[Continuing with Breaking Bad week’s character profiles, now it’s Skyler’s turn. Per usual, this won’t make much sense if you haven’t watched the show.]
“Why do people hate Breaking Bad’s Skyler so much?”
This seems to be the million dollar question that countless traditional media articles can’t seem to figure out. It’s become so baffling that Anna Gunn (the actress who plays Skyler, wonderfully I might add) recently wrote a New York Times editorial pondering that question, and thought it might have something to do with misogyny directed at a “strong woman” like Skyler.
But I have to take issue with this description of Skyler since—-if you’ve actually watched the show—-Skyler doesn’t seem so much strong as near-tortured by confusion. She can’t fully turn on her husband, but she won’t embrace him either. She’s lived the entire series in an anxiety-filled gray area.
In the first couple seasons, she was suspicious about her husband’s actions and ultimately dealt with that frustration by…helping her white collar crook boss Ted cover up embezzlement and tax fraud, then indulging in flirtations with him? Huh? Then once she found out her husband was a crystal meth cook, she began the weird dynamic of simultaneously hating him/loving him.
We don’t truly know how Skyler feels from one moment to the next: not when she almost divorces him, not when she wants to launder his money for him, not when has a nervous breakdown and wants her kids far away from him, not when she’s unwilling to help turn him into the police, and not when she nearly stabs him to death when it’s finally time to skip town. All of this confusion, anxiety, and emotional turmoil may be realistic, but that is far from a “strong” woman in any sense of the word.
It also doesn’t help that Skyler’s life doesn’t seem to have a whole lot in it besides reacting to Walter or bull shitting with her sister Marie. She has no female friends besides Marie. She hasn’t worked in years when the show starts. She only gets a job from a crooked boss who has a crush on her (and who she eventually sleeps with), and later from her own husband who needs a way to launder his drug money. Does Skyler enjoy Star Trek reruns or knitting? Is she fired up about origami or yoga? Is she obsessed with the Arizona Cardinals or a vegan-based diet? We have no idea, because the character has never seemed to care about much of anything other than reacting to Walt, drinking wine with Marie, or indulging in the occasional anxiety-prone cigarette.
Is that anyone’s idea of a strong woman?
BONUS
Oh, and as for the question “Why do people hate Skyler so much?” Well it’s not really the focus of the article, but I’ll answer it for free…
It’s because Walter is our antagonist, and we signed on for his journey, not Skyler’s. A lot of the early scenes with a pregnant Skyler and Walt’s family are good character-building but they’re not the real juice of the show for a huge part of the show’s fans. I’ve heard a lot of people say they fast-forward through those scenes when re-watching the early seasons. A good chunk of BB’s core audience is just wanting to watch a badass crime drama with razor-wire suspense, and a lot of Walt’s domestic life in the early seasons really undercuts that tension.
Anna Gunn the actress seems to get that people won’t like anyone that challenges Walt since he’s the main character, and Skyler isn’t (she says as much in the article), and yet she really doesn’t get it because she doesn’t fully seem to accept that answer. In her mind, people hate Skyler because she’s a strong woman, and yet I know five women who watch Breaking Bad and none of them like Skyler since she has been asked to live in a wishy-washy, inconsistent place. They don’t like her because they don’t know if she is strong or weak, and she is by far the least consistent character in Breaking Bad’s core cast.
I also think she doesn’t seem to get how the internet works, because that seems to be what she’s basing most of her negative experiences off of. The internet fans hate everyone and everything. For every person who thinks Hank is a hero (and I don’t, more on that later today), there is one that doesn’t. For every person who loves Jesse, there’s one that doesn’t. And even Walter has fans pretty polarized. Skyler isn’t exempt from that.