They harder they 'Saul'

A special edition devoted to the upcoming release of 'Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion to Better Call Saul'

A bonus What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I tell you about squat cobbler…

We are exactly one week away from the official release of Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion to Better Call Saul! (Which, you might not know, is still available for preorder.) Rather than clog up the regular Friday newsletter — which should be pretty packed this week, given how many notable shows are returning or premiering — I figured I would separate the shameless plugging into its own entry, hitting a variety of book-related topics before we get to pub day next Tuesday, which will likely also be accompanied by a bonus newsletter.

Excerpt! Excerpt! Read all about it!

While the majority of the book involves me breaking down each episode of Saul, plus archival interviews with Vince Gilligan, Bob Odenkirk, Rhea Seehorn, and others, there is also a conversation with Saul co-creator Peter Gould at the end of the book. It is by far the longest and most in-depth the two of us ever had about the show, because it was the first time we could speak when he wasn’t busy making the show, wasn’t busy doing several other interviews that day with other critics and reporters, and also didn’t have to hold back on any subject for fear of spoiling future episodes. So we covered everything, from the original conception of the character on Breaking Bad all the way through the series finale.

Today, Rolling Stone ran an excerpt from that interview, covering a day that was scary for everyone who worked on the show, and for all of us who watched and cared about it: Bob’s heart attack in the summer of 2021, on a break from filming the final season’s “Point and Shoot.” Peter talks about that day from his perspective, what he thinks he and Gilligan and Sony would have done if Bob either didn’t survive or simply couldn’t recover enough to resume acting, and how they altered the filming schedule once Bob was healthy enough to come back to work. In a series with a lot of forks in the road, this was by far the biggest, because there was no real way to finish the story without its leading man. Thankfully, the Albuquerque medical community was able to save Bob, for his sake, for his loved ones, and for all the people who love watching him perform. A happy ending.

And speaking of endings, the excerpt also contains Peter’s memories of filming the final Jimmy/Kim scene, and what he thinks happened with the two of them after the series ended. It’s just a small fraction of our discussion, but it’s an awfully good fraction.

The book… and how to get it (and/or see me)

Let’s break this down:

• You can still preorder the book from all the usual places: 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.

• If you live in the New York area, I will be at The Strand on Wednesday, February 5, at 7 p.m., for a Q&A with New York Times critic James Poniewozik. I’ll be signing books afterwards, happy to chat with whomever. I’ve done a lot of events at The Strand. It is a great space, a great environment for book lovers, and I hope to see a packed room. So order tickets (which can include a book for me to sign) if you want to go but haven’t already.

• If you specifically live in the northern New Jersey part of the New York area (aka Tony Soprano country), I will be at Words in Maplewood on Thursday, February 6 at 7:30 p.m., for a Q&A with Vulture critic Kathryn VanArendonk, followed by signing, chatting, etc. Admission for this one is free; details here. Another great store, and it’s always nice to do something right in the heart of the subscription base for The Star-Ledger, even if it will be a few days after the last print edition of the paper goes out.

• If you want a signed book but aren’t able to come to either event, Matt Zoller Seitz’s online bookstore is selling them.

What’s in a name?

In addition to the plugs, I thought I’d share with you an amusing behind-the-scenes story from the writing of the book. I should warn you in advance, though: this is the minutiae of minutiae, even by my standards.

Over the course of putting it all together, I spent a lot of time on the combined Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul wiki, checking various details about minor characters, the timeline, etc., against both my original writing and all the revisions I was making for the book. When I got to Season Three’s “Sunk Costs,” which includes the subplot where Mike throws the sneakers over the power line as part of a typically elaborate Ehrmantraut scheme to mess with the Salamancas, I realized I didn’t know the name of the Mexican physician who gives Mike the packet of drugs, and who does work for Gus in a few episodes of both series, played by JB Blanc. I went to the wiki, and saw he was listed as “Barry Goodman,” a strange name both for a Mexican doctor and for someone appearing on two shows that already had a very prominent character with the same surname.

I reached out to a Saul producer who worked on both series to ask how they came up with the last name for Dr. Goodman, and they replied that at no point did scripts for either show use that name, adding, “There is no way we named him Barry Goodman.” From there, it turned into a conversation about how the wiki also provides names for the three members of Jimmy’s film crew, even though the characters were always referred to in the scripts simply as “Camera Guy” (played by Josh Fadem), “Sound Guy” (Julian Bonfiglio), and “Drama Girl” (Hayley Holmes).

Though the producer wasn’t sure if this was specifically the case with Barry Goodman, they noted that they frequently got requests from actors’ representation to give their characters a name, particularly if it’s more than just a bit part, because it looks better when they’re trying to get their clients other roles. “Camera Guy,” or “Doctor” (as Gus’s physician is referred to simply in all BB/BCS scripts) sounds like someone who has one line in one scene of an episode, rather than a recurring character who gets to have some fun interplay with the leads.

Because I can sometimes be a dog with a bone with the most obscure of trivia, I eventually reached out to Josh Fadem to see if he knew where the names came from for the film crew. He explained that Camera Guy’s name evolved over time. In his first appearance, his name appeared in a newspaper article about Saul’s billboard stunt (which is the inspiration for my book’s cover), and when fans zoomed in on the article, they saw it listed as “Joey Dixon,” named for a couple of the show’s editors. Years later, AMC produced a series of digital shorts featuring Fadem, Bonfiglio, and Holmes talking about filmmaking, and in that one, Camera Guy became Marshall (a tribute to the show’s cinematographer, Marshall Adams), and Sound Guy and Drama Girl were revealed as, respectively, Phil and Sherry. Impressively, though, all three are still listed by their job titles in their IMDb entries for the regular series.

I never did figure out where the name Barry Goodman came from, though. But there’s some extremely wonky detail buried in some of the book’s many, many, many footnotes.

That’s it for today! Back Friday with a more traditional newsletter covering lots of non-Saul topics!