“Season five is just everything’s on fire, and it’s just burning down around us,” said Bob Odenkirk. This synopsis from Odenkirk would make sense if you had seen the season four finale of Better Call Saul where Jimmy McGill (Odenkirk) announced that he would be practicing law under the name of Saul Goodman – the lawyer for meth cooks Walter White and Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad. Fans had eagerly been waiting for Jimmy to finally encompass the sleazy Saul Goodman persona.
From the words of Odenkirk, season five sounds like a typical day in the life of Saul Goodman. “They’ve been building it slowly but it’s turning. Now it’s turning rapidly, I would say,” said Odenkirk. “That’s similar to Breaking Bad, too. This very slow buildup as we go up the rollercoaster ramp and then, it starts going downhill, it just cannot stop. And that’s where we are in season five, which we’re shooting right now.”
Breaking Bad had gone on to become a popular, successful drama series and every episode would exceed expectations. When the spinoff, Better Call Saul, was first announced, fans were excited and wondered if the bar that Breaking Bad set could be surpassed. With the recent development in season four’s finale, things are starting to pick up and take off.
“I was worried about the audiences staying with us. We asked people to watch closely and to understand on a deeper level the characters and the plot, and you know what? They did,” he explained. “The audience really impressed the hell out of me. But I do think that it was all because of Breaking Bad and not just because of the success of Breaking Bad, but because people who watched Breaking Bad knew that every detail matters, the eye floating in the water, it means something. And so by getting a large audience to watch on that level, then when Better Call Saul started, they immediately were hooked into watching closely and not worrying about it getting somewhere but trusting that it would.”
Season five of Better Call Saul will premiere in 2020.