‘Breaking Bad’ Almost Had Saul Work At Hot Topic, Not Cinnabon

Better Call Saul almost had Bob Odenkirk dabbling in his emo phase.

Writer and producer Peter Gould recently shared an early draft of a Breaking Bad episode, which would have set up the character to work at Hot Topic in his self-titled spin-off series that ran from 2015 to 2022 on AMC.

“Came across this page from an early draft of #BreakingBad’s penultimate episode. Cinnabon? Not just yet!” wrote Gould on Bluesky.

In Better Call Saul, the titular attorney is introduced as a struggling public defender working at a Cinnabon, a callback to the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad. “If I’m lucky, a month from now, best case scenario, I’m managing a Cinnabon in Omaha,” Saul tells Walter White (Bryan Cranston) in the 2013 episode ‘Granite State’.

After sharing a screenshot of the early script that featured “Hot Topic” in the line instead, Gould explained why they opted not to reference the counterculture retail giant.

“In fact, we found out that Hot Topic was carrying #BreakingBad stuff and we didn’t want to make it look like a cheap promo,” he wrote in a follow-up post. “So Cinnabon it was! (And they had no idea about it until the episode aired).”

After Breaking Bad‘s five-season run from 2008 to 2013, Better Call Saul followed Saul Goodman six years before he got tangled up in Walter White’s criminal enterprise. The show was nominated for multiple Golden Globe and Emmy Awards.