'Breaking Bad' prequel shifts spotlight to Naperville's Bob Odenkirk

Walter White may be dead and (presumably) buried, but “Breaking Bad” fans won't be totally left out in the cold with the premiere of its prequel, “Better Call Saul.”

The hourlong drama series, which premieres Sunday, Feb. 8, on AMC, follows the exploits and evolution of the character who became popular during the latter years of “Bad's” 2008-13 run, Saul Goodman — aka Jimmy McGill (played by Bob Odenkirk) — as he morphs from struggling lawyer to the sleazy strip-mall shyster who would become White's attorney.

Joining Odenkirk from the previous series are Jonathan Banks as future fixer Mike Ehrmantraut, along with Michael McKean as Saul's more legitimate lawyer brother Chuck; Rhea Seehorn as Saul's law colleague Kim Wexler; Patrick Fabian as Chuck's law partner Howard Hamlin; and Michael Mando as calculating career criminal Nacho Varga.

“I had to rethink him,” says Odenkirk of his character at a recent gathering of TV critics in Pasadena, Calif. “He's a different guy. The guy you're going to meet in this show is a far more dimensional character than Saul Goodman was on ‘Breaking Bad,' a much richer character, but by necessity, he's on screen a lot more and the story's about him, and so I had to do the job of acting and reading the script and talking to (co-creators) Vince (Gilligan) and Peter (Gould) about the character and figuring out ... these new sides of the character.”

Standing in sharp contrast to shady Saul is brother Chuck, an honest attorney with an as-yet-undisclosed rare illness and a deep and abiding respect for the law.

“I'm the one who has done very well sticking by the law,” says McKean in a separate interview. “... I'm the one who says, ‘Well you could do that except it's wrong and against the law.' Now that doesn't mean that lawyers always make the right choice or that lawyers always do something that's going to be for the good of humanity. They're going to do what's good for their clients.

“The law is Chuck's deity,” McKean continues. “If there is an absolute, religious people, they say God is the absolute. That's who we go to. The word. Well, this is the word to Chuck, the law, and it's something that escapes Jimmy because what Chuck knows about the law is a lot more than what Jimmy knows. And their roles are not exactly reversed now, but Jimmy is the one who is kind of taking care of creature comforts for Chuck, whereas Chuck used to be the guy who'd fly to Chicago to bail him out of jail or who'd get him a job in the mailroom of my firm, to do things for him like that. But I guess you could say he's sort of the conscience, yeah.”