In this piece · 7 sections+
The show most like Breaking Bad is Better Call Saul, and it isn't close. Same writers' room, same New Mexico dust, same patient camera that will hold on a guy tying his shoes for ninety seconds because Vince Gilligan believes shoelaces are drama. If what you loved about Breaking Bad was the slow moral rot — a decent person making one small compromise, then another, then waking up six years later as somebody the old version wouldn't recognize — Saul does that arc even more carefully. Start there. Everything else on this list is a partial match. Some are strong partial matches. Some are what TMDb throws at you because a woman sells drugs in it.
The one that actually matches
1. Better Call Saul (2015, 6 seasons, Netflix + AMC+)
What it shares with Breaking Bad: Everything structural. Gilligan and Peter Gould, same cinematographers, same crew of directors, the same conviction that the most interesting shot in the world is a wide static on a parking lot at 4pm. Bob Odenkirk plays a guy who wants to be good and can't quite manage it, and every season he loses a little more of the fight. Jonathan Banks and Giancarlo Esposito are back doing what they do. Starter episode: Season 1, Episode 1 — do not skip it, the pilot is one of the best hours the medium has produced. What's different: No meth. Slower on purpose. The first two seasons are a legal drama that occasionally remembers it lives in the Breaking Bad universe, which frustrates people who wanted cartel shootouts in episode two. Push through. It becomes something else. Commitment: 63 episodes, ended clean in 2022, no dangling threads.
🏆 DROP EVERYTHING
Strong matches
2. Snowfall (2017, 6 seasons, Hulu)
What it shares with Breaking Bad: The rise-and-fall shape. A smart kid from South Central named Franklin Saint decides he can run the crack trade in 1983 L.A. and be smarter than everyone who's ever tried it, which is the exact energy of Walter White announcing he's going to cook the best meth in the Southwest. Same delusion, same slow-motion consequence. John Singleton co-created it before he died, and the show carries his fingerprints — specific about a neighborhood, allergic to sentimentality about the damage. Starter episode: Season 1 pilot. It's a stronger opener than most people give it credit for. What's different: Snowfall is angrier than Breaking Bad and less tidy. Breaking Bad wanted you to think about one man; Snowfall wants you to think about a policy. Commitment: 6 seasons, ended in 2023, sticks the landing.
✅ WORTH IT
3. Mr Inbetween (2018, 3 seasons, Hulu)
What it shares with Breaking Bad: The quiet menace. Ray Shoesmith is a hitman in suburban Sydney, and the show treats his job the same way Breaking Bad treated Walter's cook shifts — as work. Errands. Dry cleaning to pick up, then a guy in a trunk. The tone is drier and the episodes are twenty-five minutes, but the DNA is identical. A guy compartmentalizing until the walls fall. Starter episode: Season 1, Episode 1. You'll know inside ten minutes if the rhythm is for you. What's different: Much smaller in scope. No cartels, no empire, just one man and his daughter and the people he has to hurt this week. If you wanted spectacle from Breaking Bad, this isn't that. Commitment: 26 episodes, ended in 2021 because the creator decided it was done, which is a beautiful thing a network executive would never allow twice.
🏆 DROP EVERYTHING
4. Hannibal (2013, 3 seasons, Hulu / Prime Video)
What it shares with Breaking Bad: A prestige-era transformation show about a mostly-normal man being pulled toward something monstrous by a charismatic partner. Swap Jesse for Will Graham and Gus Fring for Mads Mikkelsen's Hannibal Lecter and you're in the same neighborhood, thematically. Bryan Fuller's direction is more baroque than Gilligan's meat-and-potatoes framing, but the compositional discipline is the same. Every shot is decided. Starter episode: Season 1, Episode 1, "Apéritif." What's different: This is a horror show that thinks it's an opera. Breaking Bad kept its violence grounded; Hannibal turns corpses into art installations. If you can't stomach that, bail. Commitment: 39 episodes, cancelled by NBC in 2015, ends on an ambiguous note the fans have made peace with.
✅ WORTH IT
5. Narcos (2015, 3 seasons, Netflix)
What it shares with Breaking Bad: The drug-empire mechanics at industrial scale. If you finished Breaking Bad wanting to know what a Gus Fring operation looks like from the inside, Pablo Escobar's business in 1980s Colombia is that show. Wagner Moura plays Escobar as a guy who thinks he's the hero of his own life and can't understand why the world keeps disagreeing. Starter episode: Season 1, Episode 1. The voiceover from Boyd Holbrook is heavy in the first two episodes; it lightens. What's different: Less character interiority. Breaking Bad lived inside Walter's head; Narcos is a chase story with better production design. Commitment: 30 episodes, Escobar's arc ends at the end of season 2, then it becomes a different show about the Cali cartel that's still good.
✅ WORTH IT
6. Animal Kingdom (2016, 6 seasons, TNT / Prime Video)
What it shares with Breaking Bad: Family as the engine of every bad decision. Ellen Barkin plays a matriarch running a crew of surfer-criminal sons in Southern California, and the show is at its best when it's about the small manipulations between people who love and use each other — which is what Breaking Bad was always about underneath the meth. Starter episode: Season 1, Episode 1. Fair warning: it's uneven, especially the last two seasons. Some fans check out around season 5. What's different: Less ambitious writing than Breaking Bad. This is a good soap with real actors, not a masterpiece. Commitment: 75 episodes, ended in 2022.
