Gilligan's desert: barren of women

Spoiler alert, as we take a look at the women - or lack thereof - in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

It's a man's world. Well, it certainly is with Netflix's greatest hits so far.

Let's take a look at the IMDB summary pages for the cast of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul (respectively) and play 'Spot the Women':

Breaking Bad series cast

Better Call Saul series cast

Women make up 18.75% of these screenshots: out of 16 lead characters, only three are female.

Vince Gilligan, then, does not believe the genres of crime and drama, and subject matter including law and a meth-empire, are feminine topics.

But if you scrap that and look at the women that we do have, we would see only dependent figures. Junkies, girlfriends, wives.

Marie Schrader is the perfect example of this. She's dependent on her family - her husband Hank and her sister Skyler for companionship - and on her own addictions: shoplifting, therapy. As an independent character, she doesn't contribute much to the plot, aside from being Skyler's sister.

And look at Jesse's trail of girlfriends, either dependent on drugs or depended on by their children.

Skyler White, long-suffering wife of her self-absorbed, bitter husband, is the only female who really bites back. The power struggle between Walter and Skyler is something that really needs to be examined in greater detail, but ultimately breaks down to this: Skyler still loses.

Skyler is silenced by Walt, overpowered, beaten down. And in the end, she acts on instinct to save herself and her children. We learn that in a world where men like Walt rule, nobody wins.

Did Gilligan think twice about this in his more recent series?

Better Call Saul presents another idea of women. Opening with a line about "talking dirty", Kim Wexler is the beauty with a brain. Lawyer extraordinaire, Kim appears in every episode of the prequel, but I struggled to remember her name when asked. Her sexual/intellectual persuasive ability is something we're more used to seeing in a female character. But again she seems to have little affect on the overall plot of the series. And seems to be the only active female character in a desert of men.

So, where are all the women? Probably prepping for the launch of Orange Is The New Black, but hopefully they're all doing something sensible, law-abiding and staying well out of the way of these pricks.