Bob Odenkirk’s ‘Better Call Saul’ Follow-Up ‘Straight Man’ Ordered to Series at AMC
Following the successful Season 6 premiere of Better Call Saul, AMC is officially greenlighting Bob Odenkirk‘s latest project, the drama series Straight Man.
The show was announced earlier this year and appears to be on a fast track with the series expected to debut in 2023. From Aaron Zelman and Paul Lieberstein, Straight Man is an adaptation of Richard Russo’s novel of the same name and will be Odenkirk’s third series with the network following Breaking Bad and spinoff Better Call Saul.
The first season will feature eight hour-long episodes executive produced by Odenkirk, Zelman, Lieberstein, Peter Farrelly, Mark Johnson, Richard Russo, Naomi Odenkirk, and Marc Provissiero. Straight Man is a mid-life crisis tale set at Railton College, a badly underfunded school in the Pennsylvania rust belt. The story is told in the first person by William Henry Devereaux, Jr. (Odenkirk), the unlikely chairman of the college’s English department.
(Credit: Joe Pugliese/AMC/Sony Pictures Television)
“The saying goes ‘the third time’s a charm,’ but when it comes to Bob Odenkirk on AMC, the first and second times were about as charming, captivating, and viscerally entertaining as it gets,” said Dan McDermott, president of entertainment and AMC Studios for AMC Networks. “As Better Call Saul begins its epic sixth and final season, we could not be more excited by the prospect of keeping Bob at home on AMC and watching him breathe life into another nuanced, complicated, and unforgettable character.”
When TV Insider caught up with Odenkirk prior to the series pickup, he said of the show, “It’s a great project. I love the tone of it. It’s more comic than Better Call Saul. So far, there’s no guns in it, there’s no drug dealer,” he joked.
“It’s more leaning towards comedy, but still [observes] human character. The atmosphere of it, the milieu of it, the world of academia is a little hot box of feelings and ideas and resentments and personality and intellect and an interesting place to embroil people in. And I think this guy’s an interesting character whose story I want to hear and tell and watch.”
Catch Odenkirk on Better Call Saul‘s final season and stay tuned for his role in Straight Man when it arrives next year on AMC.
Straight Man, Series Premiere, Expected 2023, AMC
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