There’s the old saying attributed to Billy Wilder, who said, “If you give the audience two plus two, and you let them add it up so it equals four, they’ll love you forever.” I think what he meant by that is it’s always best not to spoon-feed the audience. The audience is plenty smart on their own, and they’re perfectly capable of adding two plus two. That’s something we typically like to do on Breaking Bad, to hint at things and imply things. It’s not out of a desire to be unnecessarily coy or cutesy. It’s just that subtle storytelling interests me more. At the end of the day my writers and I are the first viewers of the show, and we try to tell the kind of story that we ourselves would be intrigued and entertained by. I think the seven of us prefer subtle storytelling that doesn’t hit you over the head, that doesn’t shake you until you understand every last detail.
– Vince Gilligan, writer/creator of Breaking Bad, AV Club interview (Oct. 2011)
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Professor of film and Shakespeare. Advocate of social media. Lover of popular culture,