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"FacebookPinterest\n\n In TV, as nowhere else, the writer is king\u2014none more so than those emperors of the air that control every aspect of an ambitious, ongoing cable drama. The show-runner is this era's version of the Creative Titan, and few have done more with the power than the three GQ recently convened in the Olympian heights of a room at the Soho House in West Hollywood, to talk deeply about their craft.\n\n The men speak in voices as different as their shows: Matthew Weiner, the man behind Mad Men, is a high-speed stream of sparkling copy; Vince Gilligan, who created Breaking Bad, has the straightforward, gracious drawl of a geeky southern gentleman; and David Milch\u2014who wrote Deadwood, the misbegotten John from Cincinnati, and Luck, which met an equally early end this spring after the deaths of three equine cast members\u2014has the baroque gnomic gravity of an archdruid. But each of these giants expresses, in his distinct way, just how ambitious and deep the new breed of TV drama has grown.\n\n\n\n GQ: I think we've all gotten used to the idea that television has evolved into its own distinct art form over the past ten years or so, rather than just movies on a small screen.\n\n Matthew Weiner: Seeing movie people trying to get into TV now who don't understand that is very interesting.\n\n GQ: What's the mistake they make? \n\n Matthew Weiner: It's a different genre. It's literally comparing a short story to a poem. Or a play.\n\n GQ: Nowadays nobody would struggle with feeling inferior for working in television instead of movies, the way someone like The Sopranos' David Chase once did, right? \n\n Matthew Weiner: Oh, there's still a hierarchy. Forgetting about remuneration and public adulation, there's still a hierarchy in terms of the writer's Olympic Dream. I have to warn you, journalism won't be on this list.\n\n GQ: Thank you for that. \n\n Matthew Weiner: It would start with poetry, then go theater, novel, then film, and then TV, then maybe radio. \n\n GQ: Why is that still true, when it's obvious that some of the best work is being done on TV? \n\n Vince Gilligan: It takes time. It started out when movies were the movies and TV was this bastard stepchild.\n\n David Milch: The symbol retains its hold long after the substance which the symbol is supposed to represent has lost its real basis. Look. [pulls a stack of scratch-off lottery tickets from his pocket] I just stopped and got gas, so, like an idiot, I bought a bunch of scratch-offs.\n\n [He distributes the tickets. Feverish scratching ensues and continues throughout lunch.] \n\n Matthew Weiner: If we win, what happens?\n\n David Milch: You keep the money. Please do. What I'm trying to illustrate is that none of us, thank goodness, needs $10. And yet we willingly submit to the hold the symbol has on us, associated with luck. In the same way, the mystique of the film writer holds long after the substance\u2014in which films were a more powerful medium. That's not true anymore, but the symbol still has its own autonomous reality.\n\n Matthew Weiner: Part of it is just about scarcity. You can see Jon Hamm thirteen times a year, and you can see Brad Pitt twice. That in itself creates a magic and a hierarchy.\n\n GQ: And yet, Vince, you've said that Breaking Bad instantly came to you as a TV show, not as a movie. \n\n Vince Gilligan: Well, if it had been the 1970s, absolutely it would have been a movie, and I would have had to forgo a lot of fun story, because I would have had to fit it all in two hours. That's the first question: Is this two hours' worth of story or a hundred hours' worth of story? And in all honesty, I've written movies that have been made, and the process has not been as satisfying as writing for television.\n\n GQ: Clearly a lot of writers\u2014and actors and directors and so on\u2014have come to realize that. \n\n Matthew Weiner: Who knows where the talent goes? Sometimes it goes where the money is. Sometimes I think writers are really interested in the glory.\n\n GQ: And the glory's in TV right now? \n\n Vince Gilligan: It seems like it.\n\n Matthew Weiner: All I know is that at one point they added the word television to USC School of Cinematic Arts.\n\n Vince Gilligan: Holding their nose.\n\n Matthew Weiner: I'm sure someday they'll add the word computer too.\n\n Vince Gilligan: But let's leave aside for a second the idea of glory. TV is where writers get to tell interesting stories right now.\n\n Matthew Weiner: Without interference.\n\n Vince Gilligan: Because writers, for the most part, run television.\n\n GQ: One unique thing is that you're creating worlds without a clear ending. Ideally the story goes on and on and on.... \n\n Vince Gilligan: Endings are the hardest part. I find there's a great relief that at the end of every episode, every hour of TV you produce, while you want a proper and satisfying ending, it doesn't have to end The Story, in capital letters.\n\n Matthew Weiner: And that automatically makes it more real. Because in the end, there's things that are hanging, the way they are in real life. And your audience, you're actually whetting their appetite for more.\n\n GQ: So do you go into each season laying a certain amount of groundwork, in case it does get renewed? \n\n Matthew Weiner: The first season, I used everything that I had. I'd been thinking about it for six years. I used every song I wanted to put in that show. I used every story line. The only thing I knew that I didn't use is that there was another Mrs. Draper. I knew that the real Don Draper's widow was part of the story and that she was in California. That and the fact that Don's wife, Betty, didn't know who he really was. That's all I had left.\n\n GQ: So when you had to do season two, were you terrified? \n\n Matthew Weiner: Yeah! It's terrifying when you have to do episode two! You think you've used it up! Yes, it was terrifying. And then when season two was over and I didn't know if it was gonna get renewed, I thought, \"This could be a relief, because I don't really have anything.\"\n\n David Milch: Hospitality to the theme of change\u2014to change as a theme, not necessarily to change as the organizing principle of the storytelling\u2014must be present if the show is to continue to develop. Change as a theme. And for work that seems so disparate, if you think about it, there is exactly that similarity.\n\n Matthew Weiner: And that's part of what changed in TV, by the way: Guess what, you don't know who the show's gonna be about this week. You don't know who's gonna die and disappear this week, even if you love them. We are not giving you a formula. I watched the first season of The Sopranos as a viewer, and you literally felt like you were being dropped out of an airplane every episode. You constantly had the sensation that you had missed an episode. \"Everybody in the story seems to know that guy! Do I know that guy? Was he on?\" No, they just act like they know that guy, because they have a life that's without you. Right? When Betty and Don got divorced, I did it in between seasons. We came back and saw them living in different houses and that she was remarried. Viewers still did not believe that she was divorced, because how could you do that with your show? You can't just\u2014that's the show! Is she not gonna be in it anymore? Now it's the viewers' problem if they don't know what's going on. And all of a sudden, a world has opened up to us as writers.\n\n GQ: Do you enjoy the physical side of your jobs\u2014actually filming the show? \n\n Vince Gilligan: It's wonderful. It's more fun than writing. Anything is. Writing is like getting hit in the head repeatedly with a mallet. For me, anyway. I love having written. You feel good when you have that fifty-page script. I don't know from personal experience, but it's like childbirth: You forget the pain, and then you're ready to do it again.\n\n Matthew Weiner: To have your work shot\u2014it's an experience that nobody else gets to know. As opposed to piling up scripts, trying to sell a story, getting notes, and then hoping the ecution will happen at all, let alone well. It would be like being an architect and never getting a building built. Everyone here\u2014we're drawing plans, and then we build the building.\n\n Vince Gilligan: I always loved stories of the studio system back in the '40s and '50s, where you'd have writers in their individual offices, this one working on a Humphrey Bogart movie, this one doing something else.\n\n David Milch: Isn't that nice to think about?\n\n Vince Gilligan: And your movies would get made. Now there's a kind of hang-fire misery involved in living the life of a screenwriter in which you get paid a lot of money, you can write your movie in the South of France or wherever the hell you wish to work, but it's very likely your blueprints will never be made into a building. With TV, you write something, and a week or two later it's being produced.\n\n Matthew Weiner: Screenwriting is not our end product. I walk on set and I see the person I cast, and the costumes I went to the meeting for, and the hair, and somebody's done something amazing with the set. All these people's creative input comes into it.\n\n David Milch: That's the extraordinary part. How much you learn, how quickly. It's like this in-gush of information that modifies your original idea. It's so precious.\n\n GQ: You must have had to learn to work in a different way on Luck, since you and [fellow ecutive producer] Michael Mann agreed you wouldn't be on the set. \n\n David Milch: Yeah, it's been absolutely new. It's involved the postponement of that learning experience.\n\n Matthew Weiner: I can't even imagine what it's like to just go and see it thrown at you.\n\n Vince Gilligan: That's what it's like to write movies. You write it, and then maybe you get invited to the premiere, maybe you don't.\n\n GQ: Was it very awful? \n\n David Milch: No, not awful. Absolutely different. When I was working on Deadwood, it was understood that the script was a work in progress and when we got to set everyone would kind of work on it together. This was completely different, with a different result. But there are compensations for that. Learning to live with the given is the great humbling educational process of life. And I've had a sufficiency of education this past year.\n\n GQ: You all approach the necessity of collaborating with other writers in different ways. Can you talk about your approach to the writers' room? \n\n Matthew Weiner: We all came up in this system. There is something about it that's very old and exactly the same as it's always been. When I watch The Dick Van Dyke Show, I'm like, Wow, this is the same job. There's the 12-year-old kid on the staff. There's the guy who delivers lunch. I guarantee you I can walk into either of these guys' offices and, except for where the snack room is, it's gonna be similar on some level.\n\n GQ: There will be snacks, though. \n\n Matthew Weiner: I think that's a WGA thing. There has to be a lot of food. We have \"fifteen-minute meal leave.\" If you haven't eaten for fifteen minutes, you have to. Oh, my God, the lunch menu, like, meets you when you're walking in the door. You're making breakfast and they're asking you what you want for lunch. But I had a really good writers' room this year. There are other times when you dread going into that room. You're literally, like in a movie, outside the door taking a deep breath before you walk in. And it's not them. It's not the human beings. Sometimes you're just distracted by bullshit.\n\n David Milch: You bring the atmosphere with you.\n\n Matthew Weiner: Yes, that's totally true.\n\n GQ: What do you mean by that? \n\n David Milch: Well, the best situation of all is to come clean in the writers' room and discover, through your encounter with your fellow writers, the nature and rhythms of the story that you're trying to tell. But if you bring with you resentments or anxieties, you tend to project and corrupt those natural rhythms, and you wind up with some very strange hybrid forms.\n\n Matthew Weiner: And by the way, having been on the other side of it, I actually think that part of my success climbing the hierarchy of the writers' room was that I knew that when the boss came in, no matter what mood they were in, I was not going to take it personally. I'd be like, \"Okay, okay, you don't like that? Well, I've got something else. Did you actually say 'Fuck you' to me? Okay. Well, you don't mean it.\"\n\n David Milch: That's a gift. How did you develop that?\n\n Matthew Weiner: That's the way my family is. You can't take it personally.\n\n GQ: Does that mean you have license to say \"Fuck you\" to your writers in the room? \n\n Matthew Weiner: No! I am not that person. I'm the time-wasting show-runner. I will walk in and say, \"I'm sorry, I just got off the phone with blank and blank, and they want this, and blank wants this, and blank wants this...\" And they're all sort of sitting there like, \"We were talking about Peggy.\" And I'm like, \"Yeah, okay...maybe we can use this for Peggy!\" You're just hiding the fact that you just want to vent.\n\n GQ: Given all the time in the world, would you choose to work this way on your shows, or would you prefer to write everything yourself? \n\n David Milch: That's a good one. All the time in the world? The \"B\" answer is, I'd write it all myself. Which is to say that in my vanity and egoism, I would think that that would be the way to proceed. And I know deep down that the better answer is: Even having all the time in the world, it's better to collaborate with your brothers and sisters. It's ultimately the richest experience. But there's a kind of intolerant economy that happens: \"Just let me do the fucking thing myself.\"\n\n Matthew Weiner: And it's wrong.\n\n GQ: To feel that way? \n\n Matthew Weiner: Yeah. What I find at this point is that the room generates story. But the actual writing and the consistency of it\u2014in the end, I will probably have to do it myself. And I want to. And I think they want me to. I think it's demoralizing, on the one hand, to not see a lot of your stuff shot, but I keep telling them, when I was [a writer and ecutive producer for] The Sopranos, nine times out of ten somebody would come up to me and say, \"That line was so great.