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Anna Gunn’s character on ‘Breaking Bad’ is actually not strong enough

Anna Gunn, who plays Skyler White on "Breaking Bad," says the character "has become a flash point for many people's feelings about strong, nonsubmissive, ill-treated women."
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
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“Breaking Bad” star Anna Gunn broke the fourth wall to write an op-ed in Saturday’s New York Times about why she thinks so many people hate her character, Skyler White, with a sometimes vicious passion. Her answer: misogyny.

“My character … has become a flash point for many people’s feelings about strong, nonsubmissive, ill-treated women,” she writes.

There is no doubt that there is a great deal of truth in this assessment. But as a strong, nonsubmissive woman myself, it caught me off guard. That’s because I really don’t like the character of Skyler White, either. Hate is a strong word, but at times as I have watched her sit ashen-faced and angry across from Walt at the dinner table, I have wished that her character would just disappear.

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Needless to say, Gunn’s assertion sent me into a navel-gazing tailspin about my feelings. Am I secretly a woman who reviles strong women? Is my negative reaction to Skyler the result of social programming that I’m not even aware of? After sweating these questions for a day or so, I have decided that, no, that’s not the case.

I don’t like Skyler White because she’s no fun as a foil to Walt’s wickedness. Her hatred for Walt has become one-dimensional. I love the writing on “Breaking Bad,” which Gunn rightly points out “made Skyler multilayered and, in her own way, morally compromised.” But I would argue that that’s just not the case anymore.

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It’s not that fans resent her character’s strength. It’s that they resent the singular note of disdain that Gunn now strikes in her opposition to Walt.

WATCH: Video chat with ‘Breaking Bad’s’ Aaron Paul

People have fallen in love with “Breaking Bad” because it’s a fun show to watch, no matter how harrowing its deadly serious themes. And in fictional worlds, the best villains — a villain is essentially what Skyler has become as she has ascended to the level of being Walt’s arch-nemesis — are good fun. No matter how bad they are, they are just so rich to watch.

Skyler, by contrast, is singularly bitter in a way that has become boring, to me at least. And that very well might be in the writing. I’d love to see her given a really juicy way to oppose Walt that doesn’t involve taking a lover or drinking too much wine while clouded in an icy veil of condescension at the dinner table. I want her to be stronger than that.

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