Emerging from Breaking Bad’s giant shadow

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This article was published 22/04/2017 (3323 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Spinoffs are to TV what sequels are to movies — very often money-grubbing projects that leverage audience loyalty without giving much back.

AMC’s 2013 announcement that Breaking Bad would get a spinoff led to some dark muttering among Walter White super-fans. But Better Call Saul, a prequel about sleazy underworld lawyer Saul Goodman and his origins as small-time grifter Jimmy McGill, has delivered two strong seasons and has begun rolling out a stellar third. (Now with more Gus Fring!)

Some critics are even suggesting this is the rare case in which the spinoff surpasses the original. (Cue more dark muttering, for different reasons.)

I’ll start off by saying I really, really liked Breaking Bad. (I’m hoping this statement will head off any Heisenbergian hate mail.) It’s also important to point out that Better Call Saul isn’t meant to be Breaking Bad 2. With its glacial pacing and much lower body count, the show works as a measured, melancholy companion piece, not as some wannabe Walter White saga.

Whatever way you position it, Better Call Saul is terrific TV, and it’s starting to give Breaking Bad a run for its drug money. Here’s why:

Morality play

In the original series, often summed up as “Mr. Chips goes Scarface,” it was a kick to watch a mild-mannered teacher and family man go bad. It’s even more intriguing — and morally nuanced — to see a two-bit huckster and perpetual screw-up trying to make good in Better Call Saul.

Jimmy McGill (played by Bob Odenkirk) is in many ways a lovable loser, a guy with a good heart but elastic ethics. He’s worked minor cons — the slip-and-fall scam, a thing with fake Rolexes — but he’s also attempted to go straight, with a law degree from an online university and a lot of hard work and hustle.

His tenure as a legit lawyer, Jimmy McGill, Esq., looks to be brief, though. We know we’re headed toward the sketchy criminal shenanigans of Breaking Bad’s Saul Goodman.

While Walter White’s violent trajectory was driven by meth-like momentum, Jimmy’s journey is a wandering back-and-forth stroll of good intentions and bad decisions, misguided favours and banal mistakes, risky shortcuts and overly optimistic estimations. Sometimes Jimmy does the wrong thing for the right reasons; sometimes he does the right thing for the wrong reasons. Either way, it tends to go bad.

Sad clowns

With his big-talking bravado and cheap showmanship, Saul Goodman often served as comic relief to Walt’s serious menace in Breaking Bad.

Odenkirk, previously known for his comedy work, is still very funny in Better Call Saul, but with his complex portrayal of Jimmy — who’s simultaneously sweet and jerky, self-sabotaging and on-the-make, loyal and slippery — he’s also pulling off a poignant dramatic performance.

Ditto for Michael McKean, another comedy alum who does extraordinary dramatic work as Jimmie’s rigid, righteous, high-achieving brother, Chuck, an establishment lawyer undone by a psychosomatic electricity allergy.

Class consciousness

Sure, some of the impetus for Walter White’s crime empire came from the fact that science teachers in America are criminally overlooked and underpaid.

Better Call Saul digs even deeper into questions of social and economic class. The show’s elite lawyers claim to reject Jimmy because of his fast-and-loose approach to American Bar Association rules. But, really, they hate his vulgarity, his infomercials and billboards, his crazy suits, his mustard-yellow Suzuki, his shameless touting for business. Chuck, who’s reinvented himself as old money — all Craftsman furniture and chamber music and flinty Chardonnays — can’t forgive Jimmy for bringing back their small-town blue-collar background.

Magic mike

One of the best things about Breaking Bad was Mike Ehrmantraut, and in Better Call Saul we get even more of him. As played by Jonathan Banks, this enforcer and fixer is silent, patient and weary, hilariously dispassionate, eternally unimpressed. Watching Mike’s reluctant return to violence, when all he wants to do is push his granddaughter on the swings, is Better Call Saul’s most devastating plotline.

Hey, good-looking

From its brilliant cold opens to its faux-awful title sequences, from a complicated four-minute tracking shot at the Mexican-American border to a jaunty split-screen montage featuring an inflatable tube man, Better Call Saul has tons of visual style.

In TV terms, Better Call Saul is also defiantly, unfashionably slow. This season has already seen a long dissertation on how to remove duct tape from varnished wood — which is not really about duct tape, of course — and the unhurried and thorough dismantling of a station wagon.

That’s the thing: even though we know where we’re going with Better Call Saul — this is a reverse-engineered prequel, after all, with a known outcome — we’re still compelled to watch.

At some point, the front end of Better Call Saul is going to run into the back end of Breaking Bad. In the meantime, thanks to layered scripting and shaded performances, it’s a complicated kind of pleasure to follow Jimmy as his moral flexibility wrestles with his bruised humanity.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca