For the last 25 years, Alan Sepinwall has been to television what Roger Ebert was to a generation of film lovers: an essential voice — the first TV critic one seeks to make sense of what one has just watched.

His reviews of the groundbreaking U.S. crime drama The Wire unpacked and explained one of television’s most layered and literary dramas throughout its run from 2002 to 2008. The Wire set a new standard for serialized drama amid the Golden Age of Television that began with The Sopranos and ended, for many, as streaming television services changed our viewing habits forever.

While watching The Wire in my early 20s (and again in my early 30s), Sepinwall’s writing on the show was such an essential part of my viewing experience that, in some ways, I see him as a character in his own right, sitting comfortably in my top five between Bubbles and Bunk.

That’s the goal, Sepinwall told The Tyee.

“The most I can do is try to be an add-on to the experience,” Sepinwall said, “whether that’s explaining the meaning of something, why I think something worked, or why I think it didn’t. To make you think a little more, sit more in the experience, and just extend the amount of time in which you’re somehow in the world of Better Call Saul… or anything else I cover.”

Sepinwall’s Rolling Stone coverage of the legal crime drama Better Call Saul, the critically acclaimed Breaking Bad spinoff celebrating its 10th anniversary this month, will soon be available in hardcover.

Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion to Better Call Saul is Sepinwall’s third such collection, following his similar guides to its Golden Age forebears. In 2019, he worked with fellow TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz to co-author a critical compendium of writing about The Sopranos in The Sopranos Sessions; in 2017, he assembled his years of critical writing on Breaking Bad in Breaking Bad 101: The Complete Critical Companion.

Admittedly, it now seems a bit odd to be talking about Better Call Saul, a TV show that ended three years ago — especially as 2022 already feels like a lifetime ago — but the Breaking Bad universe is back in the news. Earlier this month, Breaking Bad co-creator Vince Gilligan called on the creative community to respond meaningfully to the current political climate by taking a break from awful men like Walter White, Saul Goodman and the like, and try their hand, instead, at writing better people.

“All things being equal, I think I’d rather be celebrated for creating someone a bit more inspiring,” said Gilligan, accepting a special honour at the Writers Guild Awards. “In 2025, it’s time to say that out loud, because we are living in an era where bad guys, the real-life kind, are running amok. Bad guys who make their own rules, bad guys who, no matter what they tell you, are only out for themselves.”

Who was he talking about? I think we all know, and I get the sense Gilligan struggles with guilt over setting the stage for the public embrace of the sort of man who might look up to Breaking Bad’s protagonist, the fictional anti-hero Walter White — a Walter White supremacist, perhaps.

Even watching Better Call Saul, which ran through Donald Trump’s first term, it was clear that Gilligan and co-creator Peter Gould were working through mixed feelings about serving up yet another anti-hero for their audience to deify, despite his inhumanity. Rather than tracing a chemistry teacher’s unlikely rise into the meth kingpin Heisenberg, Better Call Saul tracks the downfall of his lawyer, Saul Goodman, né Jimmy McGill, who gains the world but loses his soul over time, and his wife, only to wind up working at a Cinnabon in Omaha, Nebraska, while living in solitude, squalor and shame.

“I think they definitely learned a lot of lessons about how the audience took to Walter White,” Sepinwall said, in a Zoom conversation on our digital-era TV habits, binge-watching, writing without a clear plan and whether or not Breaking Bad — one of the most critically acclaimed series of all time, and one whose influence on modern-day TV (and modern vigilantes like Luigi Mangione) might be unmatched — was outdone by what many believed was an ill-conceived spinoff.

“If anything,” Sepinwall writes in his new book, explaining the difference between the two shows with an insight that few TV critics can match, “Jimmy’s transformation into Saul seems sadder than Walt’s into Heisenberg, because Gould and company made clear that Jimmy never wanted this to happen, whereas Walt revelled in his newfound power.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: Better Call Saul was a masterfully made TV show, but nobody wanted a Breaking Bad spinoff when it was first announced. In your interview with television writer Peter Gould, we learn that the network execs didn’t want him on Breaking Bad either. Honestly, I get that. When he first arrived, I was struck by how tonally inconsistent Saul Goodman felt at the time. Like, Bob Odenkirk’s in this show? The hated milk machine? I don’t know.

It’s a very different kind of show almost immediately after Saul shows up. The first season and a half of Breaking Bad, Walt and Jesse seemed to be under constant threat of death. It’s a very stressful show up to that point. Not that it suddenly becomes laid back and chill, but just having someone there who actually knows what he’s doing takes off the table — for a while — the perpetual threat of death and violence for them.

And it allows the show to go into some more interesting directions. So that was a hugely valuable addition to Breaking Bad, and I can’t imagine that show without him. And yet, at the same time, you know, like I said in the book, and like you just mentioned, I did not for one second think that you could actually make a good show just about him. They proved me wrong.

When did you first start to acknowledge that this might be a better show than Breaking Bad?

There’s a three-episode run in Season 5. It’s “JMM,” then “Bagman,” which is Jimmy and Mike in the desert, trying to survive, and Jimmy winds up having to drink his own pee. And then “Bad Choice Road,” which climaxes with Lalo showing up at Kim’s condo, and Kim basically telling Lalo to “shut up and get out of here.”

I had long since accepted that this was a very good and often great show. But that period was when I first started to seriously say, wait a minute, is this actually as good as Breaking Bad? Is it possible it’s better than Breaking Bad?

Do you have an answer to that question?

I think that the best moments of Better Call Saul are at least as good as the best moments of Breaking Bad, and some of them are better. I think the finale of Saul is better than the finale of Breaking Bad.

I think, in general, the people making these two shows who worked on both were better at what they did when it came time to do Better Call Saul. And so I think Saul has just some spectacular highs. Breaking Bad also has spectacular highs. But Saul might have a few more of them, and I think some of them are higher than the equivalents on Breaking Bad.

I’m gonna come down on the side of Better Call Saul, and I have this theory on why.

Please.

My one criticism about Breaking Bad is that I really feel like they let Walter White get away from them. I love that show so much, but I think he went from anti-hero to hero. He was a full-blown American badass by the end. And once they got there, I think it was a little bit tough to put the genie back in the bottle. With Saul Goodman, the writers had a little bit more artistic restraint. You’re rooting for him, and you’re marvelling at his skills as a con man. But you never escape the sense that, fundamentally, this guy sucks.

I think they definitely learned a lot of lessons about how the audience took to Walter White. I think Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould and the other writers were really kind of dismayed by how much the audience wound up siding with Walt, and against Skyler. And they learned lessons from that. One of the smartest things they did with Better Call Saul was they made Kim enjoy the part of Jimmy that is the con man.

Critics have called Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) one of the best female characters on television. I think I agree, and not just because of her incredible ponytail. You root for her, and when she picks up and leaves, it feels a bit like a correction for what happened with Breaking Bad and Skyler.

On Breaking Bad, Skyler is right. But if Skyler gets her way, there’s no show. She wants Walt to stop dealing meth. So she’s getting in the way of our fun, whereas Kim likes Jimmy the con man, likes pulling cons with him after a while. So we like her, and therefore, as we see her getting dragged down by him, you start to take her side over Jimmy’s, and you start to feel the tragedy of it. Because you know that’s what Jimmy’s going to turn into.

Considering the current political moment, it’s nice to revisit a show where the bad guy is clearly the bad guy, we’re not all secretly on his side and there are consequences for his actions. It’s actually a little bit refreshing.

You want Kim to get the heck out of there. People were afraid for her. Kim’s not on Breaking Bad. Does that mean she dies? Is that what finally turns Jimmy into Saul? And [the writers] were smarter than that. They came up with a still-tragic ending for her that was not that dark, that felt truer to her experience and who she was. And I found that really satisfying.

In the early seasons, I was impatient for the moment Jimmy became Saul Goodman. I felt a bit like Milhouse. “When are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?” But eventually I realized it wasn’t about the fireworks factory at all. It was about the journey to the fireworks factory, so to speak. What did you think about the slow-drip storytelling of this show?

I saw this interview that Peter and Vince did relatively early on, and they’re asked: When is he going to become Saul? And Peter says something along the lines of, well, we’re worried that it would be like making a show called Batman and you only ever see Bruce Wayne. But that’s ultimately what they did! It should be so annoying, and yet instead, the journey becomes so fascinating that you don’t want it to end. It’s really remarkable that they were able to do this bait and switch and make it as satisfying as they did.

It seems like they might have even been able to get away with that a little bit more because this show bleeds into the streaming era. With Breaking Bad, we were still doing the weekly episode thing. With Better Call Saul, I binged every season. There was never a time where I was waiting for next week’s episode. I think it allowed them to take their time with that story.