\" And I'd say, \"That's David Chase.\" It's hard for writers to understand that when you sign off on an outline, they feel it's finished. And you know it's just a stab at it. Actually, I don't think they could even work if they knew how unfinished you know it is.\n\n Vince Gilligan: We work a little different, it sounds like. There are seven of us, total, counting myself. And we spend at least two weeks, sometimes three, on just the outline. Every detail we can think of, down to the color of the dress, is in the outline. That's the heavy lifting. I liken it to a sequestered jury that never ends. The verdict is never announced; we're just in there forever. When we finish breaking a story, we actually have this little ceremony where we write the number of the episode and we thumbtack it up, and everybody claps. It's very sort of corny, but the understanding is that, at that point, if any one of us, including me, were to get hit by a train or come down with the flu or whatnot, any other of these writers in the room could deliver, could turn that into a screenplay.\n\n GQ: David, your approach is more cryptic. \n\n David Milch: Yeah. I think it's more of an osmotic and less cognitive process. We knock stories around, and then we sort of give them out haphazardly. It's much less of a coherent approach. What you're hearing described in one way or another is an organism which is constantly transforming itself, which at one moment is one thing and at another moment is something absolutely other and different. Hospitality to that fluidity is what makes for a wonderful show-runner. The blessing\u2014and we've all had the experience\u2014is when you meet a writer who can do it, and you get this stupid look on your face...\n\n Matthew Weiner: It's like falling in love. Understand that we're living in that world twenty-four hours a day. David Chase would always come in and say, \"I think I fid it. I was in the shower and it came to me.\" And I'd think, \"Why is he always in the shower?\" Then I got this job, and I was like, \"Oh, my God, you're always thinking about it.\" You get to the point where you've run through almost everything that could possibly happen, and then all of a sudden somebody will say something that you didn't think of\u2014\n\n David Milch: \u2014that's totally different from what you thought.\n\n Matthew Weiner: And you're just like, \"Wow! I love you!\"\n\n David Milch: And quite literally that's the truth. That's the definition of love, that going out in spirit to a separate and other soul and being received similarly. It's a lot of fun. \n\n GQ: What's the opposite? What makes a toxic writers' room? \n\n Matthew Weiner: People fighting for control. People fighting for Daddy's attention. I write about it all the time. We have that scene in the episode \"The Suitcase\" with Don yelling at Peggy for complaining about not getting enough credit. I tried to explain to people that I was both of those people.\n\n GQ: I thought that scene was specifically about the question of putting your name on so many Mad Men scripts, which has been somewhat controversial. \n\n Matthew Weiner: I don't know why anyone would want their name on something that they didn't write. I don't want to discredit somebody for taking the first swing at something, because that's huge. Even if I throw out the whole thing, they've helped me. But over 80 percent of it is rewriting and I'm going to put my name on it. If I keep more than 20 percent of your script, I'll leave your name alone. Basically, it's a question of ego. I can't stomach the idea of someone not knowing that I was involved in it. For the well-being of my daily interaction with the people I work with, I felt it best not to have to watch somebody go up and get an award for something I had written every word of. I'm not Cyrano de Bergerac.\n\n GQ: The counterargument is that your involvement is implied by the show-runner position. \n\n Matthew Weiner: I am breaking with tradition on some level. And immediately I'm defensive. David did do it on The Sopranos. He did it less than I do, but he did do it. And I felt it was better for our relationship. I tell my staff that my response wasn't \"Well, he's just going to rewrite what I do anyway.\" It was \"I'm going to write a script that he will not be able to change.\" And I got there.\n\n GQ: Do you other guys put your names on scripts you've done extensive rewrites on? \n\n Vince Gilligan: Not typically.\n\n David Milch: Not typically.\n\n Matthew Weiner: They're classier than me.