Vince Gilligan Recalls Brutal Reaction to His Breaking Bad Pitch

Breaking Bad is now considered by many to be one of the greatest TV shows of all time, but when creator Vince Gilligan first started pitching it, not everyone warmed to the idea of seeing a chemistry teacher decide to start cooking meth after getting a stage-three lung cancer diagnosis.

During a South by Southwest Film & TV Festival panel last week (via THR,) Gilligan recalled finding a notebook where he cooked up his first basic thoughts on Breaking Bad. All he’d written down was “Good guy does something bad to save his family,” but this seed soon blossomed, and he took an expanded pitch to Sony, where an executive told him, “‘That’s the single worst idea I’ve ever heard.’”

Gilligan noted that the executive in question was no longer at Sony, saying, “To his credit, he’s a good man, and he acknowledged [his mistake later].”

It wasn’t the only bad reaction Gilligan faced as he tried to make Breaking Bad a reality. He previously told Emmy TV Legends about a meeting with TNT that went downhill after he unveiled the meth element of the show’s story. “[The two executives] look at each other and they say, ‘Oh god, I wish we could buy this.’ Then they said, ‘If we bought this, we’d be fired … We cannot put this on TNT, it’s meth, it can’t be meth, it’s reprehensible.’”

HBO was also ice cold on Breaking Bad, emitting “a toxic gamma radiation of disinterest,” while Showtime didn’t want to greenlight another Weeds-like show about a parent dealing drugs. Eventually, FX bought the script but passed it to AMC. “God bless them, that…when AMC came calling, [FX was] big enough to allow AMC to purchase the script for Breaking Bad…that behavior’s kind of rare in the business.”

Suffice it to say, everyone who turned down Breaking Bad must have felt a bit silly after the series finally got made and was met with universal acclaim, enviable viewing figures, and awards aplenty. That’s show business, folks.