Better Call Saul Trivia Quiz: Can You Pass It?

Trivia Quizzes TV Shows

Spin-offs built around a supporting character from a beloved show almost never live up to the original, and prequels carry an even steeper handicap since audiences already know exactly how everything has to end. Better Call Saul somehow avoided both traps entirely, taking a fast-talking, morally elastic lawyer from Breaking Bad and building a slow-burning, quietly tragic character study around him that many critics and fans eventually argued was just as strong as the show it spun off from, and possibly even more emotionally devastating by the time it reached its finale.

Each season opens in black and white with a man calling himself Gene Takavic managing a Cinnabon in an Omaha shopping mall, watching the food court through a security mirror and flinching at anyone who looks twice at him, which means the series is technically narrated from a point after Breaking Bad has already ended. Those cold opens accumulate across seven years of broadcast, from a taxi with an Albuquerque air freshener to a cancer patient trapped in a dumpster enclosure, until the last two episodes hand the entire runtime over to Gene and let the timeline collapse. Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, who wrote the 2009 Breaking Bad episode that introduced Saul Goodman in the first place, ran the show on AMC from February 8, 2015 to August 15, 2022 across 63 episodes.

Jimmy McGill practices elder law out of a storage closet behind a Vietnamese nail salon, drives a Suzuki Esteem with a mismatched door, and builds the Sandpiper Crossing class action into something that could have made him legitimate. His older brother Chuck, a founding partner at Hamlin Hamlin McGill who claims to suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity and spends most of two seasons in a house without electricity, is the one blocking him, and the courtroom hearing in which Jimmy plants a cell phone battery in Chuck’s jacket pocket to prove the condition is psychosomatic is the hinge the whole series turns on. Kim Wexler, played by Rhea Seehorn in a role invented for this show, is the more interesting problem: not a victim of Jimmy’s schemes but a willing co-author of them, and the person whose decision to destroy Howard Hamlin’s reputation sets up the worst thing that happens to anyone.

The second track belongs to Mike Ehrmantraut, working a parking booth at the courthouse before Gus Fring puts him on payroll, and it fills in the machinery Breaking Bad only referenced. Nacho Varga spends four seasons trying to get his father out of the way of the Salamancas, Lalo Salamanca arrives in season four as the only member of that family with charm and patience, and Werner Ziegler brings a crew of German engineers to Albuquerque to dig out the laundry basement that will later hold a meth superlab. The desert episode in which Jimmy and Mike walk back with seven million dollars in cash and one bullet-punctured water jug runs almost wordlessly for long stretches.

The series drew 53 Emmy nominations and won none of them, a record no other drama holds, and Bob Odenkirk suffered a heart attack on set during production of the final season and returned six weeks later. The finale sends Jimmy to a federal prison in Montana with an 86-year sentence after he throws away a seven-year plea deal to tell the truth about Chuck in open court. A shaky season number or a half-remembered name is worth checking against the results once the last question is in.