Albuquerque Aftermath: From Breaking Bad to Pluribus with Rhea Seehorn, Vince Gilligan, & More

This SXSW 2026 panel brings together the core creative team behind Vince Gilligan's television universe — Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and the new series Pluribus — for a wide-ranging conversation about craft, collaboration, and what it means to make ambitious television over two decades. The panel includes Gilligan himself, actress Rhea Seehorn, composer Dave Porter, costume designer Jennifer Bryan, and producer Trina Siopy, moderated in a conversational format that weaves audience questions throughout.

The session opens with a striking data point: Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul have been watched for 3.5 billion hours in just the last two years alone, a testament to what Gilligan calls their status as 'rites of passage.' Gilligan traces the origin of Breaking Bad to a 2004 notebook entry — a single sentence about a good man doing something bad — and recalls that one Sony executive at the time called it 'the single worst idea for a television show I've ever heard in my life.' The show was originally conceived for the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles before a New Mexico production rebate brought the production to Albuquerque, a city Gilligan fell in love with for its 'virgin territory' feel and extraordinary cloud formations that became visually iconic.

A significant portion of the conversation explores the creative process and team dynamics. Gilligan articulates his philosophy for the writers' room: the best idea wins, and the key to unlocking it is deliberately not keeping score of whose idea is whose. He credits this non-hierarchical approach as central to why the collaboration has been so durable and productive. Seehorn describes how Gilligan's method of trusting both audience and performer liberates actors to give nuanced, internal performances — she doesn't need to telegraph what her character is thinking, only think the thoughts truthfully. Composer Dave Porter explains that the mandate for Pluribus was to start entirely from scratch musically: abandoning the guitars, synths, and world instruments that defined Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul in favor of a full orchestra and choir. He describes recording with live orchestra as a leap of faith requiring computer demos first, and calls the experience of hearing 50 musicians play your own music 'awe-inspiring.' The theme music for Pluribus gave everyone chills on first listen in the mixing room.

Costume designer Jennifer Bryan offers a masterclass in character-building through wardrobe. She describes inventing Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman's look through a deliberate strategy of 'wrong' signals: a brown double-breasted suit (brown being 'mud, not a power color'), pockets placed on the wrong sides, and buttons positioned so high they were called 'nipple buttons.' Most iconically, she snapped the metal bridal bit off a fake Gucci shoe and rewired it with a paper clip — a detail Seehorn says she would look at on late nights to remember why Kim still loved Jimmy: 'This man's life is only held together with a paperclip.' For Pluribus, Bryan received a mandate to make the world look like nothing in the zombie or dystopian genre. Her solution: strip clothing of all social signaling — no jewelry, no accessories, no geographic or religious markers — so characters wear clothes purely as shells for protection. She mixed global cultural elements (Scottish kilts with t-shirts, saris with jeans) to signal a collective rather than individualistic existence. The production even debated whether the characters needed clothing at all, concluding they wear it only for sun and cold protection. Bryan also reveals that Carol's distinctive yellow leather jacket — sourced from France and custom-made — was so visually striking it inspired the entire marketing campaign and poster design for Pluribus.

The panel addresses the 'unlikable character' question directly, with Seehorn pushing back on the framing: the label 'unlikable' has been overused, particularly about female characters, and reflects overly restrictive definitions of what women are permitted to be on screen. She argues the more meaningful question is whether a character is 'accessible' — and Carol is honest, truthful, and believable in her grief and anger in ways audiences can connect with even if they wouldn't approve of her behavior. Gilligan closes with a reflective statement about anti-heroes: after 20 years of writing Walter White and Saul Goodman, he is now deliberately writing a good person in Carol Stork, and he wonders aloud whether the era of television anti-heroes may have, in some infinitesimal way, normalized real-world bad behavior. 'I think we need more good guys in the world,' he says, 'and I'm all for writing good guys from here on out.'