Topping Better Call Saul: Vince Gilligan’s Next Trick Pluribus Might Be His Hardest Yet

The Long Shadow of a Prequel

When Vince Gilligan announced The Pluribus, his next television project, my first reaction wasn’t excitement — it was apprehension. Because honestly, how do you top Better Call Saul?

I say this as someone who loved Breaking Bad. I devoured every episode, watched Walter White’s slow moral collapse with horrified fascination, and thought Gilligan had closed that universe perfectly. When the idea of a Saul Goodman spinoff was announced, it felt almost unnecessary — a clever side character getting more screen time sounded like a recipe for dilution, not revelation.

But Better Call Saul turned out to be something else entirely: a patient, devastating character study that, at its best, surpassed Breaking Bad in craft, tone, and emotional depth. It surprised me, then humbled me. If Breaking Bad was about transformation, Better Call Saul was about revelation — peeling back a man’s layers until we saw not who he became, but who he always was.

And as Gilligan gears up for The Pluribus, it’s hard not to think he’s facing the same impossible standard he set for himself.

Becoming Saul

Better Call Saul begins before Breaking Bad and stretches beyond it — though you don’t need either timeline spoiled to appreciate its slow, deliberate structure. It’s a show about Jimmy McGill, a man whose good intentions and survival instincts collide until they fuse into the persona we know as Saul Goodman.

The genius of the show is that it resists the easy descent narrative. Jimmy doesn’t “break bad.” He slides, rationalizes, adapts, and performs. There’s a human tragedy in that ordinariness — a reminder that corruption doesn’t always roar; sometimes it whispers.

Gilligan and Peter Gould treat moral decline as something procedural, almost bureaucratic. Every choice feels small and logical in the moment, which makes the larger pattern that much more haunting. Where Breaking Bad was a chemical reaction, Better Call Saul is erosion — slow, precise, irreversible.

The Unveiling of Kim

If Jimmy McGill is the story’s gravitational center, Kim Wexler is its revelation. Played by Rhea Seehorn in what may be one of the finest performances on television, Kim begins as Jimmy’s moral counterweight — disciplined, composed, ethical to a fault. But over six seasons, we see something far more interesting than a descent or redemption arc.

Her character doesn’t transform as much as she reveals herself. The brilliance of Seehorn’s portrayal lies in how she threads the smallest gestures — a pause before a lie, a flicker of delight at mischief — into something both alluring and unsettling. Kim’s evolution is subtle, even imperceptible at times, until we realize, toward the end, that she was never entirely who we thought she was.

That’s where Gilligan’s genius as a storyteller shows. In Breaking Bad, Walter White’s transformation was explicit — the teacher becomes the criminal, the meek becomes the monstrous. In Better Call Saul, Kim’s journey is quieter, more psychological. It’s not a transformation; it’s an unveiling.

By the final stretch, I found myself more haunted by Kim than by any character in the Gilligan universe. Her choices, her silences, her moral gymnastics — they linger. Few television characters have occupied that kind of gray space so convincingly.

A Villain to Remember

Every great drama needs a worthy antagonist, and Better Call Saul gives us Lalo Salamanca — a villain as magnetic as he is terrifying. Tony Dalton’s Lalo is charming, intelligent, and utterly unflappable, which makes him even more frightening.

Unlike the cartoonish menace of many TV villains, Lalo’s power comes from composure. He doesn’t yell; he smiles. He doesn’t need chaos; he orchestrates it. Watching him move through the story is like watching a cobra decide when to strike.

Gilligan’s writing treats him not as a spectacle but as a presence — an existential force that warps every scene he enters. The result is one of television’s most memorable antagonists, precisely because the show refuses to overuse him.

The Art of Restraint

What sets Better Call Saul apart from so many modern dramas is its faith in the audience’s intelligence. It never spoon-feeds. It trusts silence, trusts that we can sit through long, wordless scenes of Jimmy tinkering, scheming, or just sitting — and still feel the tension build.

The cinematography, too, is deliberate. Every frame looks like it was argued over in the editing room — the symmetry of a courtroom, the emptiness of the desert, the gray anonymity of post-Breaking Bad Omaha. The show’s tone remains remarkably consistent from start to finish, balancing moral ambiguity with visual elegance.

It’s rare today to see television that demands patience without rewarding it with cheap twists. Better Call Saul rewards attention. It rewards noticing. And when it does speak — when the dialogue lands — it cuts clean.

The Faltering End

If I have one reservation, it’s that the final season didn’t quite match the precision of what came before. It aimed for poetry and achieved it in tone, but at the cost of pacing. The writing occasionally felt stretched — less focused on tension, more on tying emotional bows.

That said, endings are nearly impossible to get right, especially when expectations tower this high. And Better Call Saul earns its conclusion with grace. It’s not flashy, but it’s deeply human. The show doesn’t just end — it exhales.

Even so, I couldn’t help thinking that the last stretch, while poetic, lacked the razor-sharp rhythm of earlier seasons. For a series that built itself on restraint, it stumbled only slightly in trying to find closure.

The Bar for Pluribus

Now, with The Pluribus on the horizon, Vince Gilligan finds himself in a position few creators ever reach: competing not with others, but with his own legacy.

If Breaking Bad was his bold experiment and Better Call Saul his masterpiece of precision, then The Pluribus will have to justify its existence in a world where television has already seen what Gilligan at his best can do. Expectations aren’t just high — they’re astronomical.

And yet, maybe that’s the challenge he thrives on. Better Call Saul itself began as a risk, one that no one believed could stand next to Breaking Bad. It not only stood — it redefined what a prequel could be.

As I think back on Jimmy and Kim, on the desert stillness, the whispered cons, the moral fog that hung over every frame, I realize Gilligan didn’t just tell a story about a lawyer or a criminal. He told one about identity — how we build it, how we justify it, how we live with it.

If The Pluribus can capture even a fraction of that truth — that quiet devastation of being human — then Gilligan may yet surprise us again. But make no mistake: topping Better Call Saul may be the hardest trick he’s ever pulled.