We are absolutely drowning in Better Call Saul promotional teasers.
AMC is flooding the market with little clips and featurettes before the show premieres with a two-night run on 8 and 9 February, and there isn’t even a real trailer yet.
AMC is in need of a hit. Sure it’s zombie drama The Walking Dead is the highest-rated show on television, but once Mad Men bows out in 2015 following Breaking Bad’s blaze of glory last year, the prestige network will be left without any other break-out series. That’s why they really need Better Call Saul, a Breaking Bad prequel featuring Walter White’s hapless lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), to be a success.
So how does that translate into a marketing strategy? A few seconds at a time, it appears. Last night, viewers of The Walking Dead who are brave enough to sit through the commercials caught the latest Better Call Saul teaser disguised as an Acura commercial (or is it an Acura commercial disguised as a Better Call Saul teaser?). We finally saw our first scene from the show, where Saul gets in a fight with Mike (Jonathan Banks) the ex-cop and drug heavy who eventually loses his life at the hands of Walter White (spoiler alert). Does that mean Mike and Saul were buddies before Mike went to work for Gus Fring?
But this is the latest in what appears to be an endless string of little snippets meant to whip us into a frenzy of expectation so that the February premiere will deliver the kind of eyeballs that AMC needs to prove that they still have it. Here’s a look at everything else we’ve gotten so far.
Shred
AMC released this teaser just today to pile on to the Better Call Saul frenzy. In it we see someone shredding a handful of IDs for the same spikey-haired dude and a police report probably for his arrest. It’s classic Saul, and we’ll probably learn more about the identity of this client once the show starts.
Tingle Fingers
Similar to the “Shred” teaser, this hint from two weeks ago sets a mood by showing us a cheap motel room used in a coke-fueled tryst and left in a hurry as the law approaches. We see Saul’s ad circled in the yellow pages as the quarter spent on the vibrating bed finally runs out of time. Again we learn very little. We’ll probably get one of these a week for a month, like some sort of Southwestern Advent calendar.
Greetings From The Set
Clocking in at over two minutes, this treat from early November is the longest video we’ve seen yet, thought mostly it just talks about how great it is for everyone to be back in Albuquerque and working with the same crew. We do get to see some of the other cast members like Michael McKean, who plays Saul’s brother, but God forbid we find out anything substantive about the show.
The Theme Song
Back in October we got a glimpse of what might be the show’s theme song, a honkey-tonk influenced jingle for one of Saul’s late-night television commercials that got him so much business. The only footage we see is of him mugging in the courtroom so you can’t really discern much of what the show will be like. Funny song though.
Behind The Scenes
In August we heard from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan and Better Call Saul creator Peter Gould. In this clip they tell us that the show takes place five years before Saul met Walter White. They also say he used to be a good guy and ask what might have caused him to turn into the huckster he became. Maybe he was driven insane by ceaseless teaser trailers?
Health Insurance and Church Going
Each just 10 seconds, we see Saul deliver one sentence in each, one to a pair of potential clients and one to a courtroom. We learn absolutely nothing from these except that Bob Odenkirk is still alive and well and capable of delivering his lines one at a time.
