Better Call Saul vs Breaking Bad: A Data-Driven Showdown
Is Better Call Saul better than Breaking Bad? I used episode ratings from three major platforms to settle the debate once and for all. Spoiler: the data had other plans.
Intro
If you haven't been living under a rock for the last decade, you've heard of "Breaking Bad", Vince Gilligan's masterpiece about a chemistry teacher who gets cancer and ends up building a crystal meth empire.
"Breaking Bad" is one of the best shows ever made and one of my personal favorites. It's a work of art from every angle: the character development, the acting, the writing, the cinematography, the music, everything. Unlike many other great shows, it stuck the landing with a perfect ending.
And then lightning struck the same place twice. A few years later, Gilligan came back with "Better Call Saul", a spinoff about the man who put the "criminal" in "criminal lawyer", Saul Goodman. Same as "Breaking Bad", it was magic: brilliant writing, fully realized characters, and once again, a perfect finale.
"Better Call Saul" was a super-rare case of a spinoff actually living up to the hype, respecting the source material and matching its quality. But even more than that, people (myself included) have made a bold claim: "Better Call Saul is better than Breaking Bad."
In my regular TV posts, I typically make subjective arguments for why this is true. But here, I'm going to use data to see if this is actually the case.
Data Used
For this analysis, I mainly used rating scores at the episode level. To avoid skewing the data based on a single source, I pulled from three platforms: IMDb, TMDB, and TVMaze. Each rating score per episode is based on thousands of individual ratings, so we can assume there are enough observations to provide real insights. For the analysis, I used the average rating from these three sources (for example: IMDb 8.3, TMDB 8.9, TVMaze 9.1, average for analysis 8.7).
Another point to consider: "Better Call Saul" has 6 seasons while "Breaking Bad" has 5. That said, both shows have 62 and 63 episodes respectively, so the comparison is still valid. It just means that seasons 5 and 6 of "Better Call Saul" will be compared against "Breaking Bad" season 5.
The Analysis
At first, I started with a simple presentation of all scores per episode. I wanted to see if we could identify a clear difference between the two shows in their average rating scores.
I can't get a clear insight from this, other than noting that both shows' ratings increase over time. I can't really identify which show is higher. In some cases, "Better Call Saul" comes out on top, in others, "Breaking Bad" does.
The episode-level view isn't providing clear insights, so I moved to average ratings per season, which gave a clearer picture, but not a definitive one.
The verdict is clear, right? When looking at average ratings on a season level, there's a clear winner: "Breaking Bad". Each season scores higher than "Better Call Saul". But I wanted to verify this from additional angles. Maybe one data source is giving irregularly high values that are skewing the average?
So let's break down the same view, but for each of the data sources individually:
So this answers it too. Other than one season on TVMaze (Season 4), all the different data sources are saying the same thing: "Breaking Bad" is winning here. But I wanted to check one last thing, because going by averages can still be influenced by high outliers. Maybe "Better Call Saul" is better most of the time, but "Breaking Bad" gives each season a few perfect scores that push the averages up.
So the last idea I had was clear: boxplots. I'll show each season of both shows using boxplot values: minimum, 25th percentile, median, 75th percentile, and maximum. This will reveal the value of each show and season based on the rating distribution, not just the average.
Now the verdict is final. Using boxplots on each season shows without a doubt that "Breaking Bad" is beating "Better Call Saul". The median, 75th percentile, and maximum scores are almost always higher, and in most cases, even the minimum scores of "Breaking Bad" are higher than the minimum scores of "Better Call Saul". The Verdict
While I enjoyed "Better Call Saul" more and found the story of Jimmy McGill far more compelling than Walter White's, the ratings per season, whether by averages or boxplots, leave no room for doubt. The majority of viewers and TV critics believe that "Breaking Bad" is the stronger show.
