The idea was that each week, Saul would be visited by a different stand-up comedian in need of legal advice. But that premise was scrapped when Gould and Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan realized that they didn’t “know anything about the half-hour idiom,” thus depriving the world of a show in which Saul Goodman would, say, handle Paul F. Tompkins’ overdue parking tickets. Obviously, this was just the kernel of an idea, but it’s still kind of surprising that any project could go from a light-hearted riff on a Comedy Central cartoon to an occasionally soul-crushing drama in which drug dealers get shot in the head on a weekly basis.
The pair then moved onto an idea that would have made Saul a “sort of a Jerry Maguire for criminals” in that he was “assembling teams” of crooks and “getting involved in their personal lives” – not profiting off of potential brain injuries and/or drunkenly groping his female employees. That too, fell by the wayside when the pair realized that Jimmy’s transformation into Saul was the ultimate “tragedy” of the story … well, that and being stuck in a windowless Cinnabon.
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