\n\n Vince Gilligan: But that said, every single thing Matt just said is bulletproof. I guess I don't do it because Chris Carter didn't do it, and I learned everything I know from working with Chris on The X-Files. But I recall times when I would rewrite someone else's script and I would miss out on some money but, worse, know that the world wasn't going to know the work I'd done. If you're going to stick to tradition and suffer in silence and it's going to give you an early heart attack, why do it? So I'm impressed. Hats off to you, Matt.\n\n David Milch: I think it can be a sign of mental health. Ego suppression can be an act of ostentation.\n\n Matthew Weiner: Well, I'm very healthy.  \n\n GQ: Do we all agree that The Sopranos was an important moment in the transformation of TV? \n\n Vince Gilligan: Oh, absolutely. Breaking Bad couldn't exist without The Sopranos.\n\n Matthew Weiner: I feel like David Chase died for my sins. Do you know how many decisions were based on some meeting when he was on Northern Exposure or The Rockford Files or some show you never heard of that he worked on for three years? Somebody saying to him, \"You can't do that,\" and him saying, \"Why not?\" And them saying, \"Because you can't.\" We were exorcising those demons. He wouldn't do a walk-and-talk, which is two characters being covered in one shot, talking. He wouldn't do that, because it was something NBCUniversal used to do to save money. Sometimes you'd be at this amazing location with a strip club on one side, an abattoir on the other\u2014spectacular. You'd say, \"Can't they just walk down the highway?\" And he'd say [sarcastic], \"Sure. Let's just lay some track, walk backwards, and we can get out of here by four.\" I knew it was some network ecutive he was punching in the face thirty years later.\n\n Vince Gilligan: Now, I think The Sopranos couldn't have existed without Hill Street Blues.\n\n GQ: Did you sense that, David, when you were working on network shows like Hill Street or NYPD Blue? Was there the same kind of excitement you feel now? \n\n David Milch: There was excitement, but it was not articulate. It was like everyone felt as if he or she had been caught doing something wrong.\n\n Matthew Weiner: The antihero, even though it's such a big part of the American tradition, was something people thought no one wanted in their living room. They'd go to the movies and watch Gene Hackman in The French Connection, but when they got home they didn't want to watch Sipowicz.\n\n GQ: And yet that antihero character\u2014the charismatic monster\u2014has become the signature of this TV revolution: Don Draper, Walter White, Al Swearengen, to name three. What changed? \n\n David Milch: The whole idea of going out to a movie was really a secularized version of going to church. And there was a certain expectation you brought to a movie which, as we've said, has taken all this time to be demystified. Commercials were once TV's version of the church. Which is to say, you couldn't offend the sponsor, therefore certain values had to be underscored in the subject matter. Now, with the move to cable, we're in the process of exploring the anti-versions of all these forms.\n\n Matthew Weiner: I think we've always been a subversive culture\u2014poking at authority, being a gangster, breaking the rules. That's Antihero America. At the same time, there's a lot of guilt and shame that goes along with our basically criminal mentality. Wasn't that a lot of what Deadwood was about? \"Why do I get the land? Because I was here first!\" So when a character like Tony Soprano comes along, you're saying, \"This is a real criminal. I wish I could be that way. I really do.\" And at the same time: \"I hope something bad happens to him, because it's probably wrong to feel that way.\"\n\n GQ: But why so many antiheroes now? Other than the fact that you can get away with it on cable nowadays? \n\n Matthew Weiner: We like to see it that way and pat ourselves on the back, but Twelve Angry Men was made for TV. Requiem for a Heavyweight, Marty, Patterns, The Bachelor Party, all were made for television. I mean, The Twilight Zone! There's nothing that's ever been more counterculture than The Twilight Zone. It was literally saying, every week, America is fucked-up.\n\n GQ: But Rod Serling had the form of science fiction as a kind of Trojan horse\u2014just like tits and violence on The Sopranos, or the genre of the Western, or pretty 1960s clothes... \n\n David Milch: It works, that Trojan horse shit. It really works.\n\n GQ: At the same time, a show like Luck doesn't seem to need that recognizable genre. Nor did Breaking Bad. Are we in a new phase? \n\n Vince Gilligan: Going back to film: Because it was, as David said, a kind of church, a special place, it carried with it all sorts of conventions. If there was going to be a horror film, it was advertised as a horror film. You knew what your expectations were going to be.