Better Call Saul

• 1. Introduction

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  Better Call Saul ran for six seasons and 63 episodes, and it turned one wry prediction into a real place. In the Breaking Bad episode "Granite State", the lawyer Saul Goodman gives Walter a best-case scenario. He says: "If I'm lucky, a month from now, best-case scenario, I'm managing a Cinnabon in Omaha." Years later, the AMC series Better Call Saul sent viewers to exactly that fate. It did so in black and white, in the opening scenes of its first five season premieres. But the series is really about the long road behind that line. How does a minor lawyer from another show earn a drama of his own? Why would its creators follow him toward a destination every viewer already knows? And what does a story feel like when the audience can see the ending from the first scene?

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• 2. A Thought Experiment

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  Saul Goodman walked into Breaking Bad during its second season, in an episode that already carried the title "Better Call Saul". He was meant to appear in only four episodes. Bob Odenkirk, who played him, had never seen the series before he showed up. The character grew far beyond what the writing staff planned, and he became central to the story. Odenkirk guessed that audiences warmed to him because he was "the program's least hypocritical figure" and "is good at his job".

  By 2009, Vince Gilligan, who created Breaking Bad, and Peter Gould, who wrote that first Saul episode, were already discussing a spinoff. Gould recalled that the team had considered several "what ifs". What if the show won a Primetime Emmy Award? What if people bought "Los Pollos Hermanos" T-shirts? The staff never expected such things to happen, but they did. A Saul spinoff then began as a thought experiment.

  While filming the Breaking Bad episode "Full Measure", Gilligan asked Odenkirk what he thought of the idea. In July 2012, Gilligan hinted at it in public. He liked, he said, "the idea of a lawyer show in which the main lawyer will do anything it takes to stay out of court". That could even include settling on the courthouse steps.

  In April 2013, Gilligan and Gould confirmed that the show was in development. By July 2013, no deal existed yet, even though the second half of Breaking Bad's final season had not aired. Netflix was one of many interested distributors, but the deal went to AMC and the Breaking Bad production company, Sony Pictures Television.

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• 3. Writing the Tragedy

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  Gilligan and Gould first reached for the template of Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist. They pictured a half-hour show in which Saul received celebrity guests as clients in his strip mall office. They had no idea how to write that format, so they fell back on hour-long episodes. Gilligan described Breaking Bad as "25-percent humor, 75-percent drama" and guessed the new show would reverse the ratio. Odenkirk later called the first season "85 percent drama, 15 percent comedy." Gould called the humor in both series the "secret sauce", because it made the drama stronger and the drama made the humor stronger.

  Gilligan once thought Saul was "great flavoring" for a show but not its substance. That view shifted when the two writers recognized that the Saul of Breaking Bad was a man who had come to accept himself. How he got there could carry a series. They also refused to write a legal show. They wanted a crime show that included some legal elements. To learn the territory, the writers spoke with real lawyers and watched cases at Los Angeles Superior Court. Most of what they saw was downtime, with everyone waiting for someone else to act.

  The title Better Call Saul was fixed from the start, so Gilligan and Gould felt they had to rush from Jimmy McGill to Saul Goodman. Then they realized, in their words, "we don't want to get to Saul Goodman … and that's the tragedy". Rhea Seehorn's performance as Kim Wexler in the first season pushed them further. From the second season they put more weight on the Jimmy and Kim relationship. They also slowed Jimmy's transformation for the rest of the run. Gilligan compared this to the effect Aaron Paul's acting had on the eventual storyline of Breaking Bad.

  Gilligan stepped away from the writing staff early in the third season to focus on other projects. That made Gould the sole showrunner, a handover planned since the debut. In the fourth and fifth seasons, Gilligan worked as a "director for hire", directing one episode each season. He praised Gould for keeping the quality high. For the final season, Gould brought him back to the writers' room, calling it "wonderful to have him there, so we can finish this show that we started together."

