker turn much quicker than the version we were given. In a rage-fueled response to his partner's death, Walter was set to reap revenge on Jesse's killer. The killer (described as simply "a drug lord," possibly Tuco) would be captured by Walt, and locked up in his basement. There, Gilligan planned to have Walt torture him by removing his toes one at a time, cauterizing them with a blowtorch.
"Before the strike, being the freshly minted showrunner that I was, I was ready to throw the kitchen sink at the finale," Gilligan told Esquire. "We were shooting these episodes completely in a vacuum, and so out of some blend of showmanship and fear and desperation, I figured the finale ought to just be so slam-bang that people would want to come back for Season 2." As a result, he imagined a climax in which Walt would set up a trip-wired shotgun, offering the tortured drug lord a way to die without Walt technically needing to kill the man himself. With the villain refusing to do so, eventually, Walter Jr. would find the captive stranger and try to help him, only for the drug lord to take revenge on Walt by using the tripwire to kill both himself and Walter Jr.
“Ew, you are seriously fucked up,” Gilligan recounts the execs' reaction to this idea. "The good thing about these pitch-out meetings," he later surmised, "is that you pitch out your story to the best of your knowledge, but everyone realizes you can switch things up."
Hank Was To Die Instead of Jesse
Needless to say, Walt's spiral into villainy took the show to many dark places over the series' run, but at a much slower and more calculated rate than originally planned. One ticking clock that perfectly heightens the stakes for Walt's adventures is the inclusion of his brother-in-law Hank (Dean Norris). Hank is a DEA Agent hunting the mysterious Heisenberg with no idea that the kingpin's true identity is right under his nose. This became an effective device for tension in the slower-paced version of the show we were given, but Gilligan very nearly took that away too.
"I was going to kill off the character of Hank at the end of that first season, having originally planned to kill Jesse and changed my tune," Gilligan told Esquire. "I figured I ought to sacrifice one of the main characters at the end of Season 1, because that’s what the ballsy shows do! But the whole shape of the show would have been so different from what you know now, and I think it would have been a much shorter, less rich experience." AMC's Charlie Collier added to this that "the strike changed everything. It cut the season short by two episodes, and fortunately, Vince and his team were nimble enough to be able to deliver their first seven episodes and have it make sense." Had they killed Hank as planned, who then would have been the one to kill Tuco in Season 2?
Tuco Was Set To Be the Main Villain
When the strike was over and the show began its second season, Aaron Paul wasn't the only actor to flip the script. Gilligan told Digital Spy that the original intention was to have Tuco be the main bad guy for that entire season, but Raymond Cruz had prior commitments to the TV show The Closer. Cruz told AMC that they asked him back for eight more episodes but, finding it difficult to travel between LA and Albuquerque to play two polar opposite characters was too much for the actor. "No. I’ll do one more and that’s it. You guys have to kill me.”
Thankfully, they chose not to kill Hank after all, and the DEA Agent was able to forward his own storyline by killing Tuco off the show. However, this foiled yet another plan, leading Gilligan and his team to reconsider Walt's main villain for the season. "We're never gonna have a character as good and interesting as he was, but we then thought to ourselves, 'Why don't we go in the complete opposite direction?' [...] a buttoned-down, cold-blooded, soft-spoken businessman." And from their desperate need to replace Tuco, Breaking Bad's most iconic villain was created. Giancarlo Esposito's Gustavo Fring.
The Strike Changed Things for Skyler and Gomez Too
In his book, Breaking Bad 101, Alan Sepinwall details how in conversations with Gilligan and writer Peter Gould, they revealed two ideas they had for the Season 1 finale at the time of the strike. One saw drug dealers invading the Whites' home looking for Heisenberg, resulting in Skyler discovering the truth behind Walt's shenanigans up to that point. “It would have been a great scene,” said Gould, who would go on to create the spin-off Better Call Saul with Gilligan. “I don’t know where the hell we would have gone after that.” The other saw Walt witness Tuco murdering Hank's friend and partner at the DEA, Steve Gomez (Steven Michael Quezada). "Instead, they had an extra amount of time to tinker with what was working and what wasn’t," says Sepinwall, "and to return for their second season with a much clearer handle on the characters and the stories."
As the man who created these characters and wrote the pilot, Vince Gilligan puts it best when reflecting on the effect the 2007 WGA Writers' Strike had on Breaking Bad. "At just about the time we would have had to shut down for lack of scripts, which in those early days might well have been a death knell for the series, the WGA went on strike, thus saving my ass, for which I will be forever grateful." It's hard to know for sure what would have been different if not for that hiatus, but based on these statements, TV's iconic meth-cook story could have unfurled with very different results.
