BREAKING BAD at TCA: Live-Blog

BREAKING BAD is about to embark on its final run of episodes, and before the show says goodbye, the cast and producers will have one final Television Critics Association panel.

Follow along to see what they have to say!

1:10 PM: We’re seeing the Comic-Con trailer of the show’s best moments.

1:13 PM: The cast has come out and now the panel has started. First question is about the unexpected character evolutions throughout the show. Vince Gilligan says all of his actors are fantastic, but Dean Norris’ character served a “limited function”: a frat-boy, loved more by Walter Jr. than his own father, etc. “He is a very complex and wonderful individual,” Gilligan says of Norris, noting that Norris went to Harvard, etc., and by knowing him, it “enriched [Gilligan’s] ability to write for him.”

1:17 PM: “I can’t remember exactly what my original intention was,” Gilligan says of his original ending for the show. He says he used the glib line of turning Mr. Chips into Scarface. He notes he “couldn’t see the forest through the trees” in the original years. Bryan Cranston says what he was pitched was in broad strokes. Cranston says he was “aghast” by Gilligan’s original pitch of turning this lovely man into such a terrible person, and he “wanted the role really bad.”

1:19 PM: “Aaron and I read the last script together and it will be on a documentary,” Cranston says of reaching the very end.

1:20 PM: A critic has an issue with the Mr. Chips-to-Scarface analogy, and Gilligan says he partially agrees. He says a good argument could be made about whether Walt’s particular road to hell changed him or if it revealed other parts into him. Gilligan says if he could go back and redo the pilot, he would tone down the apathy in the classroom, because Walt was a good teacher. Cranston says Walt’s teaching was “his one true passion besides his family.” Receiving the news about his emanate demise released that volcano of emotions, Cranston says.

1:24 PM: So about that documentary…it will be on the BREAKING BAD box set (not clear if it’s complete series or final season), but it’s two hours of the history of the show. “Have you seen it?” Gilligan asks his cast. “We never see anything,” Cranston half-jokes. The documentary will feature things from as early as the first week of the pilot, thanks to old EPK footage.

1:27 PM: “Jesse’s a drug dealer, he’s a murderer, but for some reason, you want to protect him,” Aaron Paul says of his character. He notes that the audience wants to root for the bad guy, which is why the audience often roots against Skyler. Anna Gunn says the audience sided with Walt, empathizing with a “what if I got in that position?” mode, and she notes that Skyler was the one to most consistently say Walt can’t do these things and get away with it. Gunn says that if Skyler had been too sympathetic, viewers could have lost sympathy for Walt, and then the show could have been thrown out of balance.

1:30 PM: “With how the season ended last year, he’s just emptied out,” Paul says of the end of the last season. “He’s terrified of this man and he wants nothing to do with him.”

“Walt has a large reservoir to be shared with everyone, and he shares his joy…over the last eight episodes,” Cranston jokes. “I think everyone will be satisfied by the ending when we hug it out.”

1:32 PM: “I never…I spent plenty of time on the internet looking up useless crap, but I have never looked up BREAKING BAD,” Gilligan says. He says he’s never Googled himself, either, because he would fall into a rabbit hole of content.

1:34 PM: The cast (Paul, Gunn, and Betsy Brandt) had a visible moment when Gilligan corrected himself while referring to the show in the present tense. He thinks people will dig the ending.

1:35 PM: Saul spinoff update: “It is my fervent wish there will be a Saul spinoff,” Gilligan says. That being said, he notes it’s for the big bosses to decide if it happens.

“I’d love to do it, I’d do it in a second, because if Vince wrote it, it would be awesome,” Bob Odenkirk says of the potentially spinoff. He notes if it doesn’t happen, he’s thankful for everything he’s had so far.

1:37 PM: On what we don’t know about the characters so far, Odenkirk says he think Saul is from Chicago, since he himself is from Chicago.

R.J. Mitte says that when he was creating Walt Jr. he used a lot of his real cerebral palsy.

Brandt says that she always felt her character wanted to have kids and they couldn’t. She notes she and Gunn used to talk about what their on-screen parents must have been like.

Gunn says she feels like the sisters must have had an unhappy childhood and were “war buddies.” She thinks that Skyler had to deal with things at a very young age, and that was a “very, very important part of her character.”

Paul says he didn’t have a backstory in his head, “but Jesse was in a constant search for guidance in his life.” And he notes that Jesse viewed Walt as a father figure and felt abandoned by his parents (which we did see) and that comes out when Jesse wants to protect kids.

Cranston jokingly says the turning point was in 1978 when Walter entered the Nathan hot dog eating contest and consumed 38.5 hot dogs and nearly became an eater instead of a chemist.

1:44 PM: And that’s it!