Identifying systemic creativity in Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad

This article considers Vince Gilligan’s highly innovative Breaking Bad (2008–13) as the outcome of a collaborative creative process shaped by the interaction between Gilligan, as the principal creative agent, with the evolving domain and field of American television. The innovativeness of Gilligan’s series is conceptualized here by means of applying Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s systems view of creativity, whereby Gilligan’s access to and impact on the domain of TV production is examined: he is seen as operating within the simultaneously constraining and enabling factors of the structures inherent to American television, its modes of production and viewership. This article elucidates how the innovativeness of Breaking Bad was the outcome of Gilligan’s adherence to and departure from particular traditions of form, format and structure inherent to the production of American TV drama – in conjunction with the radical transformations that the domain and field of American television were undergoing at the time.