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• 4. Brothers and Rivals

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  Jimmy McGill begins his legal life in the mailroom of Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill, the Albuquerque firm built partly by his older brother Chuck. There he befriends Kim Wexler, a fellow mailroom employee who finishes law school and becomes an associate. Their friendship later turns romantic. Managing partner Howard Hamlin seems to be Jimmy's nemesis, until it becomes clear he was acting on Chuck's orders. Inspired by Chuck's success, Jimmy earns a Juris Doctor degree through a correspondence school, the University of American Samoa. Even so, the firm refuses to hire him.

  Jimmy turns to elder law and discovers that a nursing home chain called Sandpiper Crossing is defrauding its clients. He and Chuck begin a class-action suit together. Chuck quickly hands it to the firm, squeezing Jimmy out. Chuck is confined to his home by electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and he belittles and sabotages his younger brother. A doctor named Dr. Cruz suspects the condition is psychosomatic. In the third season, that suspicion is confirmed, and Chuck dies soon after.

  A second feud runs through the same city. Gus Fring owns the restaurant chain Los Pollos Hermanos, which fronts his narcotics distribution. He wants to move from cocaine to locally produced methamphetamine, so that he can end his dependence on the cartel. Across from him stand the Salamancas, a Mexican crime family who claim to have started the drug trade in New Mexico. Hector Salamanca leads them, and later his nephew Lalo does.

  Caught between them are Ignacio "Nacho" Varga, who wants to protect his upholstery-shop father, and Mike Ehrmantraut. Mike is a former Philadelphia police officer who starts out as a courthouse parking lot attendant and becomes a fixer for Gus. Gilligan described the writing as developing two separate shows. One centered on Jimmy, Kim, Chuck and Howard. The other followed the more familiar Breaking Bad faces, such as Mike and Gus.

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• 5. Familiar Faces

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  Every season began with a writer rewatching all 62 episodes of Breaking Bad, to confirm that the new scripts caused no conflicts. As the series went on, script coordinators Ariel Levine and Kathleen Williams-Foshee formed the show's "brain trust". They reviewed every script, tracked minor character traits and kept small details from the earlier show correct.

  Giancarlo Esposito joined the main cast in the third season as Gus Fring, the role he had played as a starring member of Breaking Bad. Two other characters began as nothing more than names. Nacho Varga and Lalo Salamanca were both mentioned, but never seen, in the Breaking Bad episode "Better Call Saul". Michael Mando won the part of Nacho after impressing Gilligan and Gould with an audition tape and a screen test. Tony Dalton first appeared as Lalo in the fourth season and joined the main cast for the fifth.

  Before the second season, Gilligan warned that returning characters would need to be more than "just a cameo or an Alfred Hitchcock walkthrough". Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul said throughout the run that they would play Walter White and Jesse Pinkman again only for a good enough reason. Both appeared in the final season. Dean Norris could not join at first because of his work on the CBS series Under the Dome, but he guest-starred as Hank Schrader in the fifth season. A second-season cameo for Betsy Brandt as Marie Schrader was dropped after the writers' room called it distracting. She returned in the final season.

  Some returns never happened. Before the series began, Anna Gunn mentioned a talk with Gilligan about appearing as Skyler White. Bill Burr was set to return as Patrick Kuby in the fifth season, but scheduling fell through when he had to attend to a personal matter. After the series ended, Gould said he had wanted to bring back all the remaining Breaking Bad characters for the finale. He and the writing staff could not find a proper way to fit them into the story.

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• 6. Made in Albuquerque

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  Principal photography ran from the 2nd of June 2014 to the 9th of February 2022, mostly at Albuquerque Studios in New Mexico. Gilligan directed the series premiere, and Gould directed the finale. The locations were often real businesses. Jimmy's back office sits in an actual nail salon, and the producers worked with its owners. The Salamancas' restaurant is a real South Valley business that production modified slightly while it stayed open. The Old Bernalillo County Courthouse stands in for the local courthouse, and a parking kiosk at the Albuquerque Convention Center served as Mike's workplace in the early seasons.

  The Omaha scenes were shot at Cottonwood Mall in Albuquerque. Production worked with Cinnabon to bring in period-specific equipment and service items, and the extras in the store were Cinnabon employees. The New Mexico Film Office reported that the first four seasons brought over US$120 million into the state. It also reported 1,600 crew hired for each season and a total of 11,300 extras.

  From the third season, the crew added Panasonic VariCam Pure cameras for their low-light sensitivity. That let them film extra wide exteriors at night and shoot sets in near total darkness, such as nighttime in Chuck's house, which had no electricity. An episode typically took nine days to shoot. After the COVID-19 pandemic, the final season got a longer schedule of three weeks per episode.

  Odenkirk, Seehorn and Patrick Fabian shared a house in Albuquerque owned by Odenkirk and his wife. Odenkirk had lived alone during the first season and felt lonely at home after filming. Recurring actors such as Josh Fadem stayed there when they came to shoot. In March 2022, a crew with no cast members went to Leo Carrillo State Beach in California to film the opening teaser of the season six episode "Point and Shoot". It was the only time the series was filmed outside New Mexico.

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• 7. Fading Credits

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  A drawer of burner phones, a bus stop bench advertising his business and an inflatable Statue of Liberty balloon each take a turn in the title sequences. Every episode opened with a different low-quality image recalling Saul Goodman's days on Breaking Bad. Gilligan and Gould drew on the poor quality of early VHS tapes and the low production values of 1980s public-access television. Saul's own law firm ads on Breaking Bad had the same crude look. The pair wanted the sequences to look deliberately rough, so they would stand out from the polished openings of other shows.

  Some sequences were assembled from unused Breaking Bad footage, and others were filmed for the new series. Assistant editor Curtis Thurbe put them together. Barrie Cadogan, guitarist of the band Little Barrie, scored them. While he worked, he was told the producers wanted music that cut off abruptly at 15 seconds.

  Every season except the last had ten episodes, so each episode number reused the same image from one season to the next. Beginning with the second season, the picture quality dropped, intermittently flashing black and white. It lost more color with each passing season. Many viewers theorized that this tracked Jimmy McGill's slide toward Gene Takavic, whose scenes were entirely in black and white.

  The final season had thirteen episodes, and the format changed. In the title sequence for "Nippy", Saul Goodman's "World's Greatest Lawyer" mug falls off his desk and shatters, as it did in every tenth episode. Then the image and music stop early and give way to a blue screen, like a home video recording on a VCR. "Nippy" is also the first episode set entirely after the events of Breaking Bad. In the last three sequences, the blue background briefly flashes a new image, which returns later in the episode.

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• 8. Records and Reception

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  On the 8th of February 2015, the series premiere on AMC drew an overall audience of 6.9 million viewers. It also drew 4.4 million in the 18-49 demographic and 4 million in the 25-54 demographic. That was the record for the highest-rated scripted series premiere in basic cable history, until Fear the Walking Dead, another AMC series, passed it later the same year.

  Critics were warm from the start. In September 2019, The Guardian ranked the show No. 48 among the best TV shows of the 21st century, describing it as "A supremely measured character piece that has steadily improved as its central tragedy has materialised." In 2021, Empire placed it at No. 27 on its list of the greatest TV shows of all time. That same year, 206 TV experts polled by the BBC voted it the 23rd-best series of the 21st century. In September 2022, Rolling Stone listed it as the 32nd greatest TV show of all time. The first season holds a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and the sixth season holds 99%.

  The awards record is stranger. Better Call Saul received 53 Primetime Emmy Award nominations and zero wins, the record for most nominations without a win. Seven of those were for Outstanding Drama Series, and six were for Odenkirk as lead actor. Jonathan Banks was nominated four times for supporting actor, and Esposito twice.

  The final season also changed streaming for its network. The sixth season premiere brought the biggest day of new subscriber sign-ups in the history of AMC+, which launched in June 2020. When the finale arrived, the app suffered an outage that logged many users out. AMC reported that first-day viewing of the finale was four times as big as the season premiere. Beyond the screen, the franchise now includes a talk show, several web series and digital shorts, comic books and an insider podcast.

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