CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR BOTH BETTER CALL SAUL AND BREAKING BAD. I WILL BE DISCUSSING BOTH IN DETAIL.
Hello everyone, it’s Alex here, and I’ll start by asking a question: have you ever watched something that is critically lauded, heralded as a work of greatness, and just felt completely isolated from the group by thinking it’s merely okay?
If you have had that experience, then you probably have the same feeling that I had after almost every episode of Better Call Saul, the spinoff prequel to one of television’s greatest shows, Breaking Bad. Focusing on the character of Jimmy McGill before he becomes the criminal lawyer Saul Goodman, the series follows his moral degradation as well as the origins of other Breaking Bad characters such as Mike and Gus.
I binged Breaking Bad during the third lockdown, and it blew my mind. Within just a few episodes, I got sucked into the story of chemistry teacher turned drug-lord, Walter White, and the dangerous world of cartels he inhabited. It was an artsy, suspenseful TV show that will stay in my memory for a long time. To counter that, I found Better Call Saul to be inferior on almost all fronts and, despite some great moments, was nowhere near as consistent and entertaining.
After hearing the consensus of some that it was just as good, if not better than Breaking Bad (we’ll come back to this point), I hoped that it would live up to the hype, and for the first few episodes, it did. The start of Better Call Saul paints itself as a legal comedy-drama, and it does a really good job of showing the days of Jimmy McGill before he embraces the buffoonish Saul Goodman personality. He’s a man who has an ego and ways of circumventing the rule of law, but he’s also a man trying his best to care for his ill older brother Chuck, whilst working his way up the law ladder.
The first episodes see him trying to win back a criminal client with the help of two young accomplices, but the plan goes awry when they run into returning Breaking Bad character Tuco Salamanca and are nearly killed. It’s a brilliant pilot run, one that helps establish both Jimmy’s world of law and the pre-existing cartel business that morphs into what we in Breaking Bad.
Once this start is over though, the show grinds to a halt for a mostly uninteresting slog that lasts for the first two seasons. The pilot presents us with an expectation that the worlds of the law and the cartel would frequently intertwine and lead to Jimmy’s turn to criminality. However, for long stretches of the show, the stories of Jimmy and Mike feel alarmingly separate. We’re not on edge waiting for Jimmy’s first business with Gus or watching Jimmy and Mike work together – instead, the meetings of the two worlds happen mostly by chance.
Mike asks Jimmy to watch for anything unusual when he’s investigating Los Pollos Hermanos, but once that’s done, Jimmy’s back to his elder law and it’s business as usual. I know that in real life lawyers would have multiple cases to deal with at once, but in a show where a drug cartel is a major presence, you’d think that a criminal lawyer would be way more involved in proceedings than he actually is. That’s certainly the impression that Breaking Bad gives us, anyway. As Saul always seems in the loop on cartel business, but here he barely has an idea of what’s going on and mostly has to rely on others to do the work for him.
The storylines that Jimmy is involved in throughout are a mixed bag. The dynamic between him and his brother Chuck is initially strong, with Chuck committing his life to be the best in law while Jimmy cuts corners and barely qualifies. The reveal at the end of season 1 that it’s been Chuck holding him back all along is really powerful, and I expected that to be where Chuck’s story ends as he’s served his purpose.
Instead, a petty game between the brothers trudges on for two more seasons, and the only motivation we see on Chuck’s part is petty jealousy. They occasionally try and paint Jimmy as sympathetic towards Chuck, but again this doesn’t work as Chuck is absolutely horrid to him, so at the end of every scene with the two I just felt cold and bored. The scene where Chuck commits suicide is really well-filmed and quite eerie, but the emotion was lost on me because I’d lost all interest in his story long before the show did.
I also want to bring up what is probably the main crux of the show, the relationship between Jimmy and Kim. This mostly works for me on a performance level, considering that Rhea Seehorn is phenomenal as Kim, but I don’t think the show’s story gave us enough reason as to what these two saw in each other. I get it on Jimmy’s end because Kim doesn’t degrade Jimmy for his lower status in the law like his brother did and he can aspire to be like her, but I don’t understand why Kim could be attracted to a loser like Jimmy. Jimmy himself is just not that interesting of a character, and it makes the sudden romance between the two feel forced.
