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Making it legal: AMC phones up highly anticipated new series 'Better Call Saul!'

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Cassie Dresch / TV Media
Bob Odenkirk stars in “Better Call Saul!”

Bob Odenkirk stars in “Better Call Saul!”

"Breaking Bad" is widely considered one of the greatest TV shows of all time. By the end of the five-season series, it had been entered into the 2014 Guinness World Records book as the highest-rated TV series ever and had raked in 16 Emmys, two Golden Globes, two Peabody Awards and a People's Choice Award.

It was a sad day for diehard "Bad" fans who had invested so much into the high school chemistry teacher and his former student from Albuquerque, New Mexico, when the last episode wrapped.

Now, however, there's a new reason for viewers to be excited -- and all it takes is one phone call to Saul. From "Breaking Bad" creator Vince Gilligan and writer Peter Gould, the much-anticipated dramedy "Better Call Saul!" premieres with two new episodes on back-to-back nights -- Sunday, Feb. 8, and Monday, Feb. 9, on AMC, -- before sliding into its regular Monday timeslot the following week.

Bob Odenkirk ("Saturday Night Live," "Mr. Show with Bob and David") stars as the slick, shady criminal lawyer Saul Goodman in this prequel, set six years before "Breaking Bad," when Saul is known by his real name -- Jimmy McGill. "Better Call Saul!" focuses on Jimmy's growth and development into the shifty litigator "Bad" fans quickly fell in love with, showcasing the journey of how Saul Goodman came to be.

"It is the story of a character coming to an understanding of himself, who is searching for his place in the world," Odenkirk told "Variety" in January. "He's trying to be an ethical guy and live by traditional standards of behavior. But he finds himself good at breaking that code and crossing that line, and he's not sure how to use it. He doesn't feel much acceptance in the world he's in, which is a traditional legal world of an old firm that he finds himself in the universe of. So he doesn’t know his place."

Playing Jimmy was a task and a half for Odenkirk, considering Jimmy's practically a different character in "Better Call Saul!" "I had to rethink him," Odenkirk said at the Television Critics Association winter media tour last month. "He's a different guy, a far more dimensional character than Saul Goodman was on 'Breaking Bad.' He's got slippery ethics."

Part of that dimension comes from Gould (the mastermind behind Saul's character) and Gilligan. Initially written as a one-off character, people soon fell in love with Saul Goodman, and the writer and creator wasted no time in tossing out ideas on how to create a show around him.

"We just loved Bob and we loved Saul, and we loved writing words in Saul's mouth. We loved writing the crazy dialogue that Saul produces," Gilligan told the "Toronto Star" after the TCA panel. "It was really as simple as that. Then we said to ourselves: 'How do we build a show around this character?' And then we realized we had to go back and do a prequel to figure this out."

Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn as seen in “Better Call Saul!”

Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn as seen in “Better Call Saul!”

And so, Jimmy McGill was born (so to speak). The project was a long time coming -- tense negotiations between Sony Pictures TV and AMC slowed the process down considerably -- and now fans of Saul get to see his backstory unfold to the point when he first met chemistry-teacher-turned-drug-dealer extraordinaire Walter White (Bryan Cranston, "Malcolm in the Middle").

Fans of "Breaking Bad" who were hoping to see Mr. White and his apprentice Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul, "BoJack Horseman") in the first installment of "Better Call Saul!" unfortunately won't get their wish -- at least not yet. Gilligan and Gould shot down the idea that the meth-making team will make an appearance in the premiere season at the TCA winter media tour, but they left the door open for them -- and other original cast members -- to crop up in the future.

"We want this to stand on its own. We don't want to mislead people in expecting something that's not going to happen. But having said that, everything else is on the table," Gould said.

"We're not saying it's never going to happen," Gilligan added. "I want to see them all eventually show up. The sky's the limit. But we don't want it to feel like a stunt when they show up. If it feels like that, then we in the writers room have done something horribly wrong."

That's not to say that "Breaking Bad" fans won't recognize at least one other face in the show. Jonathan Banks ("Wiseguy") reprises his role as Mike Ehrmantraut, the cool, calculated former cop who served as Saul's personal private investigator in "Bad." "Better Call Saul!" details the origin of the often combative and testy relationship between the lawyer and his fixer, with an early trailer for the series depicting the humorous initial interaction between the two.

Audiences also get the opportunity to meet plenty of new faces in this prequel, including Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn,"Whitney"), the go-to litigator at Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill; Chuck McGill (Michael McKean, "This Is Spinal Tap," 1984), Jimmy's older brother and name partner at Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill; and Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian, "General Hospital"), Chuck's ridiculously good-looking, charismatic law partner.

Fans of the critically acclaimed series "Breaking Bad" may be sad the show has seen its end, but now there's something new to be excited about -- all it takes is one phone call to Saul. From Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, the highly anticipated dramedy "Better Call Saul!" premieres with two new episodes on back-to-back nights Sunday, Feb. 8, and Monday, Feb. 9, on AMC, before sliding into its regular Monday timeslot the following week.