We’re days away from the premier of Better Call Saul and, if you’re like me, you’ve been binge-watching your favorite episodes of Breaking Bad to prep yourself. (I’ll never get tired of watching any episode that involves Badger and Skinny Pete.) All of this buzz leading up to the return of Albuquerque’s shadiest lawyer is a perfect excuse to break into the trivia vault and dig up some facts on the pilot episode and early days of Breaking Bad. So without further ado, let’s get down to it.
1. Bryan Cranston took a refresher course in chemistry. Bryan Cranston wasn’t entirely a stranger to Bunsen burners and safety goggles before signing on for Breaking Bad. The actor was a member of his high school chemistry club while attending Canoga Park High School in Los Angeles in the 1970s. As a refresher course on mixing chemical concoctions, producers had Cranston take a few chemistry lessons from a professor at the University of Southern California. As the show moved forward, Vince Gilligan and Bryan Cranston would often correspond with Donna Nelson, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Oklahoma, to ensure they were adding the right components to their meth.
“Dr. Donna Nelson from the University of Oklahoma approached us several seasons back and said, ‘I really like this show, and if you ever need help with the chemistry, I’d love to lend a hand.’ She’s been a wonderful advisor. We get help wherever we need it, whether it’s chemistry, electrical engineering, or physics. We try to get everything correct. There’s no full-time [advisor] on set, but we run certain scenes by these experts first.” Via io9
2. We’re led to believe Walter White contributed to the 1985 Nobel Prize. In the pilot episode, the camera pans to a plaque on the wall of the White home that congratulates Walt on proton radiography work that was related to the winners of the 1985 Nobel Prize. The plaque doesn’t say who those winners are, but in real life the winners of the 1985 Nobel Prize for chemistry were Herbert Hauptman and Jerome Karle, who developed methods of determining crystal structures.
3. Vince Gilligan makes several references to his previous work on The X-Files. Gilligan first met Bryan Cranston when he was working as a writer on The X-Files and Cranston played a terminally ill anti-Semite in the episode “Drive.” Gilligan gives a nod to his time with Mulder and Scully twice during the pilot episode. The first time is when Walt mentions an Erlenmeyer flask — there was a 1994 episode of The X-Files called “The Erlenmeyer Flask” — and again when Jesse flicks a cigarette out of the motor home. The brand of cigarette is Morley, a fictional brand smoked by X-Files character C.G.B. Spender that has also been used in The Walking Dead.
As the series progressed, Jesse later switched to Wilmington cigarettes.
4. The concept was inspired by a story in the New York Times. In the mid-2000s Gilligan had finished his time on The X-Files and was looking for work as well as trying to develop an idea for an original series. Gilligan revealed to Newsweek that he wanted to take the personality of a character in a new direction as a show progressed.
“Television is historically good at keeping its characters in a self-imposed stasis so that shows can go on for years or even decades,” he said. “When I realized this, the logical next step was to think, how can I do a show in which the fundamental drive is toward change?”
Gilligan told Conan O’brien that the vehicle for the character change that would spark the idea for Breaking Bad came in the form of New York Times article about a guy who had a mobile meth lab in an RV.
5. AMC and Vince Gilligan didn’t see eye-to-eye on Walter White’s casting. Gilligan had Bryan Cranston in mind for the part of Walter White from the inception of the idea for the show, but AMC was reluctant because of Cranston’s previous work on the family-friendly sitcom Malcom in the Middle. The network approached both John Cusack and Matthew Broderick about the series, but after both actors declined the part and Gilligan showed executives Cranston’s X-Files episode, well, the rest is history.
6. If Vince Gilligan had a Showtime subscription there never would have been a Breaking Bad. Nobody’s debating that Breaking Bad story about a law-abiding citizen who becomes a drug kingpin isn’t one of the most genius concepts in the history of television, but it wasn’t the first of its kind. That distinction goes to Showtime’s Weeds, the dramedy about a suburban mom who starts selling weed after her husband dies of a heart attack. (A pretty good show until it jumped the shark in season four.) Gilligan was unfamiliar with the show when he developed and pitched the idea for Breaking Bad, and said that he became discouraged after learning of its similarity — and even admitted that he would have ditched the idea completely if he had known about Nancy Botwin.
“I could feel the blood drain from my face,” Gilligan wrote of finding out “Weeds” existed while pitching “Breaking Bad” to a cable network. “I turned to [the co-producers of Sony Television] Zack [Van Amburg] and Jamie [Erlicht]. ‘Did you know about “Weeds”?’ ‘Oh, yeah,’ they said. ‘Great show. But your thing is completely different. She deals pot and your guy deals crystal meth. Apples and oranges.’
While “Breaking Bad” and “Weeds” have managed to co-exist for years, Gilligan admits he never would have gone through with “Breaking Bad” if he had know about the existence of the Showtime series.
“If I had known of ‘Weeds’ weeks or even days prior to that meeting, it’s likely I wouldn’t have had the will to go on,” he wrote. “I would have said to myself (and I’ve said this a lot), ‘Damn! All the good ideas are already taken!'”
Let us thank the TV gods that Vince Gilligan didn’t have a cable package that included Showtime.