Definitely. There’s almost a full season of the show where he is not a practising attorney. He’s selling cellphones. He’s making TV commercials. That should feel super tedious on your show about one of the most infamous lawyers that’s ever been fictionalized on television. And yet it really works.

For me, it was all in the writing. There are shows that plot everything out in advance. And then there are shows that claim to know where they’re going, like Lost, or From, or even The X Files, but they don’t. This is a show that never gave me that confidence that they knew where they were going. But I think that it also offered a really lively quality. Jimmy is flying by the seat of his pants, and so is the writers’ room.

Peter said something along the lines of, they could only ever see two feet in front of themselves at any given moment. They kept saying, all right, well, he’s Saul Goodman by halfway through Season 1. No, he’ll be Saul Goodman by the end of Season 1. No, he’ll definitely be Saul Goodman by the start of Season 2. Things like that. And it just never worked out the way that they were planning, because they were watching what the characters were doing, and following that, as opposed to trying to have this master plan.

I’ve seen shows that have master plans that are great, like The Wire. I’ve seen shows that have master plans that, ultimately, blow up in their face, like How I Met Your Mother. Obviously there was a certain end point in that they had to get to the events of Breaking Bad, and ultimately they went a little bit beyond that, but within that, they had all sorts of wiggle room.

Both Breaking Bad and this show were made in kind of ways that seem really counterintuitive. Like, this is not how you should write a television show: I’m going to introduce an idea, and I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know what it’s for, and we’ll figure it out later. And yet, it’s like you say. It gives it that seat-of-the-pants energy, just like Jimmy has, and just like Walter White has.

Walter White is constantly stumbling into these situations with no thought to the consequences, and he’s got to find a way out, and so does Jimmy. You can feel that in the way that the shows were made.

Do you think that we’re losing that quality a little bit in streaming-era television?

Absolutely. Most streaming shows now, you have to come in, you’ve got to be able to pitch an entire first-season arc. In some cases, you’ve got to be able to pitch a two-year plan, a three-year plan, and have it pretty well thought out. And that’s great in theory, but it doesn’t leave room for those kinds of improvisations.

Vince and Peter had no plans for Kim beyond Jimmy needing a friend. Then they watched what Rhea Seehorn was doing, and they began writing to that, and that becomes what the entire show is about.

And you would not have that kind of flexibility on a streaming show. Also you would not have as many episodes on a streaming show. You wouldn’t have as many seasons.

The math of television has changed, and the idea that you can take a long time to find yourself by really sitting with the characters. It feels like an extinct species already, which bums me out.

Maybe this is blind optimism, but it feels like we might be working our way back to that.

I think that the binge was fun for a while, and I do think that there are some shows that play very well on a binge. Both of these qualify, even though I consumed them weekly when they aired.

But I think there’s a lot of shows that kind of come and go in a weekend, and then you never think about them again, and suddenly they’re back 2 1/2 years later, and you have to try to remember what happened and whether you still care.

Beyond that, a lot of these shows are almost exclusively serialized. You hear this phrase that drives me up a wall all the time, which is: “We’re making a 10-hour movie.” Nobody wants a 10-hour movie.

Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad are great because it’s a long serialized story, but each episode is satisfying in and of itself. I feel like in a lot of sense, you’re getting some audience fatigue with that other model of storytelling.

I ran a blog for the newspaper for years. Then one day, the higher-ups decided they didn’t need a blog anymore. So they deleted my whole archive. It felt like an incalculable loss, but at the same time, I understood why, to them, it was nothing. It’s not a book. It’s not a tangible thing. It’s just several years’ worth of my thoughts and labour, and who gives a shit about that? As someone who’s been publishing essays online for 20-odd years, I’m wondering if you ever worry about losing your archives, and if this book is, in your mind, a way to preserve them.

That’s definitely a part of it. I’ve written for websites that don’t exist anymore, and their content has kind of been absorbed by other websites in a very disorganized way. But it’s entirely possible that the later websites will also disappear, and then it’s gone.

So in that respect, it feels very reassuring that I can turn to my right and look at my bookshelf and all of my Sopranos essays are in a book, all of my Breaking Bad essays are in a book, and now all of my Better Call Saul essays are in a book.

I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you what you’re watching right now.

I’m watching a lot of Severance. I mentioned The Pitt on Max. I like that a lot. I’m watching The White Lotus at the moment. I mean, those are kind of the three big things right now, and I’m enjoying them a lot.