![]() ![]() But it is not as interesting as the other show – an intimate drama of relatively low stakes, of words rather than bullets, but fuelled almost entirely by Jimmy's relationships, and the roles they play in who he is to become. On the surface, it's the fan-pleasing story – the conduit for most of Better Call Saul's violence and cameos. The latter's storyline is perhaps what many people would expect of a Breaking Bad prequel: the tale of how ex-cop Mike Ehrmantraut – a man with the grimace of someone forever posing for his passport photo – falls into the orbit of cold, calculating Albuquerque drug lord Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito). It could be argued that Better Call Saul is really two shows: one starring Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill, another starring Jonathan Banks as Mike. "That way you don't rush past any potential drama, no matter how small it may initially seem." "Our philosophy is don't go any faster than you absolutely have to," adds Gilligan. "Coming off a hit show like Breaking Bad gave us the confidence to let the characters take their time," says Gould. "It never seemed slow to us," says Gould, "But looking back, at the end of the pilot of Breaking Bad, Walt has apparently killed two people, and he's gone from being a high school chemistry teacher to someone who cooks meth." To compare, one episode of Better Call Saul features a scene in which Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), the grizzled enforcer of Breaking Bad, spends 10 mesmerising minutes taking apart his car. "Every show has its own internal clock," says Gilligan, "its own metronome" – and Better Call Saul burns at a pace unlike anything else on TV. To adequately portray Jimmy's transformation, Gilligan and Gould decided to slow down the hyper-real world of Breaking Bad – with its planes falling out of the sky, its exploding wheelchairs, its meth Nazis – and concentrate instead on constructing a subtler and more considered character study. But it was only when we started digging into this character that we realised he had a long journey to go before he was the kind of bastard that would advocate murder as a business expedience." "When we started this," says Gould, who originally created the character of Saul in 2009 while writing on Breaking Bad season two, "we thought he'd be Saul Goodman with the crazy office by the end of season one. Hapless con man Jimmy has adopted the Saul Goodman persona in name, but has not quite yet sold his soul. As of the sixth and final season, which was split into two parts and will conclude with a run of six episodes starting today, the answer is still taking shape. "Then he said, 'What problem does becoming Saul Goodman solve?'"īetter Call Saul has taken its time to explore that question. "He went quiet for a while," recalls Gilligan. Who is Saul Goodman? Who did he used to be? Yet the most important question, the one that would unlock the entire show, came from Gould. Instead, they had to work backwards from Saul – who, as revealed in Breaking Bad, is really called Jimmy McGill. "He's too happy-go-lucky," he adds, "too comfortable in his own skin", anathema to drama. ![]() And after a while they both came to "the very scary conclusion", says Gilligan, that Saul Goodman is not a guy to build a show around. "It would have taken place in Saul's office and you'd basically have a bunch of crazy people come in," explains Gould. One idea was to make it a 30-minute sitcom. – The 100 greatest TV series of the 21st Century Warning: This article contains offensive language "We would walk around, just cogitate, and say 'okay, so what is this exactly?!'" "We had a very high concept without a lot of follow-through," Gilligan tells BBC Culture. The only problem? Neither Gilligan or Gould had any idea what the show was about. The end was nigh for Breaking Bad, and they had just recently signed a deal to make Better Call Saul, a spin-off prequel series set around Bob Odenkirk's popular shyster Saul Goodman, a criminal lawyer more criminal than lawyer, more cartoon than man. In the height of summer 2013, Vince Gilligan, the creator of "prestige TV" phenomenon Breaking Bad, and fellow screenwriter Peter Gould, took a long walk around their offices in Burbank, California. ![]()
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