Spoilers for the first season ahead.
With "Better Call Saul" finishing up this year, I can't put this show off any longer. After enjoying "Breaking Bad," I fully intended to watch "Better Call Saul," but never made it past the first episode the first time around. Waiting this long has made a binge possible, and very overdue.
You do need to have some familiarity with "Breaking Bad" to enjoy it best, since several characters in addition to Saul Goodman cross over between shows. A big reason why "Saul" works as well as it does is that while we're following the career of Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk), who will one day become the title character, in the background our old pal Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) is engaging more directly with Albuquerque's criminal element. It's not that Jimmy's journey from a criminal lawyer to a *criminal* lawyer isn't exciting on its own, but it helps every few episodes to have a gunfight or a break-in that Mike is better positioned to deliver.
Jimmy in "Better Call Saul" has the same rough character arc that Walter White in "Breaking Bad" does, where we watch a man in less-than-ideal circumstances slowly lose his soul to the dark side. Jimmy has never been entirely on the straight and narrow, however. We first meet him as a struggling public defender, trying to make a go at a legitimate legal career after a long stint as a con-artist in his youth. A huge influence on him is his older brother Chuck (Michael McKean), a much more successful lawyer who is now housebound after becoming hypersensitive to electronic signals, and is reliant on Jimmy as a caretaker. The ailment might all be in his head, but Chuck is too afflicted to work, and is technically on sabbatical from the firm he's a partner at with Harry Hamlin (Patrick Fabian). The other major new character is Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), an associate at Hamlin, Hamlin, & McGill, who is Jimmy's love interest and moral compass. When Jimmy is tempted to break the rules or stray into criminal activity, Kim is the one who encourages him to do the right thing.
Of course, we know that Jimmy's dark side is going to win out. So far, each season has started with a brief sequence that takes place in the present day, where Jimmy is a fugitive after the events of "Breaking Bad," hiding out as the lowly manager of a Cinnabon in Omaha. The big question is what happens to Chuck and Kim, and some of the other characters who don't appear in "Breaking Bad." Mike has some dealings with Nacho Varga (Michael Mando), a shrewd, likable member of the Salamanca gang who seems destined for tragedy. Jimmy, however, feels like he could go either way after two seasons. We watch him struggle mightily to be a lawyer on his own terms, deal with the demons of his past, and juggle his various schemes. He's a fascinating character - incredibly clever and competent, but also clearly not able to fit into the mold of the straitlaced lawyer that Chuck does. The performances of Odenkirk and McKean are dynamite stuff, and the exploration of Jimmy and Chuck's complicated relationship is the best part of the show so far.
I also really enjoy slipping back into the "Breaking Bad" universe. The creators are so self-assured in handling the production and stylistic choices. They're comfortable enough to have long sequences of no dialogue where Mike is surveilling a criminal operation, or to throw around references to very old movies like "Ice Station Zebra" and "All That Jazz." Taking place in the early 2000s, with a cast populated by many older actors, "Better Call Saul" has a certain quality of old fashioned, Clint Eastwood-esque, romanticized American masculinity. Conflicts are often framed as Jimmy against the system, or Jimmy against the snobs, but it's also very clear that it's Jimmy's individual choices that land him in hot water. "Better Call Saul" continues the tradition of Vince Gilligan and his fellow writers writing themselves into corners that require a lot of ingenuity to write their way out of again, and it's very entertaining to watch everyone hustle for those big twists and thrills.
I think the first season outpaces the second by a pretty wide margin, mostly because it moves so fast and has so much work to do in setting up all the characters and laying out their backstory. Mike's history as a police officer and his reasons for moving to Albuquerque are covered in a single, heartbreaking episode. There's another where Jimmy goes back to his old hometown to relive his con-man days, before embracing an even riskier future. The second season is very good, following Jimmy's attempts to integrate into a more formal law firm setting, and fighting his way out from his brother's shadow, but it also moves more slowly and is clearly a chapter of a larger, unfinished story.
I think it's safe to say I'm in this one for the long haul. I'll be back soon with more.
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