In the simmering down of the collective mania surrounding Breaking Bad’s series finale, there has been a lot of talk about the audience’s response to Skyler (Anna Gunn), Walter White’s longsuffering wife. More specifically, about the audience’s overwhelming hatred for her, which approached the nonsensical in the wide wonderful world of internet commentary (which is, as we know, just so very accommodating to female characters of all stripes). In fact, it got so intense that Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator, had to comment:

“People are griping about Skyler White being too much of a killjoy to her meth-cooking, murdering husband? She’s telling him not to be a murderer and a guy who cooks drugs for kids. How could you have a problem with that?”

Ok, so cool-points to Gilligan for at least standing up for Skyler. And I agree that in the later seasons there’s increasingly little reason to hate Walt’s wife, who walks her own moral tightrope as she tries to balance her husband’s horrific deeds with her family’s safety and well-being.

But that’s only true once Skyler learns what Walt does.

In the earlier seasons, Skyler is blissfully (ok, contentedly) oblivious to Walt’s meth-cooking ways and resembles, more than anyone else, her sister Marie. Let’s just admit this: in the earlier seasons, Skyler is painful to watch, because she’s supposed to be! She serves a purpose – she stands in for the normalcy of their lives: the petty, suburban, emphatically middle-class normalcy that has defined Walt for so long. She is supposed to be suffocating, irritating, superficial and, frankly, annoying as all hell. Marie, by the way, always remains this way.

So here’s my problem. Gilligan seems a bit disingenuous when he’s claiming that people should love Skyler, when it’s so patently clear that for roughly half of the show’s run, we very clearly were meant to despise her. I think his inferred deflection to the last seasons glosses over a reality he’d rather not admit: that he uses Skyler in the early days as a coded reference to middle-class modernity. She is less of a person than a trope – the henpecking wife getting in the way of her husband’s fun. Substitute meth for cars and you’d basically have Home Improvement.

All of this serves to underline the much more pertinent question, which is: why must the main character of these “edgy” zeitgeist-inducing shows be male? Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White are all compelling, eminently watchable characters, but for all of the fantastic work done by Edie Falco, January Jones and Anna Gunn, they do not get a chance to control the narrative the way their male counterparts do. And they all start out as little more than scenery meant to inform us about the male protagonist’s immediate environment. Perhaps the question isn’t why people hate Skyler White, but rather, where is Skyler White’s show?