Interview with Better Call Saul's Co - Executive Producer Stewart Lyons

SpoilerTV:  What can we expect from the season finale?

Stewart Lyons:   You can expect to watch it, I think you can expect to be entertained!

SpoilerTV:  Okay, Monday night's episode, we got to see why Jimmy didn't get hired at Chuck's law firm.

Stewart Lyons:  Right.

SpoilerTV:  Is that the beginning of Jimmy turning into Saul, the transformation of him becoming into a dirty lawyer?

Stewart Lyons:    I think that the question becomes how do people become anything? It doesn't start from a blank slate. Jimmy has a very detailed background that they've created of Slipping Jimmy. Is he becoming something that he isn't or is he turning into something that he was and he was hoping to get to somewhere else? I think that that's the tough part. The thing that keeps coming through, that people have a tendency to overlook, is how great a thinker and lawyer Jimmy McGill really is. He set his brother up to basically.

 ... It was a wonderful cross-examination in that home office, in which, basically, by the time Jimmy springs the information about the telephone having no battery, there's no place for his brother to go to lie. He has trapped his brother in revealing the worst secret that he could've revealed. That was a masterful stroke of cross-examination of lawyering, as it were.

I think that question of, "When does he become Saul?" He may become Saul or he may just reveal to himself that he's Saul. We don't know that yet.

 The joy in watching what Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan write, and it's the joy that is the common factor with Breaking Bad, is you just can't get ahead of these guys in telling the story. No matter what you dream up, they'll dream up something smarter, more original, unexpected. If you can outsmart them, then write them a letter telling them how you outsmarted them. They'll put you on the writing staff, because they're that good.

SpoilerTV: Jonathan Banks did a great job in that episode that was based on Mike.

Stewart Lyons: I just love that episode. I thought it was just one of the greatest episodes of television ever, period.

SpoilerTV: Yeah, he did such an amazing job. I would die if he did not get another Emmy nomination.

Stewart Lyons: Oh, yeah, I'm pissed that he didn't get the award the last time. If he doesn't get it this time ...

SpoilerTV: I know. Will there be another episode based on Mike?

Stewart Lyons: Can't speculate. There's certainly season two. If you had a resource as brilliant as Jonathan Banks, you'd be a fool not to use them and these are not fools.

SpoilerTV: Is there anything you would like to add?

Stewart Lyons: I can tell you that the writing stays brilliant until the end. I think that the show is unique, in the sense that it doesn't fall into neat little packages. Everything that you're seeing is designed and controlled by Peter and Vince, so that you're really getting the author's vision rendered as precisely as possible. Not just because Peter and Vince both directed episodes in the first year, but also Tom Schnauz directed an episode as well.

People from the writer's room are coming out and making sure that this stuff is done as precise and beautifully as they imagined it when they wrote it. It's a different kind of television. It's a kind of television that people are responding to. Not a neat little cute story all in one hour, but an evolving character study that ... Let's see how many years of the journey we all take with it.

About the Author - Shirleena Cunningham

TV Review for SpoilerTV. Has been with SpoilerTV for over a year. My credits included Law and Order Special Victims Unit, How I Met Your Mother, Bones, Chicago P. D and GIRLS. I'm also a big animal rights activists. I'm a Photographer, Writer, Graphic Designer and Illustrator.

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