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BETTER CALL SAUL REVIEW: THE LAST HURRAH OF DIFFICULT MEN
The Saul Goodman series starts out already better than Breaking Bad.
By Stephen Marche on January 21, 2015



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I'll just say it: The first few episodes that I saw are better than Breaking Bad. They are smarter. They are sharper. I have never seen a prequel handled so cleverly. What we know from the previous series about Saul Goodman, or James McGill as he is known in Better Call Saul, provides a kind of counterintuitive suspense mechanism.

Spoiler:

In the very first shot, in silent black and white, we see the ruins of Saul Goodman after the action of Breaking Bad, just as he said he would be. He's working at a Cinnabon in a mall, terrified of anyone slightly threatening who walks into the store. The question for the plot is: How did he become this way? How did he fail so catastrophically?

Other familiar characters from Breaking Bad make quiet appearances, no doubt to blow up later, but Saul is absolutely the focus of the show—an antihero in the established antiheroic mode but maybe even a better lens than his predecessors for examining the breakdown of contemporary masculinity. The other shows from the difficult-men period of television were extreme examples of the state of decline: the gangster who has seen the gangster code erode, the ad executive watching the shuddering transformation of the 1960s, the chemistry teacher who takes up meth. They were symbols. But Saul Goodman (sorry, James McGill) is much more representative of the real decline than those icons. He's a lawyer who can't make a living honestly, a fate that is known to many real people. A job that once guaranteed a middle-class existence has left him hanging onto his **** car and sleeping in a foldout bed in his office. Plenty of Americans can relate to that.

The opening courtroom scene of Better Call Saul could not be more perfect. McGill's first words are

Spoiler:

"Oh, to be nineteen again," which serve as a kind of a bracket to Tony Soprano's line from the first episode of The Sopranos: "Lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over." What was tragedy for Tony, McGill plays out as farce. It turns out that Saul's description of "youthful exuberance" is in defense of a group of teenagers who have gone into a morgue, cut off the head of a corpse, and **** it.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1xIGfVFb-U[/youtube]

So Saul does not begin as a good man who falls. He begins as a man doing whatever he has to do to survive, and we are called to watch the last shreds of his dignity and sense of self-worth dissolve, along with any residual morality.

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HarthorneWingo wrote:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1xIGfVFb-U[/youtube]

So Saul does not begin as a good man who falls. He begins as a man doing whatever he has to do to survive, and we are called to watch the last shreds of his dignity and sense of self-worth dissolve, along with any residual morality.

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DaGawd wrote:I gotta see it to believe it's better than breaking bad...

vallen wrote:we'll see. tough to get into a show that you already know how it ends.

J9Starks3 wrote:

vallen wrote:we'll see. tough to get into a show that you already know how it ends.

I wouldnt say that...its a prequel, you know how BB starts, not necessarily how BCS ends.

Another one of my favorite shows, Game of Thrones...would be awesome to have a Robert's Rebellion prequel, I think that could be epic.