Breaking Bad is widely regarded as one of the greatest television shows of all time. Coming in at fourth place on IMDB’s “Top Rated TV Shows” with an overall audience rating of 9.4 and with a Tomatometer (critic-based score) of 96%, the AMC classic continues to earn its positive reputation. I watched Breaking Bad for the first time last year, so my experience was noticeably absent of the media buzz and discourse that surrounded viewers during the show’s original run. It didn’t take me long to fall in love with the program—as many others had before me—but there was one topic of discussion that came as much of a surprise when I discovered it: the vitriolic hatred of Skyler White.
For some background, Breaking Bad tells the story of Walter White: a mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher who, upon receiving a devastating cancer diagnosis just months before the birth of his second child, decides to cook and sell crystallized methamphetamine in order to provide for his family. Skyler, Walter’s wife, often serves as the moral backbone of the show. During her pregnancy, she is constantly lied to regarding her husband’s whereabouts and activities. Once she finds out what is going on, she encourages Walt to remove himself from the drug trade. Though she eventually becomes an accessory and even an active participant in his crimes, Skyler is deeply affected by the role she plays, and the guilt changes her throughout the show.
Nevertheless, Skyler has also earned her place at the top of lists, much like the show that created her, but often with a far more negative connotation. Skyler is frequently mentioned as one of the most hated television characters of all time. In a show full of drug dealers, crime bosses, and cold-blooded murderers, I was shocked to see that Skyler was somehow considered the worst of them all. In an effort to understand people’s specific grievances with the character, I searched through a few discussion boards.
On a Reddit post titled, “I hate Skyler White,” one user commented, “She’s just so perfectly hateful. It’s like they spent years developing the most annoying character ever. She’s overbearing, weak, whiny, unfunny, and inconsistently stupid.” Another user on the same post commented, “Another possibility is that she just has a hittable face, which is also likely.” Aside from the use of critical language that is distinctly gendered in its implications, sarcastic jokes about violence are also commonplace.
On a Reddit post ironically titled, “We Don’t Hate Skyler White Because She Is Assertive, Opinionated Or A Feminist,” one account cited the fact that Skyler “was forever ‘up Walt’s ass.’” This commenter was referencing a moment in the first season when Skyler, lying in a hospital bed for an ultrasound, attempted to question her husband regarding the fact that he was smoking marijuana (this, of course, was a lie to cover up his much more sinister drug-related habit). She made several points as to why this was a questionable choice for Walt to make, including his lung cancer diagnosis and his DEA agent brother-in-law. Walt, frustrated and defensive, so eloquently asked his wife to “climb down out of [his] ass.” A scene that, at my own first glance, appeared to be a pregnant wife being gaslit by the lying husband she was only trying to look out for, has instead been used as one of the central reasons to despise this character.
Even more alarming still, one commenter on a Quora post titled, “On ‘Breaking Bad,’ why do people hate Skyler White so much?” argued, “That’s because a lot of us know a guy or two who got roped in by a mediocre woman (usually who got herself knocked up to trap him) and fell into a life of failure from which it was impossible (post children) to extricate himself.” On the same post, someone else made the simpler yet similarly troubling point, “Skyler can be incredibly ungrateful and nobody likes an ungrateful person.” Not only is Skyler—or womankind, in general—being blamed, under the guise of condescending and charged language, for any and all of the failures of her husband’s life, but she is criticized for being ungrateful. Ungrateful for what, exactly? Her husband’s inconsiderate and dangerous escapades into the Albuquerque drug market? Noted.
There were many more comments just like these, and an even greater number with language too shocking to mention here. It looked like everyone with a distaste for Skyler was trying desperately to explain why their hatred had nothing to do with her gender, while simultaneously justifying their love for the anti-hero Walter White, but most seemed to come up short. To many, Skyler was the obstacle in Walt’s way. She was the one thing holding him back from reaching his true potential as a kingpin. Even when she did serve as an accomplice, she was still loathed by viewers for her transgressions. Skyler opposes her husband’s lifestyle: she’s an unsupportive shrew. Skyler joins her husband’s crime operation: she’s morally bankrupt with little to no convictions. I guess she just can’t win.
In response to the intense hate for Skyler’s character, Breaking Bad showrunner and writer Vince Gilligan said, “People are griping about Skyler White being too much of a killjoy to her meth-cooking, murdering husband? She’s telling him not to be a murderer and a guy who cooks drugs for kids. How could you have a problem with that?” Gilligan expressed his utter shock at the reaction to Skyler White, and consistently defended her to fans.
Anna Gunn, the actress who played Skyler, also had much to say about the phenomenon. “It was very bizarre and confusing to us all. It was a combination of sexism, ideas about gender roles, and then honestly, it was the brilliance of the construct of the show. People did find a hero in Walt, but they wanted so much to connect with him so viscerally that to see the person who often was his antagonist—therefore the show’s antagonist in a way—they felt like she was in the way of him doing whatever he wanted to do, and that he should be allowed to do what he wanted to do.”
Indeed, the show’s writing prowess is worth noting. While I was never much a fan of Walt’s character, it’s impossible to deny how compelling he can be at times. To watch his gradual shift from chemistry teacher to ruthless crime lord is nothing short of extraordinary, and I’d be remiss not to mention the brilliance of the writing team for convincing viewers to root for him so wholeheartedly. Though this logic might explain some distaste for Skyler—as an inconvenience on the alleged protagonist’s journey—it does nothing to explain the horrifying vitriol that she has often been dealt.
In my opinion, these Reddit posters—their desperate insistence that none of these criticisms are sexist in nature—protest far too much. Unconscious biases play an essential role in how we see and understand the world around us, and I can’t help but feel that conceptions of gender roles or even the traditional nuclear family model have an impact on the reactions to this character.
I won’t question whether Skyler has her ups and downs. In the course of the show, she goes from loving Walt to hating him, cheating on him to conspiring with him. She tries so hard to do what is right and consistently comes up short, and those missteps take a massive toll on her. However, in a show so focused on moral ambiguity and the fine line between explanation and justification, it becomes a problem when Skyler’s actions are viewed through a distinctly harsher lens than those of her male counterparts, and especially when she is held hostage for the sins of her husband. Society often loves placing the entire responsibility for a relationship on the shoulders of women, and Skyler is no exception.
On coping with the intense hatred she received, a large portion directed at herself as opposed to the character she portrayed, Gunn said, “I finally realized that most people’s hatred of Skyler had little to do with me and a lot to do with their own perception of women and wives. Because Skyler didn’t conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female, she had become a kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward gender.”
Skyler White is strong, afraid, brave, corrupt, intelligent, beautiful, and intensely flawed. The unconscious biases that led to her scathing unpopularity can not be undone overnight, but taking a moment to question why we condemn certain characters while endlessly making excuses for others is undoubtedly a productive first step.