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AMC and Sony Pictures Television confirmed today that they have reached a licensing agreement for a spinoff of Vince Gilligan’s landmark AMC/Sony Pictures Television series Breaking Bad. As conceived, the new series is based on the show’s popular Saul Goodman character with the working title Better Call Saul. Plans call for Saul to be a one-hour prequel that will focus on the evolution of the popular Saul Goodman character before he ever became Walter White’s lawyer.
The possibility of a Saul Goodman spinoff series was revealed last April. With the recent ratings hike that Breaking Bad has been enjoying, it's felt like more and more of a distinct possibility, as the network would want to capitalize on the audience interest in the show, and characters, as quickly as possible.
In May, Gilligan, who was developing the series with Peter Gould, the writer who created the Saul Goodman character, said that they hadn't yet decided if it would be a prequel or sequel to the events of Breaking Bad.
"I like to think of Saul as a cockroach in the best possible way,” Gilligan told Vulture, indicating that the crafty lawyer may indeed survive the series' carnage. “This is a guy who’s going to survive while the rest of us have been nuked into annihilation. He’ll be the worst-dressed cockroach in the world.” Now that we know that Better Call Saul will indeed function as a prequel, Saul's fate on Breaking Bad is a little more up in the air.
"[Saul] kind of knows everybody...everybody in town, all the major players. And he has a hand in the business every which way he can," Gilligan told Yahoo! TV back in April. "So we just have to figure out exactly what kind of story we're telling. Is it a story about his creation of his own character? Because Saul Goodman, as he explains in his first episode, is not his real name. He is a self-created character, much like Heisenberg. Do we tell the story of his origins? We're still trying to hash that out. But there are a lot of fun possibilities."
It appears that we may indeed be getting a glimpse at the man he was, before he became the ambulance chasing, money laundering, lawyer-for-all-occasions, Saul Goodman.
Alan Sepinwall of Hitfix reports that deals still need to be made for Gilligan and Gould, and it is currently unclear if Gilligan will be showrunning the new series. Better Call Saul is also likely to go straight to series, with no pilot.
We will keep you updated as details emerge!
Meantime... think we'll be seeing Gus and Mike on this show?
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