Sam Catlin brings a writer’s discipline to television that mixes humour, drama and violence. We rate his collaborative storytelling highly, though his directing alone gives us less to judge.
Fi1m perspective
Walter White’s excuses are part of what makes Breaking Bad (2008) so hard to stop watching. Bryan Cranston makes him frightening and funny, while the writing keeps asking us to inspect his reasoning. We found that scrutiny unsettling, because the series takes his explanations seriously without asking us to accept them. This is the work through which we rate Sam Catlin most highly, though it tells us more about his place in a writing team than about an individual directing style.
Catlin joined Vince Gilligan’s series as a co-producer and writer in 2009, during its second series, and became co-executive producer by the fourth. He wrote ten episodes and directed the episode Rabid Dog. That is a substantial contribution, but it would be careless to assign the programme’s achievements to him alone. Its cleverness can become a nuisance; the sharp examination of Walter’s self-justification is what earns our recommendation beyond the usual crime-drama audience.
With Preacher (2016–2019), developed alongside Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Catlin became the showrunner as well as a writer and occasional director. He carried the tightly planned, collaborative story-building process from Breaking Bad into a series mixing humour, drama and violence. His approach to the ensemble treated character development as a succession of coming-of-age stories, giving the plotting something personal to follow. Adapting the comic also required changes to its structure for television, rather than simply transferring its contents to the screen. These are useful priorities, although careful preparation cannot by itself guarantee that a change from comedy to violence will feel convincing.
Sugar (2024) continues the emphasis on his work as showrunner and writer. Across these projects, the clearest reason to follow Catlin is his attention to how a continuing story gets worked out by several people. We would look first at whether the characters remain worth following, rather than mistake a complicated plot for an achievement in itself. Start with Breaking Bad, and allow rather more of the evening than planned.
