Better Call Saul has only been off the air for one month, and fans already know what's next both for showrunner Vince Gilligan and star Rhea Seehorn. Both Gilligan and Seehorn are going to collaborate again on Gilligan's next project, which has found a home at Apple TV Plus.
While details are scarce regarding what the show is about or what role Seehorn is going to play, Gilligan and Seehorn will be working together on his new show that has been greenlit for Apple TV Plus. The streamer won a bidding war for the project against potential contenders that included Amazon Prime and AMC.
Deadline reports that Gilligan will serve as executive producer and showrunner, while Jeff Frost and Diane Mercer will also executive produce. Jenn Carroll of Gilligan's High Bridge Productions will produce, while Sony Pictures Television is the studio behind the series, having also produced Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. "After fifteen years, I figured it was time to take a break from writing antiheroes… and who’s more heroic than the brilliant Rhea Seehorn? It’s long past time she had her own show, and I feel lucky to get to work on it with her,” Gilligan said in a statement. “And what nice symmetry to be reunited with Zack Van Amburg, Jamie Erlicht and Chris Parnell! Jamie and Zack were the first two people to say yes to Breaking Bad all those years ago. They’ve built a great team at Apple, and my wonderful, long-time partners at Sony Pictures Television and I are excited to be in business with them."
When Better Call Saul was coming to an end, Gilligan said that he wanted to write a "good guy" for his next project as opposed to the two antiheroes he popularized, Walter White and Saul Goodman. Details on this new project are scarce, but it has been described as a "grounded genre drama" that will be a notable departure from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Apple TV Plus has given Gilligan's new project a two-season straight-to-series order, having "aggressively" pursued it when Gilligan was pitching his concept to several networks and platforms, reportedly seeking a budget of roughly $13.5M-$15M per episode.
Fans of Gilligan's work should be looking forward to this. If Gilligan lives up to his word of creating a good guy, as he said, then he's going to venture into a completely different territory than what he's used to. Gilligan has proven to make some of the most compelling characters that ever graced television, and that doesn't just come from the main character from both of his previous series. Kim Wexler was arguably Better Call Saul's best character, which fans certainly did not expect when the show started. Now fans are going to see if he can keep that up with characters who have both good morals and good intentions.
The fact that this came out as fast as it did also demonstrates how in demand Gilligan and Seehorn are. They did so well turning Better Call Saul into the masterpiece that it is that, again, only a month after the show was done, the two of them have already been hired for a new project. It takes people of rare talents to get their next job that quickly after having just completed one that took them seven years to perfect. With all of that in mind, there's no reason to think they can't do it again.
Better Call Saul can currently be streamed on Netflix.
Source: Deadline