Gennifer Hutchison has been writing for “Slippin’” Jimmy McGill for three seasons now, and in no way is she tired of that. But like so many fans of the “Breaking Bad” universe, the executive producer thought Bob Odenkirk’s character would have adopted his Saul Goodman moniker by now.
“It’s constantly evolving,” Hutchinson, who penned Monday’s finale, told TheWrap of the writers room’s countdown to the name change we’re all waiting on. “We absolutely thought we’d get to Saul faster, but just realized that very rarely do people become who they are overnight. It’s usually a step forward and a step back. Just exploring that has turned out to be really gratifying for us and has felt more organic.”
Fans of the series know that in certain situations calling for an alibi, Jimmy does occasionally pull out the play on “It’s all good, man.” But that’s as much as we’ve gotten over 30 episodes.
Considering the entirety of “Breaking Bad” lasted just 62 episodes, we’re about halfway to a mirror-image run with “Saul’s” source material — and the dude is still just James. That slow burn suits Hutchison just fine — but it wasn’t the plan.
“We definitely thought he’d be fully Saul by now. And it’s really kind of fun that he’s not. I just love Jimmy so much,” Hutchison said. “As long as I get to write Jimmy, I’m happy.”
The occasionally crawling pace to “Better Call Saul” isn’t just limited to the protagonist’s contact information. Calendar-flipping hasn’t exactly been speedy in AMC’s Albuquerque, New Mexico, area.
“Our show always moves at a deliberate pace,” Hutchison said. “Sometimes we move a little bit slower than we might have expected. We’re in 2003 now, and I think we started in 2002. We have a very intricate timeline that our writers’ assistant and our script coordinator keeps, making sure that we know exactly where we are. We have a certain number of years before to get to ‘Breaking Bad,’ we want to make sure everybody has their target by the time we get there.”
No issue there: Saul Goodman meets Walter White (Bryan Cranston) in 2008, which means these two are still half-a-decade apart from their fateful consultation.
“Breaking Bad,” which ran for five seasons, only spanned two years of TV time.
Read more from our interview with Hutchison about the Season 3 finale here.