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CBS Purchases Show from ‘Breaking Bad’ Creator He Wrote 10 Years Ago

CBS Purchases Show from ‘Breaking Bad’ Creator He Wrote 10 Years Ago

Breaking Bad and its creator Vince Gilligan are such big deals in Hollywood right now that CBS recently won a bidding war for a new show from Gilligan—one that he wrote more than 10 years ago. The New York Times describes Battle Creek as a cop drama “about two detectives in Battle Creek, Mich. One is a trusting naïf, the other a cynic who relies on guile and deception.” Sure, that may sound sort of conventional, but as Sony President of Programming Zack Van Amburg told the Times, “Vince is the hottest name in the business. If I went somewhere with the phone book with Vince’s name on it, I could sell it.”

Things weren’t always so easy for the writer and filmmaker. In fact, things were so desperate after his time working on The X-Files, that the idea for Breaking Bad came to him while joking with a fellow TV writer about his own financial stress. “Both of us had been unemployed for a while, and we were wondering what to do next. Either he or I joked about putting a crystal meth lab in the back of an RV and driving around the country cooking meth and making money. As we were talking, the idea for this character just kind of popped into my head. It was that proverbial lightning strike.” It looks like things ended up working out OK for Gilligan. Battle Creek will air on CBS starting next fall …

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