**David Milch: **When Adam and Eve are in the garden, she says, "What are you gonna call that?" And he says, "A hippopotamus." And she says, "Why?" "Because it looks like a hippopotamus." We’ve integrated our expectations about form, so you think in the shape of twelve. You couldn’t say why or how.

**Matthew Weiner: **You cannot exaggerate the value of experience in storytelling and your gut feeling of what is a good story.

**GQ: Vince, you have sixteen episodes to go in Breaking Bad’s final season. Do you know your ending? **

**Vince Gilligan: **We have a rough idea. I’m very fortunate, because most TV producers don’t have the luxury of knowing when their show is going to end. But in some sense, some small part of you wishes you had the choice denied you. If, at the end of season four, I had been told that forces beyond my control were ending my show, I would feel pretty good about the ending we had, and I’d be able to say, "Whoops. Not my call. We gave you the best we could, and hope you enjoyed what you saw." Now there’s an element of "It’s really mine to fuck up."

**GQ: But you always had a certain arc in mind, right? You’ve said the project was always to see if you could convincingly turn a character "from Mr. Chips to Scarface." **

**Vince Gilligan: **In very general broad terms, we had a sense of Walter’s fate. But God is in the details. (I love that there’s two expressions: "God is in the details" and "The devil’s in the details.") Anyway, when you do a show about a man who’s been diagnosed with cancer in the first episode, a very likely possible ending presents itself pretty readily. But the details of that ending are really where the art’s at, if there’s art to be found.

GQ: David, you didn’t get a chance to end Deadwood on your own terms. Or John from Cincinnati, for that matter. [Read David Milch’s thoughts on the premature cancellation of Luck.] __

**David Milch: **You try to live your creative life in the way you would try to live your real life. Which is, if it turned out to be your last day, you wouldn’t be ashamed of the way you finished up. In the case of Deadwood, I had enough time to mourn but not enough time to really shape the material towards a conclusion. But if you go back and look at the concluding episode, there is a provisional sense of an ending there. Some series end halfway through and just don’t know it. So it’s not a question that I allow myself to linger over.

**GQ: Do any of you have a Great Lost Series that you wish had gotten made or had more of a chance? **

**Matthew Weiner: **I loved Andy Richter Controls the Universe. When I got there as a writer, it was D.O.A. They were like, "They’re letting us make a few more, and they’re giving us a chance." Really? They put us on Sunday night against The Sopranos in December. I don’t think they’re interested in us succeeding.

**David Milch: **It was a sacrificial lamb.

**Matthew Weiner: **Yeah, exactly. Why not just run a Magic Bullet commercial?

**Vince Gilligan: **I had this show called The Lone Gunmen. It was an X-Files spin-off, and it only lasted thirteen episodes. I remember the writing room on King of the Hill put in a joke where one of the characters is wearing a T-shirt saying "Bring Back The Lone Gunmen." And you know the kind of lead time animation has. They animated it before the show had even aired!