Goodman in a storm: an epic television journey

Picture: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

So that was Better Call Saul. Six captivating seasons of television charting the back story of shady lawyer Jimmy McGill and his metamorphosis into even shadier lawyer Saul Goodman (and, then, apparently unassuming Omaha, Nebraska, Cinnabon branch manager, Gene Takovic). Goodman (“It’s all good, man!”) was only meant to be a sub-character in Breaking Bad, introduced in its second season for a four-episode run, only to be developed into a more pivotal character in the universe and then, over the last seven years, the focus of Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s brilliantly written, intelligently directed, utterly compelling series. 

Much of the show’s strength has been drawn from Bob Odenkirk’s performances as the serial scammer McGill/Goodman/Takovic, an enlarged version of the exaggerated lawyers you see advertising on American local TV (“Been in a car crash? Then I’m the guy for you! Let ME fight your corner!”), making him protagonist of a wider landscape of Mexican drug gangs in and around Albuquerque, the thread running through both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. 

To some extent, Saul has been about plugging gaps in the Breaking Bad universe, filling in the back story of how McGill became Goodman, and thus became mixed up in the cartel that turned high school chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) into the drug kingpin Heisenberg. Saul, however, has never been about tying up loose ends, instead presenting something of a Bonnie & Clyde love story between McGill and fellow lawyer Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), as they engage in an ever-increasing spiral of capers which eventually end in tragedies and tragic separation.

Vince Gilligan (middle) with Bob Odenirk (right) and Michael McKean as Chuck McGill (left)
Picture: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

Common to both Breaking Bad and Saul are moments of subtle comedy mixed with arch violence, at perverse odds with the murky nature of plotlines, such as Jonathan Banks’ Mike Ehrmantraut - the cynical ex-cop-turned enforcer for fried chicken supremo/meth magnate Gus Fring - challenging Odenkirk for the wriest lines, and for a good half of Saul’s sixth season Tony Dalton as the Dick Dastardly-esque moustache-twirling smiling psycho Lalo Salamanca, easily one of the finest small screen villains I’ve seen in years. 

“When we first started concocting the idea of doing a spinoff, we literally thought it’d be a half-hour show,” Gilligan recently told Rolling Stone. “It’d be something akin to Dr Katz [animated Comedy Central sitcom from the late ’90s] where it’s basically Saul Goodman in his crazy office with the styrofoam columns and he’s visited every week by a different stand-up comic. It was basically, I guess, legal problems. We talked about that for a day or two. And then Peter Gould and I realised, we don’t know anything about the half-hour idiom. And then we thought, okay, well, so it’s an hour … but it’s going to be a really funny hour. I said, ‘Breaking Bad is about 25-percent humour, 75-percent drama and maybe this will be the reverse of that.’ Well this thing [Saul], especially in Season Four, is every bit as dramatic as Breaking Bad ever was. I just didn’t see any of that coming. I didn’t know how good it would all be. I really didn’t.

Throw in, then, large dollops of irony, the consistently oblique opening sequences to each episode [such as the brilliant Point & Shoot, which begins with the Pacific dreamily washing over a beach, a lone black shoe bobbing in the brine, and followed by a tracking shot that leads to an abandoned car - a future flashback to Ehrmantraut’s deception of how the murdered Hamlin’s body was never found). Add to that exquisite cinematography and smartly unpredictable direction, and Saul will make an immediate entry into the great pantheon of formidable TV series that have enthralled us over the last decade or two. 

Saul’s final season, spread out over 13 episodes (with a mid-season break caused by Odenkirk’s absence from filming due to an on-set heart attack), took arcing narrative to a new level of sophistication and creative licence. Just as Breaking Bad charted White’s transition to Heisenberg, Saul charted McGill’s less linear path from Chicago con artist to his reinvention as Goodman, and then - cleverly shot in black and white - eventual denouement as Takovic (presumably living a new life in Nebraska away from the murderous events in Albuquerque but finding the temptation to scam too much to let go, leading - in last night’s finale - to his past catching up with him). 

It is not altogether, a feelgood end. There is a hint of mild redemption, as McGill settles in for an 86-year stretch at an extreme federal prison in Montrose, Colorado, where fellow hardcore inmates respect him for his ‘Better Call Saul!’ TV ad persona. There is even something of a reconciliation between Jimmy and the now estranged Kim, long after their scamming and its intersection with Lalo Salamanca led to the violent death of smarmy lawyer Howard Hamlin and indeed Salamanca himself.

Picture: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

The received wisdom is that we have been - and still are - in a golden age of television. Better Call Saul, and Breaking Bad are both entries in a library of shows that have, with each iteration, challenged the conventions and formulas that, in particular, American-made network television shows took during my childhood. The arrival of, first, the cable channels and then, more recently, the streamers threw off the shackles of network regulation. An hour of television suddenly became an hour of cinematic television. The Sopranos (still for me the greatest television show of all time) in 1999 can lay claim to being the catalyst, leading to shows like The Wire, Mad Men, Homeland, Game Of Thrones and almost every other ‘appointment’ drama you’ve ever been recommended. Even network shows, like House or Grey’s Anatomy benefitted from the narrative-driven approach that the cable and streaming series generated.

