World Screen @ 35: Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul

As World Screen celebrates its 35th anniversary, we want to present a series of articles that recap and highlight the best of the interviews we have conducted. We are focusing on the evolution of scripted TV series.

In our last article, we looked at how Mad Men turned AMC into a must-watch destination for quality television. Today, we focus on the phenomenon that was Breaking Bad and its prequel, Better Call Saul.

BREAKING BAD & BETTER CALL SAUL
The transformation of a high school chemistry teacher from a gentle family man to a violent drug lord is at the core of Breaking Bad. Creator Vince Gilligan takes viewers on Walter White’s journey, who receives a diagnosis of Stage III cancer with only two years to live. White uses his knowledge of chemistry to manufacture crystal meth and creates, over the course of five seasons, a lucrative and increasingly criminal business to secure the financial security of his wife and son, who has cerebral palsy.

Bryan Cranston’s masterful portrayal of Walter White earned him four Emmys for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, while the show won Outstanding Drama Series twice. Breaking Bad is widely considered one of the best, if not the best, drama in television history. Long before the critical acclaim and accolades, Gilligan didn’t even think he could get the show on the air.

He said in a 2012 interview: “I didn’t think a show like [Breaking Bad] could exist, period! I was gripped by this character and I loved the idea for this show from the beginning, but I didn’t hold out high hopes that the show would ever exist. Sony Pictures Television was my initial partner as a studio, and we went together to find a broadcast home for this show. I personally didn’t [think] that we’d find one. I knew that if we were going to find one, it would have to be on cable. We didn’t even bother setting meetings at any of the four major networks. A show like this is just too dark to ever be on a network. If it had gone on to a network, it would not remotely resemble the show you see now. It would be bowdlerized. It wouldn’t even be a faint echo of what the show is now.”

“In the history of television, it has always been about stasis, things staying the same, noted Bryan Cranston in 2013. “And Vince thought, What if I change it? What if I try to change a character from good to bad? What if we got a character like the guy I wrote in The X-Files, where he does despicable things, yet you still sympathize with him? From that, he thought of me because I had played that guy. After reading the pilot episode of Breaking Bad, I thought, This is brilliant. I have to be a part of this!”

Gilligan credited the cable network AMC and the studio Sony Pictures Entertainment for allowing him and Peter Gould to follow their vision for the series. “AMC has given us a lot of freedom now, but the wonderful thing about them and Sony is that they’ve given us freedom from the get-go,” said Gilligan in 2016. “Peter and I have both worked with different studios and networks where they will drown you with notes and inundate you with laundry lists of what you can and cannot do. When we got going on Breaking Bad, a very real question at that time was, Can a show exist in which the main character is an absolute shit heel, a terrible, murderous person! And has a death sentence! To be fair, The Sopranos paved the way for Breaking Bad and The Shield did as well. The Sopranos begat The Shield and The Shield begat Breaking Bad, so it’s not as if we forged any utterly new territory, but it was still a pretty novel idea [at the time]. Sony and AMC both, to their credit, didn’t blink. They let us tell the story we wanted to tell.”

The success of Breaking Bad and the accolades it received opened plenty of doors for Bryan Cranston. “[Breaking Bad] has altered the landscape of my professional opportunities completely, he said in 2013. “There would have been no Argo without Breaking Bad. When you go into this profession as an artist, as an actor, as a writer, the only thing you are truly hoping for is not to have someone hand you a job, but to give you an opportunity. Opportunity is the only thing you want: ‘Give me a chance to show you what I can do.’ ‘Give me a chance to play in this playground.’ Then, you better be able to deliver.”

Cranston delivered in spades and so did fellow cast members. They earned numerous nominations and awards. Among them, Aaron Paul, who played Jesse Pinkman, Walter White’s partner in crime, won an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series three times. Anna Gunn, who played Walter’s wife, Skyler, won the Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Emmy three times.

FROM JIMMY TO SAUL
The success of Breaking Bad begat the spinoff Better Call Saul, a prequel that traces a different transformation, the one from small town hustling lawyer Jimmy McGill to conniving Saul Goodman, who worked with Walter White.

Gilligan and executive producer Peter Gould weren’t sure their hybrid crime drama-black comedy would work, as Gould explained in a 2016 interview, “We had nothing but reservations! There was a tremendous temptation to do this show, mostly because we loved working with Bob [Odenkirk, who plays Saul.] Speaking for myself, I loved working with Vince on Breaking Bad; it was the great creative experience of my professional life. We both wanted to keep the good thing going. At the same time, we were so proud of how we ended Breaking Bad—it felt like it ended at just the right moment—and it was so gratifying to see how people took to the show. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I was worried that this show would always be in the shadow of its more successful predecessor. I also had the fear, and I don’t think I ever expressed it to Vince, that if this was a big fat belly flop it would all land at my doorstep, since I was the different element in this new piece.”