\n\n David Milch: Now all the conventions have been hollowed out and revealed as barren. And that's ultimately the transposition of \"the story\" from the church of film to an entirely different world in which the story declares itself on its own terms, with no preexisting expectations. In fact, the expectations are there to be deconstructed.\n\n GQ: The other side of having a strong central characters is that you end up, on some level, sharing authorship with an actor. Does that cause problems? \n\n Vince Gilligan: I'm so very lucky to be working with Bryan Cranston, an actor who is not afraid to look bad. We all have stories of actors who will come to you and say, \"Gee, this scene you've written here, don't you think my character would have more dialogue?\" They'll give you artist pretenses, but the nut of it is \"My character is too much of a shit here.\" Or \"He's too weak here.\" Bryan isn't afraid to be photographed in his underpants time and time again. That's a pretty good physicalization of his fearlessness.\n\n David Milch: As soon as you say \"My character...\" you don't have to finish that sentence. You're wrong.\n\n GQ: How important is it that you get to work in short seasons of ten, twelve, or thirteen episodes? \n\n Matthew Weiner: There are two people here who would do twenty-two episodes a year! I did that in comedy, never drama, and you know what it meant? It meant there was a minimum of seven crappy ones a year.\n\n Vince Gilligan: I've forgotten how you'd do that. I say to my network friends all the time, \"I have the greatest respect for what you're doing,\" because the grind...it's inhuman. And I was never the boss on a big network show. I don't think I could have done it.\n\n GQ: So, David, how did you do it? \n\n David Milch: Well, loaded.\n\n GQ: Were you constantly frustrated, creatively? \n\n David Milch: No, because you're so hungry. You've been out in the cold so long.\n\n Matthew Weiner: Got to eat with both hands.\n\n David Milch: That's right. But I guess I've written 300 scripts, and I couldn't write the first 250 again. No way. It's a younger man's game.\n\n Vince Gilligan: I agree. I couldn't go back and do the seven years on The X-Files.\n\n GQ: Why has the particular structure of around thirteen one-hour episodes turned out to be so good for telling these kinds of stories? \n\n Matthew Weiner: I was really curious about that. This is just amateur archaeology, but I think it's related to British series, which were often six episodes long, plus a pilot. So the first series would be seven, and the second would be six.\n\n Vince Gilligan: Thirteen's also one quarter of a year, right? Thirteen times four is fifty-two. That might have something to do with it.\n\n GQ: I was wondering if there's something more abstract, even mystical, about those numbers. \n\n Matthew Weiner: I think you can cover a year in twelve or thirteen episodes. I break this all the time, but I try to make each one about a month apart.\n\n David Milch: To the extent that the theme is what we learn or fail to learn over the passage of time, form and content inform each other. So twelve [Deadwood was three seasons of twelve episodes each], which is formally just an attribute of the calendar, becomes a thematic principle.\n\n Matthew Weiner: I think plus or minus three is a gift. Thirds are great for storytelling: beginnings, middles, ends.\n\n GQ: Does that throw off your storytelling metabolism? \n\n Matthew Weiner: It's an organic human thing. If we meet for a drink and you tell me what happened today, you'll tell a story that goes like this [traces an arc in the air]: There will be a climax, and then we'll talk about the ending and what it means. You try and fuck with that, but it's still based on that shape. It's like playing jazz.\n\n David Milch: When Adam and Eve are in the garden, she says, \"What are you gonna call that?\" And he says, \"A hippopotamus.\" And she says, \"Why?\" \"Because it looks like a hippopotamus.\" We've integrated our expectations about form, so you think in the shape of twelve. You couldn't say why or how.\n\n Matthew Weiner: You cannot exaggerate the value of experience in storytelling and your gut feeling of what is a good story. \n\n GQ: Vince, you have sixteen episodes to go in Breaking Bad's final season. Do you know your ending? \n\n Vince Gilligan: We have a rough idea. I'm very fortunate, because most TV producers don't have the luxury of knowing when their show is going to end. But in some sense, some small part of you wishes you had the choice denied you. If, at the end of season four, I had been told that forces beyond my control were ending my show, I would feel pretty good about the ending we had, and I'd be able to say, \"Whoops. Not my call. We gave you the best we could, and hope you enjoyed what you saw.