Coming up to the end of Better Call Saul, many fans have a hard time saying goodbye to the Breaking Bad universe. At this time, there are no additional spinoff shows in the works, and it's possible that the series finale of Saul will put a cap on the franchise as a whole. With that said, the door is still open for another spinoff to further explore this world, and many fans online have been advocating for another series.
Characters like Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), and Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) have come up as possibilities to lead another spinoff series. But another name that seems to come up a lot has been Lyle, the young man who works as the assistant manager at Fring's Los Pollos Hermanos restaurant. Played by Harrison Smith, Lyle is not part of the main cast of characters, but given his dedication to his job and his loyalty to Gus, he has managed to stand out as a popular character with many fans.
Behind the scenes, Smith is the son of actor and comedian Dave Thomas, who was one half of the comedy duo Bob and Doug MacKenzie with Rick Moranis. Thomas recently took to Twitter to join the fans in calling for a Lyle spinoff series. The tweet has been liked nearly 20,000 times with many fans in the comments on board with the idea. Better call Saul writer-director Thomas Schnauz also weighed in.
"My son Harrison plays Lyle on Better Call Saul," Thomas said. "So proud of him. Lyle should get his own show - just sayin.'"
Schnauz responded, "And we cast him in that role because of his great audition and his work in Stanford Prison Experiment... I am the biggest SCTV fan in the world and I had no idea he was your son!"
The Better Call Saul Creatives Often Joked About a Lyle Musical
The concept of a Lyle series had come up with the Better Call Saul team as well. This is in part due to their discovery that actor Harrison Smith was also very talented as a singer. That bit of knowledge resulted in a running joke on the set where the show's creatives talked about a musical series dubbed It's Lyle! with Smith performing musical numbers as the Los Pollos Hermanos assistant manager. As writer-EP Gordon Smith recently told THR:
"It’s Lyle! or just Lyle! was a very long-running joke pitch. It’s a musical where Lyle, after Gus’ death, realizes that he’s been working for a drug kingpin all this time at Los Pollos Hermanos, and it chronicles the amount of “mind-blown” that happens to Lyle. At one point, Vince was like, 'What if Lyle sang a silly song as he opened up Pollos?' And I said, 'Sure, let’s get some comedy in here.' Then when we presented it to Harrison [Thomas], we discovered he’s a very talented, trained singer."
When it was suggested that an It's Lyle! scene should have at least been filmed as a bonus for the Blu-ray release, Gordon Smith added:
"Yeah, we love Lyle, and Harrison is so great. He’s just so game. He comes in and he’s there for it. He’s focused and very funny in a way that doesn’t put too much on. And he gives Lyle just enough earnestness that your heart breaks for him. So we actually had numbers for It’s Lyle! that we’d pitch occasionally, and then we’d sing terrible, terrible songs."
New episodes of Better Call Saul arrive on Mondays on AMC and AMC+.