I know all of these examples are American, and there have been plenty of similarly intelligently-written series elsewhere (from acclaimed Scandi-dramas to Line Of Duty), but the US has cornered the market for event programming to schedule your life around, rather than simply have on. You could say, I know, that few of these shows were based on new concepts: there was The Godfather before The Sopranos, political dramas before The West Wing and Hill Street Blues before The Wire, but none were allowed the space and creative licence to explore the plots and themes that they pursued, challenging ‘cookie cutter’ depictions of nuclear families, urban living, social behaviour or the criminal underworld.

Arguably, though, the biggest strength of all of them - and Better Call Saul has been the prime example - is pace. Like its ‘sequel’ Breaking Bad, Saul was deliberately slow to get cooking. Gilligan and Gould were in no rush to establish Jimmy McGill as the vengeful rogue, slowly building his ascent to become Saul Goodman by creating a long-form rivalry with slick lawyer Howard Hamlin (whose own arc crossed streams with Lalo’s in tragic circumstances in this final season), leaving victims in his wake, such as his own brother Chuck and eventual wife Kim. Saul doesn’t ask for our view on the morality of it all, much as The Sopranos didn’t ask for our opinion on the casual violence and the almost organised infidelity of the principle characters. And so, McGill cons and fleeces his way through scam after scam, becoming Goodman and latterly Takovic. None of this happened overnight. And it was better for it.

Tony Dalton as Lalo Salamanca
Picture: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

The quality is courage: The Sopranos wasn’t afraid to bump off Soprano crew stalwart Salvatore ‘Big Pussy’ Bonpensiero in just the second series and there have been similar ‘Well that just happened…!’ moments in all of the shows it sired, from Idris Elba’s Stringer Bell in The Wire to Bryan Cranston’s Walter White in Breaking Bad itself). Even in Better Call Saul, Lalo met his end midway through this final series, despite appearing to be set up as chief antagonist for its entire length. That is the brilliance of this sort of television. Predictability just won’t cut it.

Seinfeld proved, too, that you could fill a half hour with nothing at all, as long as it was witty. Gilligan and Gould have done something similar with their two series set, more or less, in the fairly uninspiring New Mexico city of Albuquerque. Who else could make five minutes of McGill/Goodman bouncing a tennis ball off his office wall while he contemplates his own divorce, riotously entertaining? In an industry - especially the American television industry - where every second of airtime has to count, less can definitely mean more.

Of course, some of the credit for this must go to the non-linear channels like HBO, Netflix, AppleTV, Disney Plus, AMC and others that now dominate our viewing choices. They’ve enabled the proliferation of television length, cinema-scale creativity, some of which is attracting some of the most talented directors in the industry. Disney’s acquisition of the Star Wars universe, with spinoffs like The Mandalorian and Obi-Wan Kenobi, may not have won over all of the fanboys, but they’ve literally chopped up a cinema product and made it bingeworthy telly. 

Better Call Saul’s ending will probably end the Breaking Bad universe. Gilligan says they’ve had other ideas, but his focus now will be on something completely new. “It’s a lot of pressure. It’s very scary. A lot of sweaty palms. A lot of sleepless nights,”, Gilligans’s creative partner, Peter Gould said of Saul’s ending during a Television Critics Association presentation. “I think, ‘Who are we going to please?’ I think we know. I think those of us on the show are very happy with where it ended. I hope everybody else agrees.”. 

Over the course of 62 episodes of Breaking Bad, 63 episodes of Saul, and the post-Breaking Bad film El Camino, Gilligan (who previously worked on The X Files) and Gould have sealed themselves firmly in the great library of epic television shows. While they haven’t reinvented the medium, they’ve injected something of wit and intelligence to the hour-long format. One day, I’ve promised myself to rewatch The Sopranos in its entirety. I can see these entertaining tales of morally reprehensible behaviour in Albuquerque getting another airing as well. I’d just need to find ten uninterrupted days to binge my way through all of it.

Picture: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

It’s all good, man

There is a debate amongst television critics over which show can be declared the greatest ever. It’s a similar discourse to that perennial, what is cinema's greatest film (The Godfather, obviously). Except that the television debate is probably even tighter to call. One thing is certain: we’ve been in a golden era of TV drama since the turn of the Millennium, when The Sopranos was just hitting its stride, The Wire and Band Of Brothers were about to happen, and most right-minded individuals were saying that if it wasn’t for Hill Street Blues and, especially, Homicide: Life On The Street, none of these pieces of epic, cinematic television would have happened at all.