\" Now there's an element of \"It's really mine to fuck up.\"\n\n GQ: But you always had a certain arc in mind, right? You've said the project was always to see if you could convincingly turn a character \"from Mr. Chips to Scarface.\" \n\n Vince Gilligan: In very general broad terms, we had a sense of Walter's fate. But God is in the details. (I love that there's two expressions: \"God is in the details\" and \"The devil's in the details.\") Anyway, when you do a show about a man who's been diagnosed with cancer in the first episode, a very likely possible ending presents itself pretty readily. But the details of that ending are really where the art's at, if there's art to be found.\n\n GQ: David, you didn't get a chance to end Deadwood on your own terms. Or John from Cincinnati, for that matter. [[Read David Milch's thoughts on the premature cancellation of Luck.] __](/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201206/roundtable-addendum-david-milch-luck)\n\n David Milch: You try to live your creative life in the way you would try to live your real life. Which is, if it turned out to be your last day, you wouldn't be ashamed of the way you finished up. In the case of Deadwood, I had enough time to mourn but not enough time to really shape the material towards a conclusion. But if you go back and look at the concluding episode, there is a provisional sense of an ending there. Some series end halfway through and just don't know it. So it's not a question that I allow myself to linger over.\n\n GQ: Do any of you have a Great Lost Series that you wish had gotten made or had more of a chance? \n\n Matthew Weiner: I loved Andy Richter Controls the Universe. When I got there as a writer, it was D.O.A. They were like, \"They're letting us make a few more, and they're giving us a chance.\" Really? They put us on Sunday night against The Sopranos in December. I don't think they're interested in us succeeding.\n\n David Milch: It was a sacrificial lamb.\n\n Matthew Weiner: Yeah, exactly. Why not just run a Magic Bullet commercial?\n\n Vince Gilligan: I had this show called The Lone Gunmen. It was an X-Files spin-off, and it only lasted thirteen episodes. I remember the writing room on King of the Hill put in a joke where one of the characters is wearing a T-shirt saying \"Bring Back The Lone Gunmen.\" And you know the kind of lead time animation has. They animated it before the show had even aired!\n\n Matthew Weiner: That's a vote of confidence.\n\n Vince Gilligan: Well, you didn't have to be Nostradamus to see that one coming, I guess. But that was a fun damn job. I enjoyed the hell out of that. I love Breaking Bad, but it's tough being in Walter White's head twenty-four hours a day. It was much more fun\u2014not as satisfying, perhaps, but more fun\u2014to be in the heads of these goofy Don Quixote types, always tilting at windmills.\n\n Matthew Weiner: Thirteen times it was more fun. See how you would have felt if it had stayed on.\n\n GQ: Where are we going from here? Is this window to do good work on TV going to stay open? \n\n Matthew Weiner: My kids don't know the difference between what they're watching that's TV and what's a movie. It's all on the same-size screen.\n\n Vince Gilligan: There's also movement toward nonwriting producers coming in and running shows.\n\n Matthew Weiner: Part of that is making the people with the money feel more secure, because those of us who are artistic aren't to be trusted with budgets and so forth.\n\n Vince Gilligan: I'll tell you what I worry about. Being a student of TV history, I know that in the early days, advertisers had much more of an impact on what you could do and what you couldn't do. Now with TiVo, with DVRs, consumers of TV are skipping the very thing that allows TV to exist in the first place\u2014at least in commercial television, which accounts for most of it. It makes me think a new paradigm is in the offing\u2014a new paradigm that in fact is the oldest paradigm\u2014in which each TV show is individually sponsored.\n\n David Milch: The avatar of that is product placement.\n\n Vince Gilligan: I worry that that will potentially put the kibosh on a lot of edgy, fun storytelling.\n\n David Milch: We're in such a state of fluidity in terms of the changing of the market and form that in five years something absolutely different is gonna be going on. Hey, did we win any money?\n\n Vince Gilligan: I have a couple of winning tickets, actually.\n\n David Milch: I say we give them all to the waitress. I'm telling you, in five years this conversation is going to seem childish."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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