The Five Spot: Better Call Saul Was Almost A Much Funnier, Potentially Worse Show

Also: Stinky movie stars and some useful screencaps I made

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The whole thing is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go.

FIVE: Well, that would have changed things

This is a long walk to a silly destination but it’s worth it so stretch your legs…

Better Call Saul, the basically perfect Breaking Bad prequel that showed us the origin of Bob Odenkirk’s shady lawyer character, opened with an extended flash-forward black-and-white scene where the man we knew as Saul Goodman was a mustachioed Cinnabon employee named Gene who worked at a mall in Nebraska. We then learned that this is where he ended up after the events of Breaking Bad forced him into hiding. And it was all especially funny because the character himself kind of predicted it exactly. In a scene in the final season of Breaking Bad, in the episode right before the series finale, Saul Goodman and Walter White were waiting for a ride to whisk them away and give them their new black market identities and Saul said the following line of dialogue: “If I’m lucky, a month from now, best case scenario, I’m managing a Cinnabon in Omaha.”

So, yes, perfect. And kind of beautiful. This is the attention to detail and world-building that made these shows so special, and just the audacity to take a silly throwaway line like that and make it a pivotal aspect of a much-hyped spinoff is admirable on its own. Every season of Better Call Saul would take us back to that Cinnabon briefly, just as a reminder that none of this was going to work out for the slick and occasionally sweet rascal we were watching slide into infamy. It always made me very hungry. Here’s the scene from the premiere.

So that gets us caught up on the Ballad of Cinnabon Gene. And it brings us to this: Peter Gould, the creator of Better Call Saul and a writer-producer on Breaking Bad, recently shared an excerpt from the original draft of that old Breaking Bad script, the one with the line about working at a Cinnabon that they later paid off in the scene above this paragraph. Maybe you’ll notice something different about it…

Yes, that’s right. Hot Topic. That’s where Saul Goodman joked he would end up. Not at Cinnabon. Which, I mean… it’s a much funnier visual, just the idea of Bob Odenkirk wearing eyeliner as he rings up purchases for suburban goth teens in Nebraska. And it kind of changes the whole vibe of the second show, assuming they chose to follow through the same way they did with the Cinnabon line. Again, the visual is funnier, and I’m sure the people who made these shows could have figured out how to make it all play out in a way that works, but… I don’t know, man. There’s something about the Cinnabon that was so… right. Just the idea that this guy who lived for the action, a juice addict through and through, was stuck living a mundane life of rolling out the exact same corporate-approved cinnamon buns every single day. No offense to Cinnabon here. They’re a fine company and they make a fine product. And they were apparently very cool about it despite, according to Gould’s follow-up post about it all, not having any clue it was going to happen.

“In fact, we found out that Hot Topic was carrying #BreakingBad stuff and we didn’t want to make it look like a cheap promo. So Cinnabon it was! (And they had no idea about it until the episode aired).”

Two notes in conclusion:

• It is always interesting to me how small choices like this can have such a ripple effect going forward and it’s fun to learn about them afterwards

• I really want a Cinnabon again now

Meet me at the mall.

FOUR: I am so proud of whoever came up with this goofy plot for a new Einstein-adjacent network TV show