You can’t call on ‘Saul’ anymore, but we wish him well -- whatever name he is using
How in the world did TV get lucky enough to produce a “Better Call Saul”? Here was a show, which ended its six-season run on AMC last August, designed as both prequel and sequel to one of the network’s golden geese, “Breaking Bad,” whose star, Bob Odenkirk, had never led a dramatic series before and who was reviving a secondary character called Saul Goodman who’d originated elsewhere. It shouldn’t have happened.
So why did it? Because “Breaking”/”Saul” creator Vince Gilligan was terrified of writer’s block.
“I just wanted to keep working,” Gilligan says in a conversation before the writers’ strike. “After the success of ‘Breaking Bad,’ I knew if I didn’t have another show quick, I would be paralyzed by success. I would have writer’s block like the world has never witnessed, and I’d be done. Selfishly, I needed something to roll into — so we jumped off the cliff without looking down.”
As “Better Call Saul” wraps up, the actor looks at his character’s long journey, but to what he won’t say.
“Saul” might have rested on “Breaking’s” laurels. That two-time winner of the drama series Emmy had raised the bar on novelistic television and done so on a non-premium cable network, ending in 2013. It had stuck the landing with a satisfying, devastating final episode. The character of Saul Goodman, meanwhile, was a scam artist-lawyer who represented “Breaking’s” main characters. He was very present — Saul appeared in 43 of the 62 episodes — but something about the way Odenkirk embodied him as a wretched loss of a man whom you nonetheless rooted for suggested that maybe he could hold his own in a new show.
“I struggled with the character’s limitations,” admits Odenkirk. “It was hard at times to play someone who was so aware, and yet unaware, of their own mistakes and shortcomings. But everything about who he was at the end of [‘Better Call Saul’] was within him from the beginning.”
Gilligan and longtime collaborator Peter Gould (who served as an executive producer on “Breaking” and became “Saul’s” showrunner in Season 2) had the advantage of a deep mid-life story for Saul and a vast empty field in which to sketch both his history and post-”Breaking” future, weaving the latter two into a show that may have exceeded its origins, despite having yet to win an Emmy.
“Half the people I run into — maybe more than half — are bigger fans of ‘Saul’ than ‘Breaking Bad,’” notes Gilligan. “I thought I’d hate hearing that, but it turns out, I don’t. The life lesson is to not overthink things.”
The freedom of that blank space to create meant Gould and Gilligan could shape their characters to the chemistry and personality of the actors they hired. Kim Wexler was not initially written as pivotal, but Rhea Seehorn’s portrayal made her so, all the way up to the final episode.
“Rhea could bring a remarkable intelligence [to the role] while using very little dialogue,” Gould says in an April conversation. “The more we watched her, the more we realized there was a lot more to this lady than we knew.”
“They did a remarkable job of letting her evolve,” says Seehorn, whose character became Saul’s confidant, collaborator and wife in the course of the show. “She makes surprising decisions that are not for shock value but born of her complexity. I loved how much they trusted me as the actor, and the audience, with the unspoken subtext.”
Wisely, the show also included actors and characters that resonated from their “Breaking” roles. It was a way of resurrecting Walter White, Jesse Pinkman, Gus Fring and Mike Ehrmantraut for an audience well aware of their future fates. For Jonathan Banks, who played Mike, there was no question that he’d come back for another shot in the role. “The simplicity of it is that it’s great storytelling, because it doesn’t give away a lot of stuff,” he says. “There’s always something clever, something going on.”
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“Saul” always had its eye on the big picture, too. Gould and company paid attention to all details in what he refers to as the “Gilliverse,” from the devolving, degrading opening credit sequences, to showing Jimmy’s future in black and white, to developing an overarching thesis of the story they wanted to tell. “So much of what both shows are about is: What do you leave behind in life? What is the difference your life made in the world for good or evil?” Gould says.
In the end, “Saul” and “Breaking” proved not just satisfying for the audiences, creators and cast. Dan McDermott, president of AMC entertainment and AMC studios says, “It’s impossible to overstate how important both shows were to AMC network, and the business at large. For a show like [‘Saul’] to step out of the shadow of ‘Breaking Bad’ and become an equally compelling story that stands on its own — or even exceeds ‘Breaking Bad’ — well, we can probably count on one hand the times a sequel series has outshone its predecessor.”
After a heart attack in 2022, the actor has a new outlook. “I want to make the most of my time. One of the things I’ve lacked in my life over the last 10 years is time to dream.”
These days, Gilligan is working with Seehorn on an untitled show at Apple TV+; Odenkirk has moved on to Peacock’s “Lucky Hank”; and Gould says he’d consider more stories told in this universe — at some later date.
“Vince and I both decided it would be good to give the Gilliverse a little bit of a rest,” he says. “But we had a big board with ideas or scenes we were interested in or would be fun — and there were a lot of them still on that board when we finished up the show. Maybe that’s a good thing, though. You want to leave something you didn’t get to.”
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