Better Call Saul has yet to air. In fact, we haven’t seen so much as a teaser for the planned Breaking Bad spinoff, but that isn’t stopping Netflix from calling dibs on the planned AMC series, ensuring that their U.S., Canadian, European and South American subscribers have access to it shortly after its first season run.
Netflix announced today that they’ll be offering their U.S. and Canadian subscribers the complete first season of Better Call Saul after its first season finale airs on AMC. The streaming video service will also be making the series available exclusively to streaming members in Europe and Latin America “shortly after its airing in the U.S., beginning in 2014.”
Set up as a spinoff to AMC’s popular drama Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul will serve as a prequel to Breaking Bad in telling the story of Bob Odenkirk’s attorney character Saul Goodman in the years before he started working for Walter White. “From parking tickets to mass murder, from slip-and-fall to bond fraud, Saul handles it all.”
Odenkirk’s portrayal of the morally challenged attorney — who became a crucial part of Walter White’s meth-cooking/distributing operations — is one of the many things that really worked about Breaking Bad. Odenkirk’s background in comedy certainly helped to lighten the mood in certain scenes, making Saul borderline comical at times without entirely breaking the tension of the moment. Knowing that he’s more than a bit flexible when it comes to the law and isn’t above using his legal super-powers to bend (or slip around) the rules not only makes Saul Goodman a great character to watch, but also a prime candidate for his own show. So it’s going to be exciting to see how this series works and what kind of back-story Saul has. We know how his story left off in the wake of Walter White, but who was he before Walter White entered his life and turned it upside down?
As a fan of Netflix’s all-at-once approach to distributing their original series, I actually would have preferred the series to end up on Netflix originally, as opposed to AMC, where Breaking Bad aired. Especially when we consider AMC’s choice to hold the second half of the final season of Breaking Bad to air a year after the first half. However, considering Breaking Bad aired on AMC, it’s fitting that Better Call Saul does as well. With that said, it looks like Netflix managed to get a piece of the series as well. For the last season of Breaking Bad, Netflix was able to deliver each new episode to subscribers in certain territories the day after they aired Stateside. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen here, but at the very least, from the sound of it, Netflix won’t make their European and South American subscribers wait very long to see the series’ first season once it wraps up in the U.S. In the meantime, you can catch most of Breaking Bad streaming on Netflix.
