First introduced as one of the jokier characters on the otherwise tense “Breaking Bad,” Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman was almost a parody of a sleazy lawyer. That he would be the surviving character on a new spinoff tonight, named after his advertising motto, “Better Call Saul” (AMC, 10 p.m.) is something most people couldn’t have foreseen.
But there was more story to tell, creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould say.
“He’s got slippery ethics,” Odenkirk told reporters at the TV Critics Association winter press tour last month. “He doesn’t know how to apply the ethics he has.”
“Vince and Peter have a great time creating highly conflicting ethical situations where your personal drive juxtaposes with good behavior, and the character has to navigate a complex and ever changing prism of ethical choices,” he says. “And that is fun to watch with this character.”
“It’s a very interesting character for us,” Gilligan says. “He wants to be good. But as you will see as the episodes progress, why does he want to be good?”
It could be because of his brother Chuck, played by Michael McKean, or his love interest, Rhea Seehorn, Gilligan says. “The question that we’re having fun with in the writers’ room is why is it better to be true to yourself, because Slipping Jimmy, as you meet in that first episode, really waxes rhapsodic about the days when he used to be that guy before he was an attorney, and is it better to be true to oneself or is it better to be a good person. Or is there some mix of the two?”
“Why be good?” says Gould. “Usually in fiction, goodness always leads to a happy ending. It always leads behaving ethically always ends up having good results, and we all know in life sometimes being ethical lands you in the shitter, so to speak.
The other thing I think is fascinating about it, to me, we went in I’m sure everyone who is watching, you’re remembering what a slippery two faced unethical guy Saul Goodman was on ‘Breaking Bad.’ Almost the first thing he does is suggest killing kill Badger: ‘Why not kill Badger instead of me?’
“He’s willing to do that right away,” Gould says. “And what we found when we started thinking about who this guy was and how he got to be the way he was, we found out that wasn’t the guy who we’re starting with. So we learned that there’s a lot more nuance to his ethics.”
“Saul Goodman is not who he is,” says Odenkirk. “That’s a creation of his, as he tells Walter White the first time he meets him: ‘It’s not my name.’ And this whole thing is a presentation. So in this show you are getting to meet who he is sort of behind the scenes.”
Instead, he’s Jimmy McGill, a struggling and generally law-abiding lawyer from Cicero, Ill, trying to make ends meet in Albuquerque.
“Certainly the point is not: Should we be good or should we not?” Gilligan says. “I guess the point is: It’s sometimes very hard to be good. Sometimes it’s not even in a particular person’s nature, but nonetheless the struggle, it’s just an examination. There’s no Aesop’s moral to it at all.
“But it’s interesting for us, anyway. Speaking from the writer’s point of view, it’s just an interesting examination of why do we choose to be good or why are we good. I think we should be good, but we’re not going to force-feed anybody that.
“I think Saul wants to be,” Gilligan says, “but he also wants to cut corners when he can. You see that in the first episode. That’s a lot of the fun for me in the writers’ room. A lot of the fun and the challenge for us is exploring those things and learning about them as we do.”