The Writers Guild honored Vince Gilligan on Saturday night for his work that includes bringing Walter White—whom he concedes is "one of the all-time great bad guys"—to life in Breaking Bad. "But all things being equal," he told the crowd at the ceremony in Los Angeles, "I think I'd rather be celebrated for creating someone a bit more inspiring." There are too many real-life villains already, he said, per the Hollywood Reporter. Gilligan drew major applause with a proposal to his colleagues: "I say we write more good guys."
Giving Darth Vader and Hannibal Lecter as examples, Gilligan said the problem is that "for decades we made the villains too sexy." That made viewers everywhere want to emulate them, to "want to be that cool," he said. "When that happens, fictional bad guys stop being the precautionary tales they were intended to be. God help us, they've become aspirational." Gilligan's resume suggests he's an authoritative voice on the subject: The award named for Paddy Chayefsky that he received Saturday is the guild's highest honor for television writing, given for advancing the literature of TV. He's won four Emmys and a list of other awards, per Deadline. He also wrote for The X-Files and The Night Stalker over a three-decade career.
Unlike Walter White, characters like George Bailey from It's a Wonderful Life and Andy Taylor from The Andy Griffith Show "made our country a little bit better during some other tough times in our history," Gilligan said in making his pitch, per USA Today. "If I had created them, I'd be proud, indeed." (More Vince Gilligan stories.)
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