“We jumped in with both feet, for all the reasons Peter said and, in general, to keep the band together, so to speak,” added Gould. “We had a real family of cast and crew that we loved working with for the previous six years, and we wanted to keep that group together. We jumped in without really looking where we were jumping, and AMC and Sony were both wonderful to us. They said, We support your desire to do this…now, what’s the show going to be? Then we looked at each other and said, Uh-oh! [Laughs]”

In those early days we thought it might be a half-hour comedy. Then we thought, What do we know about half-hour comedies? Not much! So, we started thinking about, Is it a sequel? Is it a prequel? Through trial and error, we wound up with what we are doing now.

Bob Odenkirk, who stars as Saul Goodman, in a 2017 interview recalled, “Vince Gilligan came to me in the third season of Breaking Bad, which was the second season that Saul appeared [in], and said, “Do you think there’s a show in that character? Because I do.” And then I said, “If you do, then there probably is one!” Vince is one of the great writers of our era. That was really my only response when Vince would bring it up, and he would bring it up once a year. Then, a few months after Breaking Bad ended production, we got together to talk about it seriously. Peter Gould— who wrote the first script that featured Saul Goodman and who writes the comedy and the gamesmanship of Saul really well—Vince and I got together at the wonderful Chateau Marmont, a classic Hollywood location. We shot the shit about whether there was a TV show in this. They didn’t know what it would be. They thought it could be a half-hour comedy. They thought it could be a one-hour procedural. In the end, it became a lot more like Breaking Bad than like either of those two ideas, but still not entirely like Breaking Bad.”

Throughout Better Call Saul’s five seasons, Gilligan and Gould have had to balance drawing characters from the Breaking Bad world against moving forward with new story arcs.

“That’s something that occupies [our minds] constantly,” said Gilligan in 2016. “It really is a question of proportion. There’s always an underlying question of proportion with any TV show, which is: How long should this show exist? How much story do we have? We have that going on all the time as the eternal question of Better Call Saul. As Jimmy McGill gets closer and closer to becoming Saul Goodman, we, therefore, get closer and closer to the world of Breaking Bad. So the other question that goes along with it is, how should we parcel out these appearances with characters from Breaking Bad? There’s no good answer to it! It’s a case-by-case feeling that we have in the [writers’] room. We don’t want to overdo it. Sometimes you have to deny yourself, and we realize that all the time in the writers’ room. We could throw Breaking Bad characters into this willy-nilly, but at a certain point it would be counterproductive; it would do the opposite of what we always want to do, which is to satisfy the audience. A little goes a long way with some of these encounters in the world of Better Call Saul.

Odenkirk is a producer on the show but leaves Saul’s character development largely up to Gilligan and Gould.

He recalled in a 2017 interview, “I was just with Peter yesterday, and we sat down for about an hour and a half and talked about every aspect of the show—production, story, all kinds of things. Sometimes, if there’s something in the script that bumps me, I’ll call him and say, Why am I saying this? Why am I doing that? But as far as the overall journey, I try to stay out of it. I speak to them literally as a fan of the show. I say, Here’s what I think is going to happen, here’s what I wish would happen. And I don’t know how much that means to them. They listen! [Laughs] They act like they care! Yesterday I told Peter a thought I had about the show. Our universe is becoming the Breaking Bad universe. And you can feel it. That’s both good and bad. It’s good because it’s super fun—for a fan of Breaking Bad, it just makes you happy. It’s kind of bad, too, because we could lose the emphasis on this wonderful, unique story that they’ve chosen to tell and that has connected with people—the story of Jimmy and Kim. So we talked about that and ways in which we could upend the journey so that people got to enjoy the fact that we are going to become the universe of Breaking Bad, but not in a way that feels like it’s the point of our show, because it isn’t. I think there are ways you could do that. But I’ve got to leave it to Peter and Vince to choose what they do.”

Season six will be Better Call Saul’s last one and is scheduled to air in 2021. In 2017, Odenkirk was asked what would have happened to Saul if he’d never crossed paths with Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. “He’d be running his law offices in that mall, serving the homeboys and the gangsters, and he’d be struggling but making some coin! I think he’s good at that, and there’s money to be made there. The whole interaction with Walter and Jesse was like putting all your money on one number that looks really good and then turns out to be a bust. He wouldn’t have had that opportunity to bet it all, and he wouldn’t have bet it all, and he’d still be a sleazy lawyer making a half-decent living. And who knows, maybe running for office!