Breaking Bad’s Vince Gilligan Says Next Series Is “Mild Sci-Fi”

Vince Gilligan is returning to Albuquerque—and science fiction. The acclaimed creator of AMC’s Breaking Bad and its spin-off Better Call Saul, who also worked for multiple years on Fox’s The X-Files (and co-created spin-off The Lone Gunman) just revealed a tiny bit of information about his new series starring Emmy-nominated Saul star Rhea Seehorn.

In a new interview with Variety, Gilligan said now that the WGA strike is over, the writers room for the as-yet-untitled show is reopening. “When the strike hit, we were very close to the end of breaking the first season,” he explained. “So we’re going to go back and finish the second-to-last episode and then get to work on the last episode … 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.”

The show is filming in Albuquerque, New Mexico, following in the footsteps of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul—but its genre will reach even further back into Gilligan’s career. “I wouldn’t call this heavy science fiction, I would call it mild science fiction,” he said. “But it does have a sci-fi element to it, at its core. And there’s no crime, and no methamphetamine. It’s going to be fun and different … 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.”

As for the plot, all he would tease is that it takes place in “the world we live in,” but a version of it that “changes very abruptly in the first episode, and then it is quite different … and the consequences that that reaps hopefully provide drama for many, many episodes after that.”

Considering their track records, we’ll definitely be interested to see what Gilligan and Seehorn have coming up next.

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