Ten Years Later, Albuquerque Is Still Breaking Bad’s Town

In 2012, Carrie Vender got a strange request from the production office of AMC’s hit show Breaking Bad, which was stationed in her home city of Albuquerque. Star Aaron Paul’s birthday was approaching, and they wanted to surprise him with something special. Vender, the owner of local favorite Rebel Donut, took an order for a box of doughnuts inspired by the show’s signature: meth with a blue tinge, called Blue Sky—decorating them with rock candy that bore a striking resemblance to the drugs Paul’s character, Jesse Pinkman, slings on the show.

Soon enough, someone who worked on the series posted a picture of Paul and the doughnuts on social media “We started getting calls immediately,” says Vender—and before long, the doughnuts took up permanent residence in Rebel’s display case. On the day the Breaking Bad finale aired, Vender estimates she sold 8,000 Blue Sky doughnuts.

Years later, on sleepy Albuquerque mornings, you can still find trays of the azure treats—and a portrait of Paul enjoying his birthday gift is still hanging right behind the coffee machine at Rebel. And though Breaking Bad took its final bow in 2013, tourists still come from across the nation to taste the doughnuts—and to take selfies in front of Paul’s portrait. “We joke that it’s the most photographed picture in Albuquerque,” she says. “It’s the doughnut that just won’t die.”

Albuquerque is a diverse metropolis of more than 550,000 people spread over 190 square miles—yet a full 10 years after the show’s premiere, Breaking Bad still has a hold on the city. In Old Town, you can still buy the rock candy “meth” made by the woman who supplied the crew for the first two seasons; curio stores still sell T-shirts with Walter White’s face on them alongside their ristras and kachina. “Bathing Bad” bath salts can still be found for sale, and for $75, you can take a tour of Breaking Bad filming locations in an R.V. designed to look like Walt and Jesse’s first lab. On Albuquerque’s Craigslist, you can occasionally find copies of the local newspaper published the day after the finale—which includes a fan-placed obituary for Heisenberg himself.

It’s an impressive feat of staying power—especially in a Peak TV era that tends to send viewers lurching wildly from buzzy show to buzzy show. But why, exactly, is Albuquerque still in thrall to Walter White?

Albuquerque wasn’t a factor in Vince Gilligan’s initial pitch for Breaking Bad; he originally envisioned setting the show in Riverside, California. But soon after buying the series, Sony approached him with a request: shoot in New Mexico, where a relatively new tax break meant a 25 percent rebate on all money spent in the state for film and television production.

Gilligan agreed. “New Mexico very quickly became the place we decided to shoot our show for strictly financial reasons. We wanted our limited production budget to go that much farther,” he told Slant Magazine in 2010. But almost immediately upon arriving there, he realized what the city had to offer—not just gorgeously desolate locations, but also locals willing to disrupt their lives and turn over their homes and businesses for the crew. “It felt like virgin territory for cinematography,” he said in 2013—a far cry from Southern California, where it can seem like every street corner has already been filmed. Soon, Gilligan started to see Albuquerque as a character in the show, and used it as an opportunity to turn his original script into a “post-modern Western”—a complex morality tale where establishing shots lingered on the landscape.

Albuquerque is just a 90-minute flight away from Los Angeles—but from the beginning, the majority of its crew were New Mexico residents, deeply integrated into the community. Local actors took roles both large and small: Albuquerque native Steven Michael Quezada played Agent Gomez, Hank Schrader’s D.E.A. partner, and has since parlayed his notoriety in the city into a seat on the County Board of Commissioners.

A Breaking Bad cast sighting soon became a badge of honor for young New Mexicans, and the feeling was mutual. Lead actors Paul and Bryan Cranston both bought homes in the state, and became fixtures at local bars and restaurants. At a 2013 fund-raiser for an Albuquerque community organization, Cranston spoke of his affection for the city: “Not only was Albuquerque an integral and essential part of our storytelling—it was a character in and of itself,” he said. “The people who make up the community, all of you and everyone else here, have been so wonderful and so giving.”

Before Breaking Bad came to town, the city’s previous claim to fame—if it had one—was about two dozen particularly rowdy episodes of COPS that aired from 1995 to 2000, when then-mayor Martin Chávez finally kicked the show out of the city. Before that, the city had Weird Al’s 11-minute epic, “Albuquerque,” wherein the artist tries (and fails) to spell the city’s name, and Bugs Bunny’s oft-mentioned wrong turn there.

