Once primarily a repository for old movies, AMC launched Mad Men in 2007 and Breaking Bad in 2008, positioning itself as a major "peak TV" player alongside the likes of TNT, HBO, and FX. Oddly enough, all those networks turned down Breaking Bad. "The two executives who I pitched it to were on the edge of their seat, they were loving it," creator Vince Gilligan told the Television Academy Foundation about his TNT experience. At the end of his breathless description of the first episode, the suits "[looked] at each other, and they [said], 'Oh, God, I wish we could buy this.'" Evidently, they were scared off by the fact that Walt cooks meth, so they "half-heartedly" asked Gilligan if he could make him "a counterfeiter instead. (No dice.)
While Gilligan says the HBO executive he met with "could not have been less interested," FX actually bought the series, only to reverse course. "We had three dramas with male antiheroes," FX president John Landgraf told KCRW's The Business, referring to mid-2000s hits The Shield, Rescue Me, and Nip/Tuck. "The question was, are we defining FX as the male antihero network, and is that a big enough tent?" According to E! Online, FX decided to branch out and greenlit the Courtney Cox drama Dirt, instead. After all these rejections, things were looking bad for the show. "It was dead as a hammer," Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan told The Hollywood Reporter. As a last resort, his agent sent it to AMC, which was looking to expand its original programming slate. And the rest, as they say, is history.
