I am the one who knocks.

So Breaking Bad, a show created by Vince Gilligan, is essentially the story of Walter White, uh, who when we start the series is a chemistry teacher.

He finds out that he has cancer, doesn't have that much longer to live, and he decides to get into the meth business.

Because he knows chemistry so well, he's gonna produce the finest meth that has ever been produced, get a bunch of money, leave it for his family, and along the way, he turns into, essentially, a kingpin in Albuquerque.

Exactly.

[laughs] As part of this project, our TV editor, Jeremy Egner, got to interview Vince Gilligan and a couple of castmates of Breaking Bad, and the subject of the anti-hero came up.

And Vince Gilligan, who wrote one of this era's great anti-heroes, was raising the question of have we done it enough? Has, in a way, reality and fiction started to come together, and maybe we don't actually need to, to sort of, uh, laud people who are doing bad things.

Exactly that.

I think there's something to be teased out about for each individual person how much their idea of a good bad movie is attached to nostalgia in some way.

I encountered this- When I was younger, when I was a teenager, what have you, I've seen it many, many, many times, whether because for those of a certain age it was on cable, or I, I had played the DVD over and over again in college.

There's a way in which familiarity sort of breeds that, uh, affection for a film.

Yes

... we thought about presenting computers on film was visualizations of, like, math equations, and you see a person just typing frantically at a computer, and then flashes of electricity are going before their eyes.

It was this way in which we didn't really understand yet what the internet was going to be, and therefore, did not know how to represent it.

And therefore-

Tell us about that one.

Sure.

So Mexican Gothic is a novel by the author Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Uh, she's quite prolific.

She writes across, uh, genres.

And this one, as the title indicates, is a Gothic thriller.

It is, uh, set in Mexico, uh, in the past.

So, so tell us why you love that one so much.

Mm-hmm

...

in the Marvel universe or the Star Wars universe or something like that.

So that has a very strong meaning, and, and that's the way that people use it.

I think Anyone who's a bookish person, or lots of people who are bookish people also know it as a source of controversy, you know? For, for many decades, the idea that there were a group of people that put together a canon, particularly of Western literature, and told you, "These are the things you should read in order to be a well-educated person." There came a time at the end of the 20th century when that whole idea was up for debate, and there was a big sort of to-do in academia.

And so the canon as an idea in books, in culture, I think for a while has been suspect because they're this, this idea of people up here, gatekeepers, elites, whatever you wanna call them, making decisions about what is good and what is not good, and then what? We're just supposed to listen to them?

Mm-hmm.

As a place that has done this for quite a while, can we start to use a different model? Can we both rely on the expertise of our critics and the people that we pay in order to do this work, but also use our, what we call our convening power, to go out and ask hundreds of experts in each of these fields, people who know this stuff front to back because they live it, what they think is good, particularly in this century.

personal,

Gilbert.

Personal's good.

I think the characters that have changed the most to me are the ones that I have identified with, right? And so if we're talking about what I think are the two main characters, are the two main characters of the book, Nick and Gatsby, when I was younger, I thought of myself as someone who wanted to be Gatsby.

I was someone who... came from a certain place and wanted to go to another place, wanted to reinvent myself into someone who could be successful, someone who could thrive in America, someone who did not sort of grow up, you know, in a lower middle class family in the Bronx.

And so the idea of Jay, the idea of Jay Gatz, changing himself, reinventing himself.

It seemed like something that was a thing you could do in America.

I mean, you yourself, Gilbert, The paradigm spoke