Why You'll Totally Love Better Call Saul—Even If You Never Watched Breaking Bad!

Never seen a single episode of the hit series? Here's why you can still tune in to the premiere of the prequel series!

By Sydney Bucksbaum Feb 06, 2015 9:28 PMTags
E! Placeholder Image

Breaking Bad fans have been waiting for this moment for months, if not years—the premiere of the prequel spinoff series, Better Call Saul, is finally here!

Ever since Bob Odenkirk's shady "criminal" lawyer was introduced on the AMC hit show in season two, fans immediately wanted more of Saul Goodman. And now, the network and Breaking Bad creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould have teamed up once more to do just that.

Except there's a twist! Turns out, Saul Goodman isn't actually Saul Goodman. And that's why viewers who have never seen a single episode of Breaking Bad can jump right in to this new series...because it's actually a prequel series set six years before the beginning of Breaking Bad, about how a struggling, down-on-his-luck lawyer named Jimmy McGill (Odenkirk) became the man who would be Walter White's (Bryan Cranston) lawyer.

Gilligan and Gould knew that there would be some viewers tuning in to Better Call Saul that had never seen Breaking Bad.

"There's a great question we always face: how much do you need to explain to the folks who know the previous material, and how much does it have to stand on its own?" Gilligan tells E! News.

And Gould answers, "We did strive to make it its own self-contained thing. When people ask if they're going to see [hidden cameos] in the background, there's nothing worse that feeling like you're not in on the joke when you watch something. I think that people will be able to understand and certainly follow the story without having ever watched Breaking Bad. It's definitely going to add a dimension because you have a better sense of the direction of the story. But none of the episodes hinge on the knowledge of Breaking Bad."

However, viewers will certainly enjoy the prequel series more having seen Breaking Bad.

"There will be an added sense of fate hanging over the whole enterprise that people who have watched Breaking Bad closely will bring to it which I think is a whole new valued added," Gilligan says. "Having said all of that, I don't think you'll need to have watched Breaking Bad to watch it. But having said that, we didn't spend as much time as we should have thinking about, ‘How would people who have seen Breaking Bad vs. those who haven't take this?' We just came up with the story. We don't do that marketing research, as it were. Maybe we should have!"

If you haven't seen Breaking Bad, here's everything you need to know going into Better Call Saul!

Before he becomes Saul, Jimmy is a small-time, ambitious underdog lawyer struggling with the question of does being good equal being lawful?

"Being good comes very naturally to him," Gilligan says. "You'll see the way he treats his brother and the way he treats this woman who he very much seems to secretly love or maybe even not-so-secretly. Good comes easy to him but law-abiding doesn't necessarily come easy to him."

He continues, "Maybe that's what the story's going to be about at its core. Where on the Venn diagram does lawful and good overlap? Can you be law-abiding and be bad? Can you be a criminal and be good? There will be a philosophical discussion centered around Mike [Jonathan Banks] later on this season that talks about just that."

And who's Mike? Mr. Ehrmantraut (Banks) is a fixer who works with—and sometimes against!—Jimmy. He also just wants a quiet life with his family, but his skills often put him right back into the criminal world.

"Mike's a great character in his own right, but he's also a great contrasting character to Jimmy," Gould says. "He hardly speaks, he weighs every word, whereas Jimmy is a motor mouth. Mike has great physical courage, he's got physical cool, and Jimmy, you could practically see every pool of sweat and sweat droplets flying off his head. We felt like having those two characters together again, there would be sparks."

While it might not seem like it at first, Jimmy and Mike are the yin to each other's yang.

"The very first time we met Saul on Breaking Bad, you saw that his private eye is Mike," Gilligan says. "It made sense practically for the story [to bring them both back]."

And that's really all you need to know going into the prequel series' premiere, since Better Call Saul will introduce new characters, a new setting and an entirely new plot that all precedes everything that happens on Breaking Bad.

Better Call Saul premieres Sunday, Feb. 8 at 10 p.m. with its second episode airing the next day, Monday, Feb. 9 at 10 p.m. The new drama series will then continue to air Mondays at 10 p.m. on AMC.