Breaking Bad ended in 2013 with a promise that its narrative universe was not yet over: AMC announced that they were developing a spinoff series, Better Call Saul, that would take place years before Breaking Bad’s narrative, focused primarily on secondary character Saul Goodman, played by Bob Odenkirk. This prequel pitted two television tendencies against each other: formulaic commercial cash grab meets artistically legitimized prestige television. How could one of television’s most acclaimed originals jettison that originality to spawn a derivative spinoff? This essay explores the tensions between originality and imitation as embodied in the pilot episode of Better Call Saul, an example of the unusual format of a “prestige spinoff.”
Spinoffs date back to television’s prehistory in radio, when the popular comedy Fibber McGee and Molly yielded a new series in 1941, The Great Gildersleeve, about the secondary character Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve. As a prototypical spinoff, Gildersleeve built upon the original’s popularity and tone, aiming to remain similar to Fibber McGee’s humor and style without simply being a copy. For decades, spinoffs have taken one or more secondary or guest characters from the original and placed them in the center of a new series in nearly every television genre: sitcoms (Robin Williams guest starred on Happy Days in 1978 to launch Mork & Mindy), Westerns (1958’s Bronco from Cheyenne), science fiction (Torchwood launched in 2006 from the long-running Doctor Who), soap operas (General Hospital yielded Port Charles), medical dramas (Grey’s Anatomy led to Private Practice), and even reality shows (Here Comes Honey Boo Boo came from Toddlers & Tiaras) and talk shows (The Colbert Report extended a character from The Daily Show). Many spinoffs emerge after the conclusion of the original, taking characters into new scenarios to extend the original’s popularity—sometimes with great success, as with Frasier’s acclaimed eleven-season run matching the longevity of the original series Cheers, but often in short-lived misses, as with AfterM*A*S*H (from M*A*S*H) and Joey (from Friends). A spinoff universe can be vast and varied, as with the landmark sitcom All in the Family, which yielded spinoffs ranging from long-running successes (The Jeffersons), important groundbreaking series (Maude), and short-lived failures (Gloria), as well as “second-generation spinoffs” from its own spinoffs, such as Good Times and Checking In.
A common critical assumption is that spinoffs are more commercially motivated than artistically justified. Media scholar Todd Gitlin wrote the landmark account of the American television industry in the 1980s, diagnosing a pervasive tendency for the medium to privilege commerce over creativity: In labeling television programs as “self-imitating artifacts,” he distinguished “between the normal imitativeness of art and the industrialized excess that is television’s sincerest form of fawning on itself.”2 Gitlin claims that spinoffs take “self-imitation far beyond the limits of previous forms.… Most spinoffs are like wealthy heirs, living off capital accumulated by the forefathers.”3
While few critics today are as dismissive of spinoffs as Gitlin was in the 1980s, skepticism remains commonplace. As Breaking Bad was wrapping up in 2013, news of a Saul Goodman spinoff was met with widespread skepticism. As TV critic June Thomas wrote, “I doubt the role is substantial enough to sustain a whole show,” especially when compared to the quality of the original series.4 Such doubts assumed Saul’s commercial motivations might tarnish Breaking Bad’s original creative heights—as Michael Arbeiter wrote, “We want our precious programs to stand independent of the executives’ clutch. We wouldn’t want ratings grabs to influence the plotlines of Breaking Bad, so we don’t want them to influence the creation of an entire offshoot show.”5
Much of this initial skepticism around Better Call Saul stemmed from the perceived quality of Breaking Bad, grounded in the context of how contemporary television storytelling differed from previous eras. While every era of television features a mixture of original, risk-taking programs with more formulaic, conventional, and derivative series, American television in the 2000s received increased cultural legitimacy, largely driven by the critical praise aimed at a number of innovative, narratively complex dramas, including popular series The Sopranos, Lost, and The Shield, as well as less commercially successful but acclaimed programs The Wire, Boomtown, and Mad Men. Such prestige dramas foreground shared norms and conventions of high-quality television, such as male antihero protagonists, dark themes, serialized narrative twists and innovations, bold visual style, and boundary-pushing depictions of violence, sexuality, and morality. Some series can fall squarely into this category, proclaiming their own seriousness and importance, while still being regarded as poorly done and derivative by critics, as with Low Winter Sun or Ray Donovan—such hyper-serious dark dramas even prompted their own parodies within other series, as with the fake Darkness at Noon appearing frequently on televisions within The Good Wife.
Concepts like “prestige” or “formulaic” are not inherent markers of quality; rather, they fit into larger constructions of taste and value embedded within broader cultural hierarchies such as gender, class, and education. Early television was viewed as a “lowbrow” medium compared to literature, theater, and film, largely because the domestic mass medium was seen as less elite and more the domain of women and children. As the category of prestige television rose in the twenty-first century, much of its cultural legitimacy was earned by distancing itself from traditional feminized genres such as melodramatic soap operas and embracing the cinematic and literary cachet of “serious drama” while employing established film writers, directors, and actors. A series like True Detective was hailed for its ambition through various markers of prestige, even though many critics questioned its overall quality, while Jane the Virgin was never treated as prestigious, despite being quite ambitious and high quality in its own ways—largely because it was building off soap opera traditions focused on the domestic lives of women. Even though a prestige drama can be great TV, we must not assume that only prestige series are high quality, nor that the sophisticated style of prestige is a guarantee of aesthetic success. Instead, we must remember that labels like “prestige,” “quality,” and “lowbrow” are all cultural constructions, used to reinforce hierarchies steeped in social power and identity.
Clearly there are inherent tensions within series that foreground their status as prestigious television, while embracing imitative impulses rather than developing their own innovations. This conflict becomes acute for spinoffs, as the form overtly embraces its debts toward another program rather than asserting uniqueness or originality. Breaking Bad is generally regarded as one of the pinnacles of prestige drama, charting an innovative approach toward antiheroes, embracing narrative and stylistic experimentation, and gaining both large audiences and critical acclaim. How can Better Call Saul follow in such prestigious footsteps while clearly embracing the imitative logic of spinoffs, straddling the line between derivative and original? To understand the cultural location of Saul, we can examine how it presents itself as both a continuation of Breaking Bad and an original innovative series on its own merits, analyzing the program’s specific techniques that signal these dual identities. These codes of meaning-making address two sets of audiences (with clear overlaps): fans of Breaking Bad eager for more of the earlier series, and prestige viewers drawn to Better Call Saul’s sophisticated storytelling and style.
Appeals to these dual audiences were there from the start of Saul’s pilot episode “Uno.” When it debuted on AMC on February 8, 2015, Breaking Bad had been off the air for fourteen months—long enough to establish distance from its spinoff but recent enough that fans were still invested in the series and remembered how the narrative ended for its various characters. Saul Goodman’s ending was bleak: