Saul Goodman is back at Cinnabon.
As Season 3 of "Better Call Saul" opens Monday night on AMC, we're once more in Omaha, Neb., where "Gene" is manager of a mall storefront, baking and frosting rolls, coolly managing the mostly young and female staff.
Then a fateful lunch break flashes us back, once again, to 2002 Albuquerque, where Jimmy McGill (Saul and Gene and Jimmy, they're all Bob Odenkirk) practices low-rent law, pulls off scams and tries to wrangle his brilliant, unbalanced older brother, Chuck (Michael McKean). Complications, and they are many, ensue.
Saul, as we knew him then, became a favorite, often a source of comic relief, on "Breaking Bad," which ended its run on AMC in 2013. Fans and critics began joking, even before the final season, about spinning off the character into his own series, which would inevitably be called "Better Call Saul."
Vince Gilligan, who created "Breaking Bad," and Peter Gould, who came up with the Saul character in the first place, pondered the possibility. They weren't eager to taint the legacy of "Breaking Bad," one of television's greatest dramas, by diluting it with a sequel.
How about making a comedy, with Saul as a lawyer with wacky clients? That first idea was soon dismissed, possibly saving viewers from another "Joey" or "AfterMASH."
Instead, Gilligan and Gould flipped the spinoff on its head, turning it from sequel to prequel and looking at how Saul Goodman, or Jimmy McGill as we would come to know him, became the Saul Goodman of "Breaking Bad."
The result is a series satisfying in its own right, different enough from "Breaking Bad" to avoid direct comparisons while treating fans of that show to appearances by some of its characters, including the terrifying Tuco and his henchmen. Jonathan Banks, as Mike Ehrmantraut, is a regular.
"Better Call Saul" rewards faithful viewing that doesn't demand nonstop action but is willing to let events take their course while appreciating the characters. It can be slow but, like war, it is punctuated with moments of terror.
Speaking of terror, hold tight this season for the arrival of Gus Fring, played by Giancarlo Esposito.
Gilligan and Gould, co-creators and co-showrunners of "Better Call Saul," understand better than anyone the balancing act that the show requires as it follows the development of Jimmy into Saul.
"When we started the show, it was sort of a puzzle," Gould said when AMC rounded up producers and cast members for a Q&A with TV critics in Los Angeles this winter.
"How does a guy who is so decent," he continued, interrupting himself to say that Jimmy "has a core of decency. He's doing things, really, always for the best of reasons. He's doing them out of love, really, more than anything else."
So "how does he become Saul Goodman? For the first two seasons, it seems almost an insoluble problem. Sometimes we thought to ourselves, 'Is this guy ever going to become Saul Goodman?'"
But this season, as it progressed, "I started to understand it a little bit better," Gould said. "I think we all started to understand it a little bit better. It takes a lot of pressure to turn a lump of coal into a diamond and a hell of a lot of pressure to turn a decent man like Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman."
In "Breaking Bad," Gilligan metaphorically turned "Mr. Chips into Scarface," so he is familiar with pacing such transitions. Of "Better Call Saul," though, he said, "Quite frankly, we thought it was going to be easier to write when we started."
You know "what the end goal, the end result is, Saul Goodman. Every season is inching the ball down the field. It's inching closer and closer. Sometimes baby steps, sometimes large leaps of the journey."
Also inching forward, and backward, is the relationship between Jimmy and love interest Kim, played by Rhea Seehorn.
"There are clearly a few things in Jimmy's life that he loves a lot, and Kim is one of those," Odenkirk said, adding that "when I think about Saul, I think about a guy who probably doesn't have those things in his life. ... I wonder how he doesn't have someone like Kim in his life anymore, because I don't think he has anyone he's trying to be good for, or be a great, better person for."
For Esposito, the challenge was playing a Gus Fring he never knew.
"I had to remind myself, in coming back, to be very present within the character and that we were at a time where he is a little more immature than where we left off. He's still finding his way to the businessman that he is, and finding his way in regard to ... where he was with the (drug) cartel."
The time shifts that make character development so interesting and challenging are a hallmark of "Better Call Saul" that won't go away, Gould said.
"One of the privileges we give ourselves is moving back and forth in time," he said. "We always talk about ('Saul') as a prequel to 'Breaking Bad,' but in some ways, it's also a sequel. So who knows what we're going to see?"
