Better Call Saul
The Prestige Spinoff
JASON MITTELL
Abstract: Few aspects of television more typify the American commercial medium than the spinoff, a new program that emerges out of a successful series to sustain its brand past the original’s shelf life. However, contemporary television is marked by the rise of prestige drama, a mode of storytelling hailed as culturally legitimate and artistically groundbreaking that seems to refute the imitative logic of spinoffs. This essay analyzes spinoff Better Call Saul’s pilot episode to understand how the series managed to do the seemingly impossible: re-create the popular, critical, and creative successes of Breaking Bad by straddling the line between prestigious originality and commercial copying.
In the late 1940s, when television was still in its infancy, the acerbic radio comedian Fred Allen offered a quip that captured a widespread skepticism toward the medium: “Imitation is the sincerest form of television.”1 Allen was highlighting how most critics perceived the emerging medium: a commercial industry driven to create derivative programming, rather than innovative, original works. Such dismissive attitudes are still widespread, as many people note how television programming is so frequently imitative of previous hits, derives from preexisting properties, or combines two successful works to create the illusion of something new. The spinoff is one prominent form of imitation driven by economic incentives, taking characters from one popular series and creating a new program around them.
However, contemporary American television has been marked by a shift in the medium’s cultural legitimacy—more than ever before, television is regarded as a place where innovative storytelling can thrive, even eclipsing film and theater as the most lauded dramatic medium. Series like The Sopranos, The Shield, The Wire, and Mad Men all succeeded by being nonderivative innovative works, rather than commercially motivated imitations, suggesting that some television might be immune to the industrial drive to copy, clone, and monetize successes. Such programming, often labeled “prestige television,” places a premium on originality, and few series in television history have been more lauded and acclaimed than Breaking Bad, AMC’s drama about a chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin.
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
