"Why is this so hard?" Vince Gilligan mutters. No one offers an answer.
It's February 2014. In a bland conference room on the top floor of an undistinguished office building near Burbank, Gilligan, five writers, and an assistant are "breaking" the first three episodes of Better Call Saul, a prequel-cum-sequel to Breaking Bad, one of the most beloved TV shows of the last 20 years. And right now, they’re stuck.
Gilligan stares at a piece of paper and strokes his goatee with his left hand. He shakes his head in frustration. Work can’t resume until he makes a decision. Finally, after a sigh, he speaks: he’ll have the bacon-potato soup for lunch.
There are seven central components to each workday in the writers’ room, in varying degrees: frustration, silence, proposals, excitement, agreement, levity, distractions, and food. The task is to break an episode into an opening teaser of three to five minutes, and four acts, with a beginning and end to each. When the writers agree on an idea, Gilligan carefully writes a brief description in black Sharpie on an index card, then pins the card to a corkboard. A teaser is seven cards. An act is fourteen cards. Some cards are incomprehensible to anyone new to the room: SAUL GIVES KAZOO WARNING. There’s also a corkboard with names of characters, and a few with pending ideas, currently in limbo.
Creating the universe of a TV series is difficult, but creating a show that’s constrained by the details of a previous series is even more difficult. "We were surprised by how little we knew about Saul," says Tom Schnauz, who wrote the Emmy-nominated episode "Say My Name" from Breaking Bad's final season, and is a co-executive producer on Saul. "We hadn’t ever thought about his backstory."
For instance, today the writers are trying to figure out how Saul meets Mike Ehrmantraut, the savvy, brusque ex-cop who did most of Saul’s dirty work in Breaking Bad. Every time a writer suggests an idea, the assistant types it into a laptop, so no idea ever goes missing. "At the end of the day, the show is about Saul," announces Gilligan, a thoughtful, analytic Virginian who disproves the legend that creative people are impetuous and emotional. "If Saul has no part of making Mike who he is, it lessens Saul." Silence returns to the room.
"What is this episode about?" asks Gordon Smith, who’s been creating long rows of pushpins, separated by color, on the conference table. There’s some talk about movies, TV shows, food, then an idea comes up: Saul and Mike met in a bar. Most of the conversation is between co-showrunners Gilligan and Peter Gould, who created the character of Saul. "That just seems like bullshit," Gilligan says, shooting down the idea. After lunch, though, another solution appears; everyone likes it, discusses it, refines it.
The day’s yield is seven cards---a full teaser. "That’s probably a better than average day for us," Gilligan tells me the next day, during an interview in his office. Throughout our conversation, he’s characteristically chatty, incisive, and candid about everything from the pitfalls of spinoffs to why running a show is like an episode of I Love Lucy.
Ed: It's nearly a year later, and with Better Call Saul premiering this Sunday on AMC, the writers’ room has certainly broken not just the Saul-Mike teaser, but many more as well. As for spoilers: There are plenty, but keep in mind that any of them could also be a red herring. At the time of this interview, Gilligan and the writers were just getting started, and any specific detail might have subsequently changed.
There’s a card in the room that caught my eye. It says, "Saul’s story is an addiction story."
That was a bit of an epiphany. It’s not an addiction story in the sense of he’s addicted to drugs or alcohol or gambling or sex. It occurred to us that Saul’s addiction is to the world of outlaws. The biggest concern for me going forward with this show was that Saul Goodman, as a character on Breaking Bad, is very happy-go-lucky. He’s comfortable in his own skin. That is what we all, in a sense, strive to be. And that’s great for self-actualization, and it’s great for real life. But that’s terrible for drama.
After a lot of fits and starts, we came to this idea that for Saul’s whole life, he’s struggled with the question of who he is. He has an innate understanding of life’s less fortunate people—because he’s been unfortunate himself, we’re going to learn. And he wants to do right, but he does not want to be a chump, or a victim. And partly because of that, he’s drawn toward the outlaws of the world. Not the petty crooks, but the big thinkers, the guys who dream.
So he’s an idealist?
