'Better Call Saul' comes to bookstores!

It's publication day for 'Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion to Better Call Saul'

This bonus What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I’m arrested for performing a Chicago sunroof…

It’s pub day! It’s pub day! More than a year after I turned in the first draft of the manuscript, Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion to Better Call Saul has finally, officially been published. So we’ve got a brief all-Saul newsletter today, followed by the more traditional one on Friday.

I’m so proud of this book. One of the arguments I make in it, regarding the constant question of which Saul Goodman show is better, is that by the time Better Call Saul came around, the people making it were more experienced and simply better at their various jobs than they had been on Breaking Bad. So when the material covers similar territory between the two shows, the execution is often higher on Saul. In a similar way, I’d like to think I’ve gotten better at this kind of show-specific book since Breaking Bad 101 was published back in 2018. I think that book is great, too (and makes a nice companion to the new one, if you don’t already have it), but there were various things I either couldn’t do back then, or didn’t think to do, that I was able to pull off this time around, most notably the long concluding interview with Peter Gould. I hope those of you who buy it are pleased with all the detail and analysis offered.

And speaking of which…

• Goodman v. McGill is now available wherever books are sold, whether brick-and-mortar or online, including Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Amazon, Powells, Indigo, Books-A-Million, or directly from Abrams Books. If you want to support a local bookstore but aren’t sure what’s the closest one to you, IndieBound has a search feature for that.

• I’m doing several events in the New York/New Jersey area over the next week, if you want to come hear me talk about the book, chat after, get a signed copy, etc. The first of these is at The Strand in Manhattan, tomorrow (2/5) night at 7 p.m., where I’ll be in conversation with New York Times critic James Poniewozik. Tickets are still available, and I hope to see lots of you locals there.

• The following night, February 6 at 7:30 p.m., I’ll be at Words in Maplewood, NJ, with Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk. It’s a non-ticketed event; more details here.

• Next Wednesday, February 12 at 4 p.m., I’ll be at The Paley Center to talk about the book with one of the museum’s curators, Jason Lynch. Details and ticket info here.

• If you don’t live in the tri-state area but want a signed copy, Matt Zoller Seitz’s online bookstore still has some in stock.

Development hell

Last week, Rolling Stone and EW published book excerpts about, respectively, Bob Odenkirk’s heart attack and how that could have abruptly ended the series, and the fact that an executive tried to talk Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould out of introducing Saul Goodman to Breaking Bad in the first place. If you need any more enticement to purchase — and/or if your copy hasn’t arrived yet and you’re eager to read as much as you can now — the revitalized AV Club has a third and final excerpt. In it, Gould talks about why he and Gilligan had such a hard time figuring out what the show was meant to be in the first place, and how even once they settled on this particular moment in the life of Jimmy McGill, the show kept surprising them by going to places they didn’t expect. Most notably, they found themselves liking Jimmy so much that his transformation into Saul — which they expected to happen at some point in the first season — was delayed for a very long time.

I often hold up the two Heisenberg-verse shows as the exception that proves the rule about how good TV should be made. Gilligan, Gould, and the other writers constantly threw out ideas without a real plan in mind, kept bouncing around in the timeline, advanced certain stories at a snail’s pace, and otherwise did all kinds of things that drive me nuts in so many of the dramas that have come after it. They just did all of those things with such spectacular execution that the process, or the pacing, ultimately wasn’t a problem.

But in another way, I look at the evolution of Saul — and, to a degree, the less obvious ways Breaking Bad grew over its first couple of seasons — as an approach which other series should be more open to. The Saul creators eventually had a tentative plan for the show, but when they started making it, the show made them realize that their plan no longer made sense, and they moved in the direction their own material was telling them to go. There can be a rigidity to a lot of modern dramas, but the Gilligan and Gould approach allows for greater flexibility to, say, turn someone like Kim from a relatively minor character into the show’s third lead, or to save the intersections of the Jimmy and Mike parts of the show for the moments where they would have the greatest impact. Plans are a nice thing to have if they continue to make sense as the series goes along, but flexibility about new ideas, and a willingness to let the show tell you what it is, are often much more valuable.

In conclusion

That’s it for today! Hope to see some of you at the book events!