“Better Call Saul,” the anticipated comedy spinoff of “Breaking Bad” was originally supposed to start this fall on AMC.
But things are going slower in writing the series starring Bob Odenkirk as the irrepressible lawyer Saul Goodman, creator Vince Gilligan says. So now it will premiere in early 2015.
“I thought it was going to be kind of easy going forward,” Gilligan told a late afternoon session Friday. “We know who this guy is.”
But, he quickly added, “We don’t really know we didn’t really know who this guy is at all when you think about it.”
Gilligan said he and he and fellow producer Peter Gould find themselves taking “long, long walks around Burbank, our old ‘Breaking Bad’ writers’ offices, saying, ‘No, wait a minute, how does this work?’ So it’s a very interesting process, and there are certain limits that you have obviously identified yourself. We know where this guy is going. We can’t, for instance, in the first episode have him lose an arm or an eye or something like that.”
Though he adds, “He could have a glass eye.”
Still, there are up to writing script eight out of the 10-episode initial season (it’s already been renewed for a second 13-episode season). And they’re in the middle of shooting the second episode, Gilligan says.
So a panel at the TV Critics press tour Friday seemed a little premature, with no clips, no stars and not a lot of details about what they’re planning.
What is known is that Michael McKean will co-star as Goodman’s brother Chuck, Rhea Seehorn, Patrick Fabian and Michael Mando added to the cast that includes at lease one other announced star reprising his character from “Breaking Bad,” Jonathan Banks, who played grim fixer Mike Erhmantraut.
Action will largely take place before Walter White met the sleazy lawyer in 2007. So it’s set in 2002, Gilligan says. “It is indeed a period piece.”
But to produce it will take time, he said.
“I am slow as mud as a TV writer. I always have been,” Gilligan said. “It was my big fear when I got the job on ‘The X Files.’ I had been writing movie scripts, and I didn’t know if I could write at a TV pace. I still feel I’m very slow for television. We had a pace, thanks to AMC and Sony, on “Breaking Bad” that was deliciously stately for television, and it was nothing that they wanted.
“It’s nothing any studio or network would want, but we have a way of doing things that is slower than most TV shows. And I think we averaged three weeks per episode just breaking episodes. We did on ‘Breaking Bad,’ and lo and behold, not a big surprise to me, we’re doing the same thing with ‘Better Call Saul’ because we want to think everything through.
“We feel that that pays dividends because, with ‘Breaking Bad,’ people say that seemed to knit together pretty well,” he said. “So here we are doing it again
Still, Gilligan says of the process, “it’s challenging, but it’s fun. It’s like being really into this Rubik’s Cube you’re trying to solve. Although having said that, I’ve never actually solved one in my life.”