Why do some people prefer this to Breaking Bad? The response from everyone has been rapturous for all six seasons, and I’m sorry, but I just can’t buy into the show’s hype.
The two are much better as Kim slowly turns bad at the end of the show, and they plot to bring down Kim’s former boss Howard, but again this is just more pettiness. Almost all of the legal drama side of the show is this as well, it’s them doing petty cons instead of being criminals in a clever and dangerous way. There’s no peril in what they’re doing, and fun though it is, it just comes across as mean and uncomfortable, and not progressing the overall plot in any meaningful way.
To be honest that’s my main issue with the show – I wouldn’t mind the less perilous scenarios and more dialogue-driven narratives, but the show is so artfully filmed and moves at such a glacial pace it’s hard to get invested. Many of the episodes open with gorgeous shots of random things such as ants swarming around ice cream, and it’s stunning but there’s no significance to them in the grander scheme. Moments that would take 5 or 10 minutes in an episode of Breaking Bad are stretched out to breaking point in Better Call Saul. It makes watching the show feel extremely cumbersome.
Breaking Bad is a slow-paced show, but it always held my attention because I was interested in everything going on. There were stakes, there was danger, I was watching a man become a monster, and when the slow building of tension finally exploded it was insanely cathartic. There’s no catharsis in Better Call Saul because instead of being excited that things had ratcheted up, I was more relieved that something had actually happened.
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I don’t want to be completely down on the show, because as I said I don’t hate this, I just think it’s considerably weaker than Breaking Bad. There are diamonds in the rough, undoubtedly.
The entire character of Nacho is fantastic, seeing a character born into the world of evil but never feeling a part of it, and working against the Salamancas to keep his father safe. The culmination of his story is enthralling, with him on the run from both cartels and hiding in a motel.
Lalo is one of the best villains of the entire Breaking Bad universe, genuinely sadistic and played brilliantly by Tony Dalton. The scene where he kills Howard is possibly my favourite moment in the whole show, as it’s one of the only times I was just as on edge as I was in Breaking Bad. It’s therefore just a shame that he doesn’t show up until season 4. Seeing the iconic lab being built under the launderette was a great little story that pushed Mike to the limits, and his friendship with the German engineer Werner was really well-done.
I also thought the way the show wrapped up was satisfying. Jumping forward to after Breaking Bad, where Jimmy is hiding under an alias working as a manager in a fast-food store and Kim is now living in Florida, was a refreshing change of pace and seeing Jimmy finally accept who he is and turn himself in made perfect sense.
That said, I still have mixed feelings about this ending. Before the final season, each season of Better Call Saul would open on a flash-forward to post-Breaking Bad Jimmy, and there were always fun disconnected little moments – however, when it cuts completely to this angle at the end of the show, we suddenly have to remember everything that’s happened in these scenes, which is jarring because they are completely unrelated to the main plot of the show. I eventually got accustomed to it, and there’s even some cool fan service here as Walt and Jesse return briefly, but it’s sad that this is some of my favourite stuff in the show when it’s so secondary to the main story the show was trying to tell.
I think there’s one main point that I’ve been trying to say throughout this entire piece: why do some people prefer this to Breaking Bad? The response from everyone has been rapturous for all six seasons, and I’m sorry, but I just can’t buy into the show’s hype. Aside from some occasionally great characterisation and some standout moments, Better Call Saul was an overly slow and passive experience that didn’t tell me much new about the world of Breaking Bad. Instead, pre-occupying itself with storytelling that was nowhere near as engrossing or perilous as it should’ve been. Breaking Bad was cool, dangerous, scary and dynamic, whereas Better Call Saul was, more often than not, repetitive and monotonous.
I won’t give Better Call Saul any rating, mainly because I’m so confused and split by the reception that I can’t decide, but safe to say I’ll go back to Breaking Bad way more than this. Sorry.
