Gilligan’s three-decade tenure in television has paralleled the rapid evolution of the medium. In the mid-’90s, broadcast networks dominated prime time with megahits like Seinfeld, ER, and The X-Files, whose viewership on Fox peaked at a now-inconceivable 20 million. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul emerged into what has been called the Third Golden Age of Television, a renaissance in audacious, cinematic cable programming for adult audiences, spurred by the success of The Sopranos and sustained by Netflix’s need to build a streaming library. Now he’s making Pluribus for Apple, one of the few companies still reliably funding expensive streaming series—especially science-fiction titles like Foundation and Severance—at a time of consolidation and austerity in Hollywood.
And yet Gilligan initially doubted he could make it as a TV writer. “The thing I was most trepidatious about is, I am so lazy,” he says. Surely, he figured, a guy whose process involved frequent video-game breaks wouldn’t last past his 13-week X-Files probation. “I thought, I don’t really need to clean out my fridge in Virginia. The ketchup will keep 13 weeks.” But to his surprise, he took to the hard work. “The two things about TV that are so great,” he discovered, are that “your writing actually gets produced”—unlike film scripts, which can take years to reach the screen, if they do at all—and “working with smart, talented people you can stand to be in a room with for 12 hours a day, five or six days a week.”
