Tonight on AMC, along with the midseason premiere of The Walking Dead, Better Call Saul makes its debut in hopes of taking the greatly successful character of Saul Goodman from Breaking Bad and giving him his own hour-long show. Spin-off shows are a tricky business. Sometimes the result of a spinoff is a television staple from the last 35 years in the form of ‘The Simpsons’*, and sometimes you get Joey. The allure of Joey Tribbiani apparently wore out after spending a decade with his ‘Friends’ in New York.
*That’s right, ‘The Simpsons’ is actually a spinoff. They originated on ‘The Tracy Ullman’ as a short cartoon break. Eventually they got turned into a full half hour comedy and became the most financially lucrative show of all time. Here’s a video of what they used to look like back then: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp4TBRawxSA&w=854&h=510]
So what is the key to making a good spin-off show? It may sound simple, but it really comes down to the writing. It’s easy to simply rely on the pre-established character, or characters, from the last vehicle they were attached to, but in order for a new show to be successful it has to stand on its own. To switch angles for a second, Marvel Studios does a really excellent job of doing just this. While their ultimate goal is to build towards ensemble movies (The Avengers, Avengers 2: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, etc.), that doesn’t mean they can just assume the audience is coming into the movie with all pre-existing knowledge of these characters in mind. In the first Avengers, it doesn’t take long for them to establish that Tony Stark likes to play by his own rules and Steve Rodgers is about planning and teamwork. Within a few lines of dialogue exchanged between the two, we see these character traits on display and it is clear that their personalities will clash going forward. We could have made this assumption just from seeing their individual movies, but to take a few seconds to establish character in the world of The Avengers is important for that specific film.
In the realm of television, you have more time to get to this point, but the same principal is in play. One of my favorite, and most successful, spin-off shows is Frasier. Frasier Crane first appeared in the season 3 premier of Cheers as a local Boston psychiatrist who started dating Diane Chambers, the female lead of the show. Only a guest-starring role at the time, Kelsey Grammer would go on to play the character for 20 consecutive years in primetime. In nine seasons on Cheers it was well-known that Frasier was quite pretentious and full of himself, but that he’d often cave to, and join in, the juvenile behavior of his other bar-mates.
So when the show of Frasier started, they didn’t take away everything that fun about Frasier Crane, but they changed what was around him. He moved across the country (Boston to Seattle), he got divorced from his wife Lilith, he got a new job as a radio host, and they surrounded him with strong characters for him to form new relationships with. So while the character was essentially the same as he was on Cheers, the new show felt and looked completely different.
That’s what Better Call Saul needs to strive for. They have the luxury of Breaking Bad never really exploring what made Saul Goodman tick as a person. Sure, we always knew that most of his actions were driven by greed, but we have no idea how he spent his personal life and how he got to be the man that he became. The key for BCS will be to not make it look or feel like a small scale version of Breaking Bad. It has to feel like its own story that we would have cared about without ever having seen the show that originated the character. Time will tell if Bob Odenkirk, and the show’s creators, are up to the task.