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Tangential — you'll enjoy them but they're not really the same show
7. Narcos: Mexico (2018, 3 seasons, Netflix)
The spinoff. Diego Luna plays Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo building the Guadalajara Cartel in the 1980s, and it's structurally the same show as Narcos but with a different geography and a slower first season. What it shares with Breaking Bad: The empire-building arc and the Mexican Southwest backdrop, which will scratch a specific itch if what you missed most about Breaking Bad was watching people conduct dangerous business in unforgiving desert. Starter: Season 1, Episode 1, or if you're impatient, skip to Season 2 which is the show's best year. What's different: More sprawling and less focused on one lead. Commitment: 30 episodes, ended in 2021.
✅ WORTH IT
8. Queen of the South (2016, 5 seasons, Netflix / USA)
Alice Braga plays Teresa Mendoza, a woman who goes from running from cartel violence to running her own operation, which is a Walter White arc with a different set of pressures. What it shares with Breaking Bad: The rise from nobody to kingpin, the pleasure of watching a lead outmaneuver people who underestimate them. Starter: Season 1, Episode 1. What's different: Network TV pacing. It's a USA show that thinks it's premium cable, which means the writing is looser and the plot machinery clanks. Enjoyable if you're forgiving. Commitment: 62 episodes, ended in 2021.
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9. Griselda (2024, 1 season, Netflix)
Sofía Vergara plays Griselda Blanco building a cocaine empire in 1970s Miami. It's the miniseries version of Narcos with the same producers, and it works because Vergara is genuinely good in it. What it shares with Breaking Bad: Rise-and-fall in miniature. Six episodes, one arc, no filler. Starter: Just start at episode one, it's six hours total. What's different: No Better Call Saul-style patience — this thing sprints. Good weekend watch. Commitment: 6 episodes, closed miniseries.
✅ WORTH IT
10. Weeds (2005, 8 seasons, Prime Video / Paramount+)
Mary-Louise Parker as a suburban widow who starts selling weed to keep her house. Predates Breaking Bad by three years and got there first with the concept. What it shares with Breaking Bad: The domestic-turns-criminal premise. Both shows share the idea that middle-class Americans will do genuinely deranged things to hold onto their granite countertops. Starter: Season 1, Episode 1. What's different: Comedy first. Weeds is a half-hour show that gets darker over its run but never abandons the tone. The last three seasons are famously worse than the first four. Stop at season 5 and you've had a great time. Commitment: 102 episodes, ended in 2012.
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11. Dark Winds (2022, 3 seasons, AMC+ / Netflix)
A Navajo Nation crime drama in the 1970s Southwest, produced by George R.R. Martin and Robert Redford. Zahn McClarnon carries it, and if the thing you loved about Breaking Bad was the specific way the New Mexico landscape sat in every frame like a character, this is that same land, filmed with the same respect. Starter: Season 1, Episode 1, six-episode seasons make it easy to try. What's different: No drug empire, no antihero. This is a straight procedural with better cinematography than it needs. Commitment: Ongoing, three seasons out, renewed for season 4.
✅ WORTH IT
What TMDb keeps suggesting that isn't on this list
Skins, Two Weeks to Live, Don't Come Home. If an algorithm is recommending you a horror movie about a haunted mansion because you liked Breaking Bad, the algorithm has confused "drama" with "anything vaguely dark." Ignore these. They don't belong in the conversation.
FAQ
What's the single show most like Breaking Bad?
Better Call Saul. Same creative team, same universe, same commitment to the slow ruin of an ordinary person. If you haven't watched it because you thought it was a spinoff cash-grab, it isn't. It's arguably a better-written show than the one it came from, and the finale lands.
Is there anything actually as good as Breaking Bad?
Better Call Saul, Mr Inbetween, and The Wire (not on this list because it's not a TMDb recommendation, but you already knew that). Everything else on this page is very good or good-enough. Nothing else is that. Prestige TV made maybe fifteen shows in twenty years that operate at Breaking Bad's level and most of them are older than TikTok.
Did the Breaking Bad creators make anything else worth watching?
Vince Gilligan created The X-Files-adjacent series Battle Creek that got cancelled after one season and wasn't very good, and he made a movie called El Camino that closes out Jesse Pinkman's story if you need that closure. His next series, Pluribus, is on Apple TV+ with Rhea Seehorn from Saul. If you liked her there, it's worth a look.
Where should I start if I've only got one weekend?
Griselda. Six episodes, closed arc, Sofía Vergara being unexpectedly great as a Miami cocaine kingpin. It scratches the empire-building itch in one sitting and doesn't ask you to commit to five seasons of anything.
Start with Better Call Saul, Season 1, Episode 1, this weekend.
Give it three episodes. If it hasn't hooked you by the end of the third, come back and try Mr Inbetween instead — the shorter runtime and drier tone catches the people Saul loses. Everything else on this list is a backup plan.