“Breaking Bad” was quite possibly the greatest TV drama of all time, right up there with “The Sopranos” and “The Wire.” And so, it was with great restraint that I started watching its spin-off “Better Call Saul” four years ago when it premiered on AMC. Any doubt that I had quickly evaporated by the first episode. The next four seasons would make for some truly compelling television.
“Better Call Saul” has become an indisputably great show and confirms Gilligan as one of the few visionaries who seems to have decided to concentrate the thick of his career on a central world in his storytelling. With all that being said, Giancarlo Esposito, who plays Gus Fring on ‘Saul,’ says that the end is near for the show. “It’s tricky with [co-creator Vince Gilligan],” Esposito told Collider. “If you look at the “Breaking Bad” model, he said five years, five seasons, but it was really five and six” with the split final season.
Season 5 of “Better Call Saul” will premiere on February 23, 2020, on AMC, but Esposito says that “there will be six seasons,” before Gilligan calls it a day.
The series is a significant achievement because of its focus on character and the subtle dilemmas that Gilligan seems to expand on with every season. If ‘Bad’ was showy and epic, this one is restrained and minimalist. Yet, they all take place in the same world that Gilligan created back in 2008 with Walter and Jesse. Gilligan expanded on it earlier this fall with the Netflix sequel “El Camino,” which concentrated on present-day Jesse Pinkman’s fight for freedom.
Recently, “Better Call Saul” star Bob Odenkirk mentioned that “Season five is just everything’s on fire, and it’s just burning down around us.”