I am one of the few people who didn't watch Breaking Bad and can't comment on the show's characters and mythology. I understand that a crooked lawyer named Saul was a character in the Tv series (first released on AMC) and, apparently, thought to be sufficiently interesting to support a spin-off show. I don't know exactly what Saul did in Breaking Bad although I would expect that his adventures were picaresque to say the least. Whenever I watched Breaking Bad, the program was incomprehensible to me -- ultra-violence played out against a background of extravagant melodrama with some sort of industrial processing plant splayed out against a warped-looking desert full of tarantulas and cactus. I entered the show in this middle and couldn't make head nor tail of it.
Better Call Saul is, apparently, a prequel. We see the hero (played by Bob Odenkirk) managing a Cinnabon in Omaha -- this introductory sequence is shot in black-and-white and full of menace. I don't know what it is supposed to mean. Episodes are 42 minutes long, apparently designed for 18 minutes of commercials per hour. However, I saw the series on Netflix without commercial interruption -- periodically, the screen would go to black where commercials had been excised. There are eight shows in the first series that appeared in 2015. The show is excellent but a little bit too rich for my taste -- I found that one episode viewed nightly was not enough (each show is plotted to end with a "cliff-hanger"), but that two shows viewed back-to-back felt just a wee bit excessive. The acting is uniformly superb and the direction is lucid and agile. The series is shot in hyper-realistic color with superb set design -- some of the locations, for instance, the lawyer's office qua sleeping room in a nails salon run by Vietnamese women, are so detailed and remarkable that they take precedence over the characters and events that take place within them. The photography is lurid with saturated colors and uses camera lenses that give everything a faintly distorted fish-eye perspective. Set in Albuquerque and its adjacent desert, the show was shot on location and everything seems convincing and geographically accurate -- the range of the Sandias looms over the empty desert where the gangsters go to commit crimes and conceal corpses. Sequences in a flashback set in Philadelphia had a similar sense of reality and conviction -- the dense, rainy urban landscape of Philly with neon flaring in the moist air is also brilliantly realized.
Better Call Saul paradoxically is about an ethically questionable lawyer named Jimmie McGill -- the somewhat Semitic implications of the show's name are undercut by the fact that the shyster is an Irishman from Cicero, Illinois. (There's a little snippet of flashback inside the flashback explaining where the name "Saul" originates -- it's not a Jewish sobriquet at all.) Jimmie is a hustler, eking out a bare existence by writing 140 dollar wills for old folks in assisted livin and doing public defender work.. He's a veteran of street scams perpetrated in Cicero involving bogus slips and falls on ice -- his nickname in Chicago was "slippin' Jimmy." Jimmy's brother is a brilliant lawyer of the kind that exists only on TV (or in David Mamet's The Verdict), a guy who knows all the relevant statutes and cases by heart and can bark out orders like: "Get me Sedima v. Imrix and shepherdize it to within an inch of its life." This might seem authentic to non-lawyers and, indeed, the legal citations, so far as I recognized them, are all, more or less, apposite but, of course, attorneys don't memorize statutes and case law in this way. Jimmy's brother, Charles is on leave from the silk-stocking law firm in Albuquerque, laid up with some kind of psychosis involving deadly fear of electromagnetic fields. (Charles lives in a house with all electric power connections ripped out and won't let anyone enter who is carrying a cell-phone; his disability frees him to act as an ally to his disreputable younger brother.) There are some vivid supporting characters, an ex-cop from Philadelphia who is a murderer and all-around tough-guy -- also a useful ally for Jimmy -- and blonde lawyer who is (sort of) Jimmie's long-suffering girlfriend. She's also enlisted in the plot to provide Jimmie with legal and logistical support when required by the story.
In the first series, there are roughly four narrative strands, more or less presented sequentially. The show doesn't enact a single complicated plot like some recent series of this sort (for instance, horror shows like The Midnight Mass or Archive 81 or crime pictures like Your Honor); rather, the program focuses on individual interlinked stories that each have a beginning, middle, and end. The over-arching narrative arc seems to be Jimmie's development from an opportunistic shyster to something approaching moral rectitude. The first story involves Jimmy's attempt to extort money from an embezzler who has taken 1.4 million dollars from the common weal of Bernalillo County -- the embezzler is a good family man named Kettleman. Jimmie colludes with some vicious skateboarders in an attempt to blackmail the Kettleman's into paying off a bogus hit and run claim. Jimmie, who begins the show as a hardscrabble public defender, working for hapless criminals (all of them guilty) on a flat fee, is greedy and sees a way to make a quick buck by setting up the Kettleman's on a hit-and-run accident. But things go terribly wrong; Jimmie finds himself negotiating for his life with horrifying Mexican gang members and barely escapes unscathed -- the skate-boarders, who are loathsome characters, come out of this affair far the worse for wear. The second narrative involves Jimmie scheming to represent the Kettleman's who, of course, have plenty of cash on hand. The story involves the embezzler's flight into the Sandia Mountains and Jimmie's adventures running them down and, then, after losing the client to the law firm where Charles remains "of counsel" as a senior partner (although now on leave), assisting his girlfriend in persuading them to take a plea -- this plot which involves a home-invasion and other hijinks is, more or less, played for comedy. The third story, the most intense of the group, doesn't really involve Jimmie at all. The ex-cop, Mike Ehrnmantraut, who takes vouchers for parking at the Bernalillo County Courthouse is confronted by two Philadelphia cops who suspect him of murdering two of their compatriots. This plot involves some spectacular violence and a dramatic confession scene in which the ex-cop explains what he has done and his motives to his son's widowed wife -- his son was killed by the two corrupt cops whom he has murdered in turn. The actor, Jonathan Banks, playing the ex-cop is pug-ugly but has tremendous presence and, whenever he is on-screen, the show springs into vivid, compelling life. Finally, Jimmie attempts to rehabilitate the seriously disabled Charles and has stumbled onto a scheme to defraud hundreds of seniors in assisted living -- the eight episode series ends with Charles and Jimmie planning litigation under RICO (the Sedima case) against the vicious senior care facility.
The show is crisply written, very ingenious and its portrayal of the legal system in accurate within the limits of the poetic license required for this sort of TV. The acting is good and the characters are compelling. I found myself looking forward to watching these shows each night and was sorry when the limited series ended.
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