Photo cred: CNN.com

I am pretty late to the party, but after having finally finished the famed Breaking Bad series I feel I can add my two cents to what remain ongoing discussions. As expected the series ran away with the awards at the Emmy’s, taking home the prize for Outstanding Drama Series, Outstanding Lead Actor, and Outstanding Supporting Actor and Actress. This last one is notable and in my opinion, well deserved by actress Anna Gunn who portrays what has become a very divisive character in Skyler White. The level of hate Skyler has inspired has reached frothing proportions, from her labeling as a flat out “bitch,” to message boards devoted to hate for the character, and most alarming of all, to vitriol and death threats aimed at Gunn herself. It got so bad that Gunn wrote an op-ed for the New York Times describing her experience playing such a hated character, which you can find here. I was aware of some sort of dislike for the character before even starting the show, but I wasn’t sure what it was about. After having finished the show, I still don’t get the hate. Read on if you have watched the show, because major spoilers ensue.

It seems that no matter how Skyler would have been portrayed, her character would be met with hate. The thing about the hate is that hardly anyone can agree on why they hate her. Some complain that she is too pushy, bossy and demanding, and that she doesn’t allow Walter to live his own life. Others hate her because they feel she is weak and “plays the victim” rather than taking more decisive action against Walt. And of course, there are those who hate her because she simply sucks the fun out of Walt’s ventures. So how exactly is Skyler supposed to be depicted so as not to rouse the ire of swaths of fans? If as a very recognizably “strong” woman, she would be considered too strong to the point of being intervening, emasculating and a “bitch”. If as a woman who falls into despondency after having chosen to stick with her husband, she is “weak,” or, when she tries to rectify her decisions, a manipulative “bitch” merely playing the victim card. And as a woman who consistently opposes her husband’s unethical actions, she is hypocritical because of her own faults, and once again, the “bitch.” The strange thing with all these complaints is that they leave no room for well-rounded, interesting and multifaceted characterizations. They deny Skyler her own faults and mistakes—essentially, her own personhood. Let’s not forget that the main character of the show is rife with faults and frequently commits terrible actions, and yet no one seems to be analyzing them so minutely as justifications for why he is, reductively, a “bitch” (let’s pretend for a second it’s not a gendered term). These complaints suggest the fact that many of us are not used to seeing woman portrayed as anything other than flat, one-dimensional characters—where they’re either the saint or the whore for example, the mother or the femme fatale, the strong or the weak-willed woman. But how boring are archetypes and tropes? The amazing thing about Skyler, and the show in general, is that she and it eschew one-dimensionality more often than not. Most characters have sympathetic sides to them — from Walt to Jesse to Saul, heck, even to Gus. And at the same time, hardly any of the characters are simply good. We see the dark side to pretty much everybody.

So why are we judging Skyler so much more harshly than anyone else? Anna Gunn hit the nail on the head when she stated in her op-ed:

But 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.

These attitudes are often contradictory and leave little space in which female characters can maneuver. Once a depiction attempts to break through this limited space, we get interesting and dynamic female characters—and anger, apparently.

Consider that Skyler White is actually very similar to Walter in many ways. Their actions and motives as characters are comparable throughout the show and echo each other in ways that can’t be anything but intentional. Her affair with Beneke, which made some viewers very angry, was based on some of the same needs Walter White needed met with through his meth-cooking life of crime. At the end of the show we get the very poignant statement that Walter didn’t in fact do everything for his family — a lot of it was done for himself, so that he could truly feel “alive.” And what was Skyler’s affair but a very rare measure taken solely for herself, so that in what was rapidly becoming an unhappy and ruined marriage, she too could feel “alive”? Walter was not the only one burdened with the stresses of maintaining the family, and having literally carried the weight of the family in many ways, Skyler too felt the need for an escape, for some purely selfish act. However, this act is often censured and judged more harshly if it’s adultery rather than murder and drug dealing.

Like Walter, Skyler also has her own bout of lawlessness and legal transgressions through the “cooking” of Beneke’s account books. Here we see an obvious and literal parallel to Walter’s own “cooking” of the meth, wherein husband and wife both showcase their dubious talents of illicit fabrications. Many like to point to this too when labeling Skyler a hypocrite for admonishing Walter for his actions. But the parallel between the two is not meant to stretched to such illogical conclusions — again, surely we aren’t equating murder to tax fraud? Though for me, Skyler’s transgressions are meant more to deepen and complicate her character, in the same way Walter’s are. Surely the central female character of the show wouldn’t be denied human qualities of imperfection and fallibility.

Additionally, Skyler’s main motive in life is Walt’s ostensible one — the protection of the family. Pretty much all of Skyler’s actions, except perhaps the affair and initial “cooking” of the books, is done with the aim of preserving the family. Like Walt, the desperate need to maintain a happy, normal and safe family life becomes the reasoning behind her mistakes — refusing to turn Walt in so that her children won’t lose their father, getting involved in laundering the money, and ultimately threatening the lives of others to protect her own. If we can understand and commiserate with Walt’s fierce devotion to family, despite its unsettling “us vs them” turn, we should likewise be able to do the same with Skyler, who is at least equal to Walt in this respect.

However, where Skyler and Walter diverge is in Skyler’s refusal to accept the decisions they both have made. Skyler’s “pushiness” and unwillingness to fully condone Walter’s choices are so grating to some viewers because it forces them perhaps to confront their own condonation of Walter. It can be a dissonant experience to feel so much investment and esteem for a character who you are aware you probably shouldn’t be rooting for. Explosions and the killing of admittedly often despicable people on TV can be pretty absorbing and exciting, intoxicating even in the way Walter begins to feel about his lifestyle. But Skyler becomes the constant voice of protest and the one that reminds us that what Walter is doing is troubling – horrifying, at times. Even in her moody silences or seemingly resigned discontent, she is bringing reality to what otherwise would be a farcical, Hollywood fantasy world where we can forget about the dead bodies, the proverbial backstabbing, and the vengeful violence within a scene. She brings the viewer more dissonance, and an uncomfortable one at that — after a thrilling day at the lab and narrowly escaping death through ingenuity, Walter and the viewer must come home to face Skyler and the jarring reality that Walter’s actions are often unjustifiably villainous. Not simply “denying” the viewer their enjoyment of Walt and his adventures, Skyler challenges the viewer to appraise Walt’s actions, and refuses throughout to lose touch with the messy, less than glamorous consequences of lawlessness.

The show is far too brilliant, layered and nuanced to wholesale dismiss characters with absolutes — or even exalt them. While we may admire Walter White, we must necessarily admit his darker side that is meant to leave us conflicted. Not to do so would be missing out on what the show does so well. Likewise, viewing Skyler’s character so shallowly as merely an unlikeable character when she was very intentionally written as a rich, intriguing and similarly conflicting, morally compromised character seems also to be missing out on what’s so great about this show.