Vince Gilligan

Say what you will about Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan, but there are few showrunners who are better at starting a series off with a bang. Who could forget the spectacle, from the pilot episode of Breaking Bad, of Bryan Cranston’s pants-less, intense-looking Walter White, addressing his family – and by extension, the audience – by saying “My name is Walter Hartwell White. I live at 308 Negra Arroyo Lane, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87104. To all law-enforcement entities, this is not an admission of guilt?" Or Bob Odenkirk’s half-hapless, half-sly Jimmy McGill, aka Saul Goodman, leading a black-and-white half-life in Omaha, Nebraska, as we slowly, inexorably observe the circumstances that have led to his downfall?

Next week will see the final tranche of episodes of the sixth series of Better Call Saul swaggering onto Netflix. They follow a tense mid-season cliffhanger that saw the sudden death of one major character and the unexpected return of a former nemesis. Expectations for the last installment are appropriately high, not least because of the much-heralded return of the two characters who defined the Breaking Bad universe from which the series was spun off: Aaron Paul’s hapless Jesse Pinkman and, most excitingly of all, Bryan Cranston’s Walter White. Better Call Saul’s creators, Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan, are intelligent men. Gilligan was responsible for Breaking Bad, on which Gould was a writer, producer and director.