If Saul were asked, he’d say, "You know, criminals are an important part of the ecosystem. Picture the blue whale. It’s a magnificent creature, 100 feet long, graceful and gorgeous as it coasts through the ocean. And yet, if you said to me, ‘All the blue whales disappeared from the earth,’ I’d be really sad … for about half an hour. And then I’d say 'Hey, what’s on TV?' But if all the maggots disappeared from the earth, we’d be fucked! All the garbage would pile up everywhere; there’d be dead horses and half-eaten Big Macs and turnips and heads of lettuce. Everything would stink to high heaven, because the maggots aren’t digesting it down to topsoil again. We can live without blue whales, but we can’t live without the maggots." That’s his philosophy.
__On the corkboard with names of characters, one card says Lalo. Can you explain where Lalo comes from? __
When we first met Saul Goodman in season two of Breaking Bad, Walt and Jesse kidnap him, put a bag over his head, and take him out into the desert. They take the bag off his head next to a grave they’ve dug. And he immediately gets fearful and starts jabbering something about, "Oh, no, Lalo, please, don’t do it." It was just a funny throwaway, to show that this guy was so sleazy that being kidnapped wasn’t even surprising to him. Then Jesse Pinkman, under his ski mask, starts yelling at Saul to shut up and speak English, because he’s talking in sort of broken Spanish, begging Lalo for his life---that reminds me, I have to mention that to the writers. Lalo should speak a lot of Spanish.
So we thought, as we often did with Breaking Bad, let’s keep close tabs on what our characters have done in the past and make good use of it here in the present and the future. Hence, we’re going to make Lalo something of a major character, we feel.
I keep calling him Saul, by the way, but his name is still Jimmy McGill. That’s his real name. We know he’s going to change his business name to Saul Goodman at a certain point---we just don’t know when or how. It’s fun to know certain story points and landmarks we need to hit, and then work toward them. It’s challenging.
While you’re creating this show, you’re dealing with specific restrictions created by the events of Breaking Bad.
Creating the backstory for him and making sure that, at every turn, it dovetails with what we know of him in the Breaking Bad era, is very challenging. There’s quite a few restrictions. And it informs your decision-making at every turn.
__When the initial announcement was made, you said, "There’s obviously a danger in doing a spinoff." What’s the danger? __
The simplest and scariest possibility is that people will hate your spinoff. I think about shows that I love. I think about MASH and I remember there was a show called AfterMASH. I think about Friends, and about Joey. In fact, I think about The X-Files and The Lone Gunmen, which was a spinoff I worked on and helped create, and that I love very much. I was broken up when it got canceled. The best possible scenario is that it’s Frasier to Cheers. Two very different shows, but both much loved. The worst-case scenario is that we’re AfterMASH---or worse.
What most excites me about doing Better Call Saul is that, in a very selfish sense, I loved doing Breaking Bad. And I’m not sorry we ended it when we did. It would have broken my heart if the conventional wisdom about it had been, "Man, that show was pretty good for the first four or five years, and then it declined into mediocrity." We quit while we were ahead. And it took no small amount of self-discipline to do that.
__One Sony exec said the show "might have ended a little bit earlier than it should have." You disagree? __
I joked about this with my writers in the months leading up to the Breaking Bad finale. I said, my big fear is I’m going to wake up six months after the show ends and say, "Oh my God, I just realized a way we could have kept this thing going for another year and a half." I haven’t had that happen yet.
Could we have gone maybe another episode or two? Possibly. But not another season. I believe we ended at the right time. I haven’t changed that opinion since it ended. I mean, I had many a sleepless night. I asked myself, "Are we going to fuck this up? Are we going to come up with an ending that is terrible?" It happens to some shows---even the best of them. You know, the best TV show you ever saw and the worst TV show you ever saw were both pretty much equally hard to make.
__The DNA is probably 99% the same. __
That’s a good way to put it. The fact that more shows and more movies fail rather than succeed illuminates how hard it is to get it right. I mean, I work my butt off. But then the guys making AfterMASH worked their butts off, too. You know?
I didn’t want the show to overstay its welcome. But when you think of the other half of your job as a show runner, you think, I’m CEO of a $30 or $40 million-dollar company. That’s about what we spend in a year to produce these episodes. I’ve got 150, 200 people working in this corporation.
__Most of them have kids and mortgages. __
Most of them have kids and orthodontist bills. They want to send their kids to college. And I want to keep them working, because they’re good people. I want to keep this company open for business.
You say to yourself, creatively I’ve got certain responsibilities, but as an administrator, as a boss, I’ve got other responsibilities. And they do seem at cross purposes, sometimes. They did with Breaking Bad. But at the end, I guess, I let creativity win. And I’m at peace with that.
__Nobody tried to cajole you? __
Oh yeah, a little bit. Sony in general was more motivated for the show to go longer than AMC---the ancillary revenue streams of Blu Ray, DVD, streaming, and all that kind of stuff---and therefore there was a little more gentle and friendly pressure from Sony. One time, they said, "Look, are you sure you can’t see a way clear to have this go a little longer?" There was gentle, friendly pressure. I talked them through a lot of the specifics of where I thought Walt was heading and why I thought he had only X number of episodes left. And they listened very closely, and came to the conclusion, perhaps a little reluctantly, that it was the right way to go.
__You’ve worked on cable shows and on network shows. What are the main differences? __
It’s a simple mathematical formula. On network TV, you do 22 to 24 episodes a season. Back in the early days of I Love Lucy or The Twilight Zone, you did 33 to 35, something like that. Typically on a network now 22 to 24. But on cable, you do 10 to 13. You have potentially twice as much time, if the studio or network will allow you, to think things through and get them right, story-wise. And that, to me, is what I love about cable TV. It’s not about having swear words or nudity.
I worked seven years on a network show---for Fox on The X-Files. And that was a great job, my second favorite job ever. But it was like the* I Love Lucy* episode where Lucy and Ethel are working on the conveyor belt, and it’s moving fast, and they’re stuffing chocolates in their aprons. It’s an analogy our writers use a lot amongst ourselves. And it ceases to be funny very quickly when you’re in the middle of it, and you’re stuffing chocolates in your mouth. It’s a bad feeling.
At a network show, you make a promise to yourself at the beginning of the season, to have as many good episodes as you can. But out of 24 episodes, there’s probably going to be three or four absolute stinkers. So let’s concentrate on the 18 to 20 we can make at least memorably decent. You have to make those kinds of deals with yourself, in network.
__You get all that, plus nudity and swear words, too. __
We don’t really get nudity, not on AMC. If we can knock off a quick version of a strip-club scene with no pasties on the girls, we’ll have that for the DVD set, you know? I love the R-rated versions of shows, and I always gravitate toward that when I’m going through the DVDs at Best Buy or whatnot.
We’re burning Sony’s money right now, as we sit here. It costs money to keep the lights on, it costs money to rent the space.
It can’t cost much, Vince.
[Laughs.] Oh, man. This place is great, compared to our last office. Oh, this is heaven compared to the last place!
__Why did you decide to make the show a prequel and not a sequel? __
I can’t even quantify for you the number of times we discussed that. We started off talking about a sequel. And the truth is, we’re going to try our best to have our cake and eat it too. The teaser for the first episode is a sequel. We pick up Saul after Breaking Bad, and have a glimpse of that in black and white. That’s the beginning of the first episode. And then we go back to the prequel land. And how long we’re in prequel land, we’re not even sure yet. We may not go back to post-Breaking Bad until the very end---hopefully four, five, six years from now.
I think the thing that steered us away from doing a sequel, ultimately, was that people want Saul Goodman. And even though we’re starting him off as Jimmy McGill, he will eventually become Saul some time in the first season, I imagine. We need to figure that out. But at the end of Breaking Bad, Saul says to Walt, "I’m not your lawyer anymore. I’m not anybody’s lawyer. I’m just some schmuck who’s going to have a different name and a different life in Omaha, Nebraska."
Essentially what he’s saying in so many words is Saul Goodman is dead. So if we were to have a sequel, and we thought long and hard about this, we could make a very engaging show about a guy, I would think, who’s staying one step ahead of the law. Except that show’s already been done. It was called The Fugitive.
__I’m struck by the leisurely pace of the writers room. It’s not as sweaty and frantic as I expected. __
The most important time for the writers is this pre-production time, before the crew starts working in Albuquerque. You’ve been here with us for two days. The phone has rung maybe six or eight times. It’s heaven, with the phone not ringing. When we have the crew up and running and we’re shooting, the phone will ring, I don’t know, 20 or 30 times an hour, with endless distractions. "We’ve got to have an answer right now in the wardrobe. Should Saul wear the green tie or the red tie?" No detail is too small to be of interest to me, because I’m such a fiddle-fucker. I’m so obsessive-compulsive with this stuff, such a micromanager and a control freak, that none of these details are boring or too small. You’ve gotta go to where the bleeding is the most severe when you’re in production. You have to triage your time. Triage---that’s a good MASH word!
