Better call your bookstore to pre-order my 'Better Call Saul' book!

'Breaking Bad 101' gets a sequel, about a prequel, written by yours truly

Some big news in my world necessitates a bonus, single-topic installment of What’s Alan Watching? Since you’ve either opened the email or clicked on the link, I won’t waste time being coy, and will confirm that I have a new book coming out on February 4, 2025, which you can (and should?) preorder right this minute, from wherever you prefer to buy your books: Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Critical Companion to Better Call Saul.

Yes, if we’re trying to be strict to the lawsuit naming convention, it should be simply Goodman v. McGill. But dramatic license sometimes has to be taken for the sake of searchability. Here’s a bigger view of the cover:

This one’s from my pals at Abrams Books, who previously published both The Sopranos Sessions and, more relevantly here, Breaking Bad 101. Like those books, it features essays on every single episode, which you can read as you watch (whether you’re a Saul vet or a spoiler-wary newbie), or in whatever order you like, and it features interviews with the cast and creative team.

Some of that material will be familiar if you read my coverage of the series as it aired, across HitFix, Uproxx, and Rolling Stone. But I wound up significantly changing, and at times wholly rewriting, the great majority of the original recaps, particularly from the earlier seasons. I rewatched the whole series as the project was in process, and seeing the episodes again prompted lots of new thoughts, and new ways to express old thoughts. Even if you were reading me every single week for those six seasons, you are going to find different, deeper insight throughout, often with a more historical perspective. If you were reading me in real time, you could see me gradually recognize that Saul had started to equal — and, at times, surpass — Breaking Bad. The book was written from the perspective of someone to whom the idea of the two shows being legitimate peers is wholly understood. So the writing is much more about character arcs, and about identifying particular pivot moments where Jimmy, Kim, Mike, and/or Better Call Saul itself made some kind of dramatic shift, or presented an especially iconic image like this one:

And while some of the interviews are archival material, collected from various professional homes, I also did a new interview with Saul co-creator Peter Gould — easily the longest and most in-depth conversation we’ve ever had about the show. He was the producer I alluded to back in January while talking about the series’ historic Emmy shutout, as we did the final piece of the interview the night after Saul completed its 0-for-53 run. Peter told me an awful lot I didn’t already know about the series, from casting trivia to his perspective on the day of Bob Odenkirk’s heart attack, and what would have happened to the show if Bob hadn’t recovered as well as he did.

There are plenty of other new odds and/or ends in there, because Team Saul is nothing if not thorough and obsessive in their knowledge of and affection for the great show they made together. At one point, I emailed Rhea Seehorn a question about the real-life development of Kim’s signature power ponytail. I only needed a sentence — a sentence fragment, really — to insert into a footnote in an essay about one of the first episodes to prominently feature Kim. She instead wrote a 600-word essay on the origin and meaning of that hairstyle choice, all of which of course wound up in the final manuscript.

Next February will be the 10th anniversary of the series, because the Earth just won’t stop going around the sun. Hopefully, a lot of you will be in a mood to celebrate that anniversary with some supplemental reading, and I’ll be ringing the hotel bell plenty between now and then. For the moment, I’ll just remind you that preorders have become extremely important in the publishing game, where the more copies that are bought before a book comes out, the better the chances that the book will also sell well (and be available in more places) once it’s actually released. So here’s that preorder link again. And here’s footage of me immediately after sending the final draft of the manuscript to my editor:

Back Friday with a regular newsletter! Thanks for reading!