Why Vince Gilligan Thinks Breaking Bad Was Rigged Against Skyler White

Along with Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul and Giancarlo Esposito, Anna Gunn helped make Breaking Bad one of the greatest TV series of all time. Yet, Gunn’s character Skyler White is never given the credit she deserves for her long-suffering role in Walter White’s story. In fact, Skyler is roundly despised by large sections of the Breaking Bad fandom.

Despite being an integral part of the show’s emotional core, Walter’s wife is frequently interpreted as the villain of the piece, who fails to understand her husband and ultimately betrays him. However, this interpretation neglects Skyler’s side of the story, and denigrates her status as one of Breaking Bad’s best characters.

The negative reception Skyler White has received from audiences has convinced Breaking Bad’s creator, Vince Gilligan, that he unintentionally rigged the show in favor of its central protagonist, Walt. Regardless of the terrible things Bryan Cranston’s character does, and how much he makes his family suffer, viewers with him.

Even though Walter White kills almost 300 people in Breaking Bad, it’s his wife that bears the brunt of the fan backlash. Her actions, such as pressuring Walt into sharing his cancer diagnosis with his family, attempting to divorce him, and having an affair out of desperation, are seen as inexcusable.

The Reception To Anna Gunn's Skyler Bothered Breaking Bad's Creator

Years after the series ended, the reaction of fans to Anna Gunn’s character apparently still bothers Breaking Bad’s creator Vince Gilligan. Along with a growing demographic of viewers, Gilligan feels that Skyler White doesn’t deserve the hate she gets. Thankfully, the character is increasingly the subject of retrospective reevaluation, but that isn’t much good to the actor who played her.

In a 2022 interview with The New Yorker, Gilligan recalled how the negative feedback about her character bothered Anna Gunn at the time Breaking Bad was airing on AMC. He admitted that the backlash against Skyler affected him, too. His recollections indicate the depths of his sentiment about this issue:

“Back when the show first aired, Skyler was roundly disliked. I think that always troubled Anna Gunn. And I can tell you it always troubled me, because Skyler, the character, did nothing to deserve that. And Anna certainly did nothing to deserve that. She played the part beautifully.”

Gunn’s feelings about her character’s reception are especially justifiable, given that she was playing a woman whose husband was deceiving her, and running a deadly criminal operation behind her back. Because Skyler goes through a harrowing ordeal in Breaking Bad, it must have been galling for Gunn to find herself on the wrong end of fans’ reactions.

If Walter White is a highly unconventional TV protagonist who doesn’t strictly fall into the category of a villain in the traditional sense, then at least he’s the undisputed villain of his marriage. Once Walt suddenly decides to break bad, Skyler has to deal with more than most spouses could possibly imagine in their worst nightmares.

Although Anna Gunn was the person most directly affected by negative viewer responses to Skyler, Vince Gilligan naturally took them almost as badly, since he’s the one who created the character and placed her in Breaking Bad’s story. Apparently, Gilligan had no idea that Skyler’s actions would be viewed with such little empathy for her situation.

Vince Gilligan Realized That Breaking Bad Was Rigged

However, Gilligan has also explained why he thinks Walter White’s wife was received so negatively by such a groundswell of Breaking Bad viewers. Looking back at his creation, he’s realized that it was massively skewed in favor of Walt, whose perspective is the central focus of the entire series.

Walt is the character we’re supposed to sympathize with, which gives him the upper hand over Skyler whenever they clash. What’s more, if you’re hiding the fact that you’re a murderous drug kingpin from your wife, the clashes you’ll have with her are going to be big. Vince Gilligan summarizes the predicament for Breaking Bad characters like Skyler as follows:

“I realize in hindsight that the show was rigged, in the sense that the storytelling was solely through Walt's eyes, even in scenes he wasn't present for. Even Gus, his archenemy, didn't suffer the animosity Skyler received. It's a weird thing. I'm still thinking about it all these years later.”

Even if he’s found an explanation for why Walt is so well-received as a character, while the likes of Skyler get a bad rap, Gilligan remains perplexed at the unparalleled level of hatred directed towards Walt’s wife. But there are reasons for this hatred, even if they aren’t remotely justifiable.

The first reason is as uncomfortable as it is straightforward. It’s unfortunately still commonplace for female TV characters to be viewed in disproportionately negative terms, particularly in cases where they’re seen to commit some form of moral transgression. In Skyler’s case, the transgression in question is her affair with Ted Beneke.

The other classic example of such undue fan hatred for similar reasons in modern television is the grief Lori Grimes received for her actions in The Walking Dead. Even without perceived moral wrongdoing, though, female characters like Skyler and Lori still get lambasted for being whiny, nagging wives when they challenge their husbands’ behavior.

Mad Men’s Betty Draper and Friends’ Emily Waltham are two other female characters to have suffered near-identical backlashes to the one Skyler White received. Even in the 2020s, You’s Guinevere Beck has experienced her fair share of victim-blaming.

Yet, there is a reason more specific to Breaking Bad that makes Skyler so prone to fan hatred. Given that she’s the closest person to Walt before he breaks bad means, she’s in the first line of fire after his life is completely transformed, especially when it comes to matters of personal, social, and legal responsibility.

Skyler is the innocent who’s most affected by Walt’s transformation, but she’s also the person whose actions have the biggest effect on the “good” side of his life. Because Walt wins our sympathy from the very beginning of the show, anything she does to impact his “good” life negatively is naturally met with howls of derision.

At the same time, any way that Walt’s “bad” life harms Skyler is understood from the point of view of a decision we’re already invested in supporting. This dynamic is a win-win for Walt, and a catch-22 Skyler can never escape.

Skyler Was Walter White's Biggest Victim In Breaking Bad

At the end of Breaking Bad, we’re left wondering what happens to Skyler White. Herhusband is dead, and all he’s left her is a set of coordinates to a burial site he thinks could keep her out of jail, despite her reluctant – and often unintentional – complicity in his crimes.

He doesn’t even leave her any income from his years as a drug kingpin, or the school-teaching job he lost. Even if she evades prosecution, she’ll be raising the kids she’s had with Walt alone, without any savings to fall back on, but still living with the trauma of what he’s done to her and the family.

His secret meth empire, concealed from Skyler via a web of deception, placed her and their children in extreme danger. If that’s not enough, from season 4 onwards, Skyler becomes aware that her husband is himself a dangerous mass murderer – one who facilitates the murder of her brother-in-law.

Still, he refuses to grant her a divorce, and burdens her with the knowledge that while they were having their second baby together he was secretly building his crime organization. Even worse, in the final episode of Breaking Bad, Walt reveals the truth to his wife in their final conversation. Throughout their entire marriage, he was Heisenberg all along.

Skyler White is the ultimate victim of Walter White in the series. Walt never earns his classification as Breaking Bad’s biggest villain more than in his marriage to Skyler. She doesn’t deserve any of the blame she gets for what happens between them in the show.