There are light spoilers for both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad in this story, but only for clarity and explanation. Nothing that will spoil your experience of watching the shows (we hope).
You’ve heard about this zany, moving lawyer story that just concluded and you’re thinking of diving in.
Just as you queue up Better Call Saul, a friend lets you know that the show is actually a spinoff. More specifically, it’s a prequel to another amazing show made by the same people. This other one is about a couple of folks who make meth, and the drug world that surrounds them, and it’s totally worth watching.
Do you need to watch Breaking Bad before you watch Better Call Saul though? After asking this, your friend tells you that it’s totally cool to dive into the prequel first first, but, there’s a point when you should go ahead and watch its predecessor to fully understand what goes down and complete the story of Better Call Saul.
How does one go about interspersing those two shows together? As long as you’re cool with a few things being a mystery, there’s actually a pretty cool and neat breaking point that you could put a pause on Better Call Saul, go ahead and binge your way through Breaking Bad, and come back around again for the ultimate pay off in the latter show. While it’s not necessary to be completely familiar with both shows to enjoy them, it’s well worth it to have seen Breaking Bad before you reach the very end of Better Call Saul.
Watching the shows chronologically
In Better Call Saul, the main character’s name is actually Jimmy McGill (played wonderfully by Bob Odenkirk). Don’t worry, he eventually gets called Saul (we’re not here to spoil it and tell you how or why though, but it’s a pretty cool story). There are some allusions to another name for the main character as well as you get into Better Call Saul, but the mystery of it is just about the same whether you’ve seen Breaking Bad or not, just a bit different.
That said, go ahead and launch into Better Call Saul. Feel free to continue through to the final season of the show, season six. This is when you’ll want to not just plow through it from start to finish. Go ahead and watch all the way through the ninth episode, titled “Fun and Games” and give yourself a round of applause and probably a box of tissues.
Great, now we’re ready to cut back. Load up Breaking Bad after you’ve finished episode nine of season six, and go ahead and watch all five glorious seasons of that show now.
Quite a different story right? This is where you have another decision to make, as there is a Breaking Bad movie spinoff as well, called El Camino, and it’s a story about Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) and what happens to him once Breaking Bad concludes.
How deep do you wanna dig?
Basically, you can watch that too before hopping back to Better Call Saul. Or, if you’re eager to get through the final episodes of that show — I know I was — then save El Camino for after you’ve finished both series.
The amazing thing is that Better Call Saul spans a much longer expanse of time than the Walter White (Bryan Cranston) driven Breaking Bad does. The two overlap for only two years of ‘real-time’ in the shows, from 2008 to 2010, the latter year being about when Better Call Saul’s finale takes place. Better Call Saul roughly covers 2002 through to 2010, removing flashbacks and such, however, the bulk of the six seasons actually occur from 2002 to 2004.
Meanwhile, Breaking Bad started roughly in 2008 (both shows feature flashbacks that go back much further than that) and came to its conclusion in 2010.
And if you want to really just put something crazy together with a lot of pausing and switching between shows, there’s this thread created by Reddit user u/milestogo171 — if you want to go through and watch both shows “in order.” And there’s this handy resource as well that lets you know approximately when things are happening season by season.
Now it’s time to watch the final four episodes of Better Call Saul and say goodbye to this gorgeous, gutting, emotional universe you’ve immersed yourself in, and wonder, will anyone from Better Call Saul get a spinoff show or even a movie?
We absolutely hope so.