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Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan never thought he would be able to sell his idea to a studio, but years later he now believes there's never been a better time to work in television.
Gilligan is currently in Australia to speak at Series Mania, an international television festival dubbed the Cannes of TV which includes four days of talks and screenings at ACMI in Melbourne.
Ahead of his address he told News Breakfast we were living through what many refer to as "the golden age of TV".
"It is the best time, certainly in my lifetime, to be working in television," he said.
"It seems to me that the folks all around the world are realising that and there's more television production than there has ever been before."
Gilligan won critical acclaim and a swag of Emmy Awards for his gritty story about middle-aged dad Walter White, who finds out he has cancer and "breaks bad" to become a drug kingpin.
He admitted he thought it would be a tough pitch to the TV executives — "I was a realist" — and revealed he copped criticism from some unlikely places about just how sinister Walter White turned.
"My own mother of all people gives me grief whenever I bring that up," he said.
"She always says to me, 'Why are you so tough on Walt? I wanted him to get away at the end'.
"And I'm like, 'Well mum, he ruined it, he destroyed his family. He didn't have to do all of the things that he did'."
Gilligan sang the praises of Bryan Cranston, who plays White, saying he had the widest range of any actor he'd seen, and how that helped the character arc over the series.
"I'm biased, but pound for pound, best actor in the world," he said.
"The structure of television traditionally was very much about stasis, about a self-imposed sort of stasis in which characters don't really change. They don't evolve or devolve.
"And I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if from the get-go we created a character who was, by his very design, supposed to change. Supposed to turn from one person into, essentially, another."
As the show entered its final season Gilligan said he felt an enormous amount of self-imposed pressure to get the ending right.
More than 10.3 million people watched the final episode live in the US alone.
"I was so worried as we were putting down the final scenes that people would hate them. I lost so much sleep I can't even tell you," he said.
Preying on his mind was the reaction shows like The Sopranos received for divisive endings.
"I was thinking about The Sopranos — which actually I like the ending of — but it was polarising," he said.
"Selfishly I didn't want to be polarising, I wanted everyone to love it."
"And I thought about all these other shows I've watched and loved, not to name any names, but sometimes an ending would come along and you'd think, that was it?"
After Breaking Bad ended in 2013, Gilligan turned to a spinoff prequel show, Better Call Saul, which follows the exploits of a morally dubious lawyer.
He said Saul Goodman wasn't necessarily his favourite character from Breaking Bad, but "he was in a sense the most fun to write for".
"Putting words into Saul Goodman's mouth is always a pleasure," Gilligan said.
Gilligan is scheduled to speak at Screen Mania on Sunday.
Topics: arts-and-entertainment, television, australia