Better Call Saul: how many seasons and episodes there are — and why the final episode is almost entirely in black and white
Six seasons, 63 episodes, 53 Emmy nominations, zero wins. The arithmetic of television's most decorated un-awarded show.
The short answer: Better Call Saul ran for six seasons and 63 episodes on AMC, from February 2015 to August 2022, ending with the finale "Saul Gone," written and directed by co-creator Peter Gould. That's exactly one episode more than Breaking Bad's 62 — the prequel quietly outlasting the show that spawned it by a single hour.
The season breakdown:
- Seasons 1–5 (2015–2020): ten episodes each.
- Season 6 (2022): thirteen episodes, aired in two parts — a production that survived both a pandemic shutdown and Bob Odenkirk's on-set cardiac arrest in July 2021.
Every season is streaming, which is how the show keeps recruiting new viewers who then discover the Emmy history and get upset on its behalf. More on that below.
Why the finale is (almost) black and white
The monochrome wasn't a finale gimmick — it was a promise the show made in its first five minutes. From the 2015 series premiere, every scene of Jimmy's post-Breaking Bad life as "Gene Takavic," hiding in an Omaha Cinnabon, was shot in black and white: a life with all the color drained out, literally. For five seasons that meant one cold open a year. Then the final stretch of season 6 moved the entire story into Gene's timeline, and the format came due.
"We were a little scared about having so much of the show in black and white."
— Peter Gould, co-creator, at the post-finale press conference
Gould has said the team considered cutting back to color and rejected it as too Wizard of Oz — so "Saul Gone" stays monochrome throughout, flashbacks included. The "almost" in the headline comes down to two deliberate flashes. In the penultimate episode, Saul's old TV commercials are reflected in color in his glasses at the moment Marion uncovers who he is. And in the finale, when Jimmy and Kim share a cigarette in a holding cell, the flame and the burning tip glow in color while everything around them stays gray — a direct echo of their first cigarette in the show's pilot era. Gould told reporters "we made it very subtle, the color in the flame and cigarette."
The Emmy record nobody wants
Across six seasons, Better Call Saul collected 53 Primetime Emmy nominations — seven for Outstanding Drama Series, six lead-actor nods for Odenkirk, two supporting nods for Rhea Seehorn — and won none of them, the worst record of any nominee in the ceremony's history. For scale: Breaking Bad went 16 wins from 58 nominations.
Seehorn, for her part, told The Hollywood Reporter before the final ceremony that Gould "nailed the final season and the finale" — the cast made peace with the scoreboard before the scoreboard did.
A show about a talented man who never gets the credit went 0-for-53 at the Emmys. Sometimes the industry reviews itself by accident.
The consolation prize is permanence: 63 episodes with nothing to cut, an ending that recontextualizes Breaking Bad rather than feeding off it, and a black-and-white final hour that new viewers keep arriving at, asking the exact question in this headline.
Previously we wrote: Yellowjackets has one season left to live up to season 1