Color-Coding Character: What Writers Can Learn from Breaking Bad
Take a cursory glance at modern fiction, and you’ll find it rife with half-formed ideas and dead metaphors. Contemporary writers mimic screenplays, and screenwriters mimic each other, resulting in an assembly line purpose-built to churn out samey corporate product. But once in a while, a meaningful signal breaks through the static. One of those rare exceptions is Breaking Bad—a work that didn more than tell a story.
It painted one.
Screencap: Sony Pictures Television
Breaking Bad distinguishes itself from most modern storytelling in many respects, not least of which being its deliberate use of color. These days, in the rare instances when writers and directors treat color as anything more than an afterthought, it’s used as blunt, on-the-nose symbolism.
But in Breaking Bad, color didn’t just provide window dressing; it helped convey the story.
Series creattor Vince Gilligan understood that meaning doesn’t just come from abstract plot mechanics or monologues. It comes from concrete details you can see. Every major character in the show had a dedicated color palette—and those colors were chosen intentionally.
Screencap: Sony Pictures Television
Let’s start with the obvious. Yellow meant meth, with the attendant corruption and fear. Jesse Pinkman, Walt’s wayward disciple, wears yellow. He’s not an angel—after all, he cooks poison for profit—but he's terrified of becoming like his mentor. His yellow doesn’t signify gold; it’s indicative of a sick, though not incurable, soul.
Contrast Jesse’s yellow with Skyler’s blue, which stands for purity, loyalty, and escape. She starts out as Walt’s anchor, grounding him in domestic stability But her husband isn’t content to live under her sky blue umbrella. So, he turns green.
Your mind may associate green with money. And you’re right, but Breaking Bad’s color coding is more complex than that. For instance, green is also the color of envy. Gilligan didn’t put Walt in green because it looked good on Bryan Cranston. He put him in green because Walter’s descent into villainy wasn’t driven by cancer or cartel threats—not at first. It was driven by wounded pride and a desperate resentment over what might have been.
Consider that green is the traditional color of the serpent in Eden, and you see where the show is going.
Screencap: Sony Pictures Television
Purple, the emblem of royalty and control, belonged to Marie. It symbolized the neurotic illusion of order in a world that refuses to stay clean.
Orange, on the other hand, marked Hank: halfway between yellow and red; action and violence. It identified him as a man of the world, sometimes stumbling, but incorruptible.
Of the whole color wheel, Breaking Bad played no color straigther than red. Of course, it meant blood and the associated sins. The Devil wears red, and eventually, so did Walt.
For the whole insightful treatment of Breaking Bad’s use of color, watch this video by ScreenCrush:
Writers who want to craft stories with lasting power should take notes. Don’t solely rely on exposition to explain your characters. Let their colors handle some of the work. Give your protagonist a color that defines his interior state, and change it as his outlook and motivations change. Remember: Walt starts in harmless, passive beige. Heisenberg dresses in black.
Now you can see how Breaking Bad’s use of color went beyond mere visual flair. The show leveraged color a a potent tool for archetypal storytelling. As I’ve hinted throughout this post, that approach is Catholic, whether the creators intended it or not. You can see the Divine Comedy play out in the costuming. You can even chart Walt’s fall like an inverse liturgical calendar that runs from white, to green, to blood red, and finally to black.
You needn’t be a TV or film writer to take advantage of color in your writing. In prose, make strategic use of color to deepen your descriptions. What shade dominates the room? What color is the socialite’s dress? How does first light tint the sky? Every pigment can carry weight and convey meaning. In particular, color is a powerful yet subtle way to reveal characters’ feelings without breaking immersion by telling the reader outright.
Note that Walter White became Heisenberg much as Lucifer became Satan: through a moral choice that turned purest white to deepest black. And Gilligan showed us that profound transformation without needing to spell it out. Instead, he just changed the man’s shirt.
Word to the wise.
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