The clock is ticking on Breaking Bad, which will come to its much-anticipated conclusion later this year with its final 8 episodes. A show that has specialized in perpetually feeling like it was only a few episodes from dramatically wrapping up since about the third season, there’s a great deal of pressure for show Creator Vince Gilligan and his team to do it right. Being that’s it’s such a propulsive, barreling train of a show, a mere shot that lingers on some poetic image or toys with dramatic ambiguity just ain’t gonna cut it.
Whatever they settle on though, it may not be the end of the Breaking Bad-verse after all.
The idea of a spin-off from Breaking Bad that revolves around Bob Odenkirk’s character has been mentioned before, with it seemingly starting as a joke question asked of the creator, to something he’s talked about publicly with a straight face. Now Deadline says AMC is formally discussing the idea with Gilligan. An hour-long comedy seems to be the default idea, though they’re considering other formats as well.
What’s funny is that Vince Gilligan has been behind a spin-off before, having developed The Lone Gunmen on Fox. That show took a trio of conspiracy theorists from the X-Files and focused an hour-long network comedy on them, though the results were not particularly successful (except for predicting 9/11**). The show was cancelled after 13 episodes and had to have its cliffhanger ending resolved on X-Files proper.
In any event, Saul is a superb character and Bob Odenkirk is a comedy legend that more than deserves such a show packaged around him- do you think this is the character to do it with though? Can Goodman be removed from the context of Walt’s operation and be entertaining? Would you prefer the show be a prequel or, assuming the character survives the series finale, something that takes place after Breaking Bad ends?
** Yeah, the pilot was about a government conspiracy to ram a 747 into the World Trade Center, so that the disaster could be blamed on terrorists and used as an excuse to increase the defense budget and launch a profit-driven war. This was in March of 2001. (I’m not a conspiracy theorist, please don’t start with the emails).