Anna Gunn’s Defense of Skyler White

Anna Gunn, the actress who plays Skyler White on Breaking Bad, wrote a New York Times op-ed piece Friday about the hate her character has inspired (see: “Skyler White meme”) among the show’s very passionate viewers:

Because Walter is the show’s protagonist, there is a natural tendency to empathize with and root for him, despite his moral failings. (That viewers can identify with this antihero is also a testament to how deftly his character is written and acted.) As the one character who consistently opposes Walter and calls him on his lies, Skyler is, in a sense, his antagonist. So from the beginning, I was aware that she might not be the show’s most popular character.

But I was unprepared for the vitriolic response she inspired.

Maureen Ryan responds with patient reason over at Huffington Post. “Message-board haters, for all their energetic wrath,” she points out, “have far less power than Hollywood executives and storytellers who don’t ask themselves tough questions about what kinds of characters they’re putting on our screens and why”:

Skyler White and the attitudes toward her didn’t arise out of a void. Yes, part of the reaction to her is straight-up sexist bullshit. But is television feeding and nurturing those kinds of repellent attitudes, or helping stamp them out? I’d love to say that the latter is true, but commercial American television still has so far to go on so many fronts.

The discussion reminds me of Connie Britton’s memorable NYT Magazine profile this past winter, in which the woman who made Tami Taylor a household name, y’all, talks about resisting the predictable storylines for her characters on both Friday Night Lights and Nashville. Being a pain, Britton’s experience suggests, is one way around it:

In the first episode, she played a stay-at-home mom pining for a bigger house; by the third season, she was the school principal — her husband’s boss. Britton said she was “rabid” about holding the producers to their promise that her character would do more than just cheer on her husband from the bleachers. “Connie doesn’t lie dormant very well,” Reiner says. “You have to give her something to do. She was inspiring, and sometimes she could be a pain.”