Who is Saul Goodman? Who did he used to be? Yet the most important question, the one that would unlock the entire show, came from Gould. Instead, they had to work backwards from Saul – who, as revealed in Breaking Bad, is really called Jimmy McGill. 'He's too happy-go-lucky,' he adds, 'too comfortable in his own skin', anathema to drama.
And after a while they both came to 'the very scary conclusion', says Gilligan, that Saul Goodman is not a guy to build a show around. 'It would have taken place in Saul's office and you'd basically have a bunch of crazy people come in,' explains Gould. One idea was to make it a 30-minute sitcom. – The 100 greatest TV series of the 21st Century Warning: This article contains offensive language 'We would walk around, just cogitate, and say 'okay, so what is this exactly?!'' 'We had a very high concept without a lot of follow-through,' Gilligan tells BBC Culture.
The only problem? Neither Gilligan or Gould had any idea what the show was about. The end was nigh for Breaking Bad, and they had just recently signed a deal to make Better Call Saul, a spin-off prequel series set around Bob Odenkirk's popular shyster Saul Goodman, a criminal lawyer more criminal than lawyer, more cartoon than man.
In the height of summer 2013, Vince Gilligan, the creator of 'prestige TV' phenomenon Breaking Bad, and fellow screenwriter Peter Gould, took a long walk around their offices in Burbank, California.
