Peter Gould’s television work is interested in how people learn to excuse themselves. We rate its attention to character, though Breaking Bad also supplies a useful warning: cleverness can get between us and the people.
Fi1m perspective
Walter White’s excuses are worth listening to in Breaking Bad (2008), because the programme keeps testing them. That is the strongest reason we rate Peter Gould’s television work: the attention paid to how people explain themselves when they do wrong. We found the series frightening because of that close scrutiny, with Bryan Cranston making Walter funny as well as troubling. The humour gives us a reason to stay with someone whose reasoning needs watching. Gould contributed as both writer and director, though the achievement plainly belongs to more than one person.
His early feature credits run from a screenplay for Double Dragon (1994) to writing and directing Meeting Daddy (2000). The significant turn was towards continuing television drama, with room to follow a character’s changes across episodes. He joined Breaking Bad as story editor in 2008 and began directing episodes in its fourth series. His directing therefore grew out of an established involvement with the programme’s writing. That matters more to our view of him than any attempt to extract a separate visual signature from a shared production.
With Vince Gilligan, Gould co-created Better Call Saul (2015), becoming sole showrunner after Gilligan stepped back. Jimmy McGill’s development into Saul Goodman makes the interest in character origins explicit, while legal drama, crime and dark comedy provide different ways of approaching him. The attraction is the chance to examine how that change happens, rather than treating the earlier life as information to be supplied. Here we can speak more firmly of Gould’s responsibility for the whole programme, not just individual episodes. His writing, directing and oversight are all part of what we are judging.
There is a caution in our enthusiasm for Breaking Bad: its cleverness can become a nuisance. We want the scrutiny of Walter’s excuses, and we are less interested when the ingenuity starts demanding attention for itself. Even with that reservation, we recommend the series well beyond the usual crime-drama audience. Start there for Gould, and watch for the writing as closely as the turns of the plot.
Biography
Peter Gould is an American television writer, director and producer. Born in New York City, he graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a BA in English in 1982 and from the University of Southern California with an MFA in 1990.
He joined the writing staff of Breaking Bad (2008) in its first season as a story editor and advanced through roles including producer and supervising producer, writing and directing several episodes. After the series ended, Gould co-created and co-showran its spinoff Better Call Saul (2015) with Vince Gilligan, later becoming sole showrunner. He has received multiple Writers Guild of America and Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his work on both series.
