With Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul behind him, Vince Gilligan has been busy crafting a brand new series, which is going to be quite different from the world of crime and methamphetamine he’s been exploring for the last fifteen years.
The new series, which is still untitled, will star Rhea Seehorn, who starred alongside Bob Odenkirk on Better Call Saul. While speaking with Variety, Vince Gilligan gave an update on the new series. While it’s been said that it has a sci-fi element, Gilligan would call it “mild science fiction” over “heavy science fiction.“
“It’s going to be fun and different,” Gilligan said. “I have no prediction as to how folks to react to it — whether they’ll love it or hate it, or somewhere in the vast in-between. But I know it’s a story that interests me, and Rhea will be playing a very different character than she played on “Saul.” The weird thing is that it takes place in Albuquerque, except it’s a whole different world. There’s no overlap that I can see. She’s playing a character who is not Kim Wexler, but hopefully people will roll with that. I’m nervous. It’ll be interesting to see how folks react to it.” When asked if he could tease anything about the plot, Gilligan said:
The world changes very abruptly in the first episode, and then it is quite different. It’s the modern world — the world we live in — but it changes very abruptly. And the consequences that that reaps hopefully provide drama for many, many episodes after that.
Now that the WGA strike is over, Vince Gilligan and the writing team are officially back to work, they just need a little refresher on what they’ve already done.
“We’re officially back in the writers room on Monday,” Gilligan said. “I’m spending most of my time in New Mexico, because I live here now. But when I go back [to Los Angeles], we’re going to reopen the writers room for the first couple of weeks in person. When the strike hit, we were very close to the end of breaking the first season. So we’re going to go back and finish the second-to-last episode and then get to work on the last episode. We lost a lot of momentum, certainly. I can’t even remember where we were exactly. So I’m going to be spending this week reading through previous episodes and old notes to figure out where we stand. We’re looking forward to getting back to work. We would have been shooting already if it weren’t for the strike. The strike was a sad necessity, and we’re all glad that it’s behind us. I’m a little sorry that we’ll be in the teeth of winter here in Albuquerque when we finally do shoot. So that’s not going to be fun — it’ll be way below freezing and it’s supposed to be a rainy winter here, too.”