But Breaking Bad filled that vacuum, capturing the city in a new way. Its depiction of Albuquerque’s drug problems was not exactly accurate—New Mexico had a more prominent problem with opiates than methamphetamine—but Gilligan’s show found the unique beauty in this sliver of the southwest, juxtaposing its strip malls and McMansions with the red rocks, arid expanses, and blue sky that stretches for miles. Many of the show’s domestic scenes are set in the Northeast Heights, a neighborhood where the median income is about that of the nation as a whole. It’s rare to see a show about middle-class people that is actually filmed in a middle-class neighborhood.

Albuquerque residents also appreciate the way the show captured sites that inspire confusion or awe—like the John B. Robert dam, a concrete structure that played a role in the show’s Emmy-winning episode “Ozymandias.” “I would pass by it every day when I took my daughter to school and started to see tourists standing there with their luggage and taking pictures,” Albuquerque-based photographer Cary Brooks remembered. The onlookers continued showing up even years after the finale aired—though he says that recently, he has seen fewer of them.

Breaking Bad shot frequently at local businesses as well, like a spacious branch of the local chain Twisters—which filled in for Los Pollos Hermanos, meth boss Gus Fring’s drug-front-cum-chicken-joint. That Twisters still has the Los Pollos Hermanos sign hanging inside the restaurant today. To mark the anniversary, two Albuquerque-based fans are paying to transform the restaurant back into Los Pollos Hermanos on Saturday, January 20—and offering to buy burritos for any cast member of prequel Better Call Saul who shows up to celebrate.

It’s difficult to tell empirically if Breaking Bad actually did attract more tourists to New Mexico. According to the data used by New Mexico True, the state tourism department, tourism definitely increased after 2011—though that was also a nationwide trend that correlates with of the end of a recession. Thanks to Route 66, New Mexico has always had a higher rate of pass-through tourism than most states, and all of the major Breaking Bad sites are located within the corridor where 74 percent of tourist attractions in New Mexico are located, anyway.

Still, there’s evidence that the nature of tourism has changed in New Mexico in the years since Breaking Bad. Since 2011, a higher proportion of visitors haven taken overnight trips to the state. Before 2011, when asked to name their primary purpose in New Mexico, a majority of visitors said “outdoor activity”; since then, more and more visitors have identified “cultural activity.” And the average age of tourists dropped in 2013, the year the Breaking Bad finale aired, before moving up again the next year—implying that Breaking Bad did bring a younger group to the state, at least while the mania was still fresh.

According to Ann Lerner, head of the City of Albuquerque Film Office, the primary impact that Breaking Bad had on the city was less about raw numbers than brand awareness. “Around the country, people can spell Albuquerque now,” she says.

Even so, the companies that run Breaking Bad tours in Albuquerque often sell out to this day. And Breaking Bad pilgrims still swarm some locations often enough to cause problems: in 2017, the owners of the house that served as the White residence on the show erected a six-foot-high fence around their home to discourage gawkers, especially those that try to replicate a beloved Season 3 moment in which Walt angrily tosses a pizza onto the roof. In 2015, Brooks, the photographer, decided to approach the family to ask if he could take some drone footage of their house, after tourist-spotting led to a fascination with the legacy of Breaking Bad. He chatted amiably with the husband for a while, who seemed confused about his project.

“A few minutes later, the wife drove up in her car,” Brooks remembers. “When she saw me, she yelled ‘CLOSE THE DOOR! GET AWAY FROM THE HOUSE!’ out of her car window.” He made an attempt to explain, but the wife wouldn’t have it. They got enough attention already.

Breaking Bad’s hold on Albuquerque is connected to the show’s critical acclaim—Cranston won four Emmys for his performance. But it also has a lot to do with Netflix. In fact, when Gilligan accepted the Emmy for best drama in 2013, he told reporters afterward that he credited streaming video for the survival of the show past its second season. The continued influx of tourists four years after the show’s finale likely has a lot to do with the show’s nonstop availability on the service.

Nancy Brennan, who lives in New Hampshire, credits Netflix with her decision to visit Albuquerque to see the sites of Breaking Bad. “During a cross-country road trip after we retired, my husband and I watched all five seasons of the show in about a month,” Brennan said. Though her daughter begged her to watch the show while it was airing, she was initially turned off by its subject matter; eventually, though, she was hooked after she began to binge it.

When Brennan got to Albuquerque in the spring of 2015, she found a listing online of all the locations used on the show, alongside stills from the relevant episodes. She and her husband visited each, posing like the characters in every photo they took.

After the trek around the city, the Brennans did what the cast and crew of Breaking Bad often did at the end of a day of filming: head to the Marble Brewery downtown. For a while, during the final season of the show, the brewery made limited-edition beers based on Walt’s personality. The Brennans read about them, and wanted to give them a try. When they sat down to order, they asked for the Walt beers—but the bartender was exasperated, like he had fielded that request a few too many times, Brennan says. “He told us, ‘The show is over. It’s been over for a long time.’”