‘Breaking Bad’ Season 6: It Was All A Lie — Vince Gilligan Interview Was Fake

If you thought the rumors of Vince Gilligan confirming the planned production for Breaking Bad Season 6 were too good to be true, you were right.

It’s easy to see how a rumor like this could get started. It’s seems like every month we hear about another surprise reprise of a show we once thought was gone for good. Netflix gave us more Arrested Development. The Mindy Project was revived by Hulu. Even Yahoo! TV got in on the action by giving life to Community after it had been dropped from NBC’s line-up.

Of course, none of those shows were as wildly popular as Breaking Bad. Vince Gilligan’s creation won countless awards and set cable ratings records. At the end of Breaking Bad‘s Season 5, the series finale was watched by more than ten million people. Being the critical and commercial success that Breaking Bad was, you may be skeptical of any rumors from the outset. Could there really be a Season 6?

Like many people, the first thing you might do is Google it. When you search for “breaking bad season 6,” you’ll see that the supposed Season 6 confirmation by Vince Gilligan is being covered by Snopes (you have to click the search result hyperlink before you realize they are reporting it as false). It also looks as if NBC News broke the story, but the domain is actually nbc.com.co, as opposed to nbc.com.

Strangely enough, there’s even a result from Amazon that appears to be selling episodes of Breaking Bad, Season 6. When you click the link to try to watch Season 6, it takes you to a page that confusingly lists all of the Season 5 episodes of Breaking Bad as Season 6. When you search Amazon for “breaking bad season 6,” the first two products that come up are the digital and physical copies of Breaking Bad, Season 5, listed simply as Breaking Bad: The Final Season. Apparently, both Google and Amazon are confused.

If you actually follow the link to the fake NBC site, it isn’t hard to recognize that the news being reported is as real as The Onion. Barack Obama running for a third term? Bill Murray saving a child’s life and preventing a bank robbery? Those stories, also reported by nbc.com.co, are just as true as the filming of a sixth season of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. As Recode noted, this is the same site that got the internet riled up with a story about Yelp suing South Park.

To their credit, the fake news site made the fake interview look legitimate.

“Walter White is not dead, and neither is Breaking Bad… We’ve kept it under wraps for months, now the cat’s out of the bag. Season 6 is coming, and it’s going to be epic and true to the fans that have followed the show so incessantly.

“This isn’t a cash-grab or a sophomoric attempt to bastardize what was such a beautiful ending to season 5. I’ve invested so much of myself in these characters that I’d always had an inkling I’d return to it… Bryan [Cranston] called me up last year and said he had this incredibly lucid dream in which Walt wakes up in a hospital bed surrounded by the DEA.”

But alas, Vince Gilligan was not interviewed by NBC News, and there are no current plans for Breaking Bad, Season 6. Until further notice, fans will have to be content with Season 1-Season 5 of Breaking Bad. But you shouldn’t feel bad if you were fooled. A lot of people thought the rumors were true. Even early the next morning, some fans were Tweeting about it:

https://twitter.com/Nouraa101/status/659639527812653056

And even an NBC television employee was duped:

If all of these rumors are making you want to watch Breaking Bad, you can stream the entire series — which ends with Season 5 — on Netflix. You can also watch Breaking Bad through Amazon Prime, even if they aren’t clear on how many seasons were actually produced.

[Image credit Kevin Winter / Getty Images]