I was prepared to declare all bets off following The Sopranos when Breaking Bad came along. The Newark mob series had everything: Corleone-esque, Shakespearian tragedy; a modern take on suburban family life; male mental vulnerability; dark humour; a creative approach to sex and violence; and a cast so brilliantly assembled - and, so Italian-American - that the Emmy judging committee should probably have just taken the years 2000 to 2007 off with a ‘gone fishing’ sign swinging on the door. The Sopranos’ deliciously open-ended finale was barely six months-cold when the American cable network AMC gave a debut to a slow-burn show about a high school chemistry teacher who, facing up to turning 50 and a terminal cancer diagnosis, succumbs to an unusual form of mid-life crisis and reinvents himself as a methamphetamine kingpin in Albuquerque. Breaking Bad took its first season to get going, and that was clearly writer Vince Gilligan’s intention. Such was its plot and character development that it is, actually, still hard to pinpoint the exact moment that it hit stride. But, like any addiction, once you realise you're in too deep, it's too late. But, by the time Bryan Cranston’s Walter White/Heisenberg succumbed to injury at the end of Season 5, we had been dragged through an intoxicating rollercoaster, not dissimilar to that Tony Soprano took us on, as families were tested, friendships questioned, and plots and sub-plots got thicker and deeper.

Whether this was Gilligan’s writing process or not, Breaking Bad was an undoubted high point in the art of the story arc, as if he knew precisely how the show would evolve from the opening episode of Season 1 to the finale of Season 5. The same must be the case with Better Call Saul, the prequel-sequel which wittily traces the creation of shyster, knows-where-the-bodies-are-buried lawyer Saul Goodman, the attorney who kept Walter White safe. Because, as we reached the final episode yesterday of Season 4, it is possible that Better Call Saul is eclipsing its predecessor for utter brilliance. Once more, Gilligan has slow-burned it, cleverly building the story of conman Jimmy McGill’s attempts to break into alegal career in the shadow of his eccentric elder brother, Chuck, while sowing seeds of Breaking Bad back stories, including the rise of Gus Fring, the scheming fried chicken entrepreneur-come-ruthless meth cartel player, his enforcer Mike Ehrmantraut and the fiersome Salamancas.

With its fourth season, Gilligan has commenced the transition of McGill into Goodman, not quite Anakin Skywalker becoming Darth Vader, but certainly the creation of a vessel for the dark arts that will, in Breaking Bad, provide Odenkirk with a breakout character as the strip mall lawyer with a line in sharp patter and equally sharp thinking. Running through the season has been Jimmy’s inability to process his brother’s death at the end of Season 3, his slowly decaying relationship with fellow lawyer Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), an ever-increasingly number of hints as to the source of Fring’s fractious - and, ultimately, fatal - relationship with the Salamancas. Meanwhile, Ehrmantraut has been tasked by Fring with overseeing work on creating the super meth lab that will figure in Breaking Bad, another scintilating nod ahead to the mother series (and, to be a bit of a nerd, another unintended Star Wars parallel, like seeing the Death Star under construction in Revenge Of The Sith...).

These are just a few nuggets from Better Call Saul’s fourth season, one which ends - no spoilers here - with Jimmy telling Kim that everything will be fine - "It's all good, man". Genius. Just as Gilligan pulled off so brilliantly with Breaking Bad, time in this universe runs slowly. Both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul progress cleverly, at a subtle pace that reveals less than you realise and more than you know at the same time. Some might find this drip-feed of detail frustrating, agonising, even. But it is no less compelling. In the best traditions of soap opera, the need to find out what happens next is infuriating, but deliciously created in the process. Looking back over these last nine episodes of Better Call Saul the reveals have been peeled away like the skin of an onion. It is writing of an exquisite hue, television of an astonishing quality. If you've watched Breaking Bad you know how many of the Better Call Saul characters end up or, at least, how they come about. Even Jimmy's ill-fated brother Chuck and girlfriend Kim are vital ingredients to the slippery fish Saul Goodman seems fully-formed when he comes into contact with Walter and Jesse in original show. Better Call Saul even includes flash-forwards to Jimmy/Saul, post-Albuquerque, trying to maintain life, soul and anonymity in a Nebraska shopping mall where, as 'Gene Takovic' he runs a Cinnabon franchise.

Regardless of the subplots and parallel story strands of each episode, the focus always returns to McGill, and his transformation into Goodman. Such is the genius of Gilligan’s characterisation and Odenkirk’s performance of him, that it will always be difficult to be sympathetic to him. His vulnerabilities, stupidity and, occasionally, good nature are all on show. He is hero and anti-hero, protagonist and antagonist, morally as lacking as most, if not all other principle characters in the show, who are all in some way working to succeed behind the lines of criminality. As we wait eagerly for the next season - there's no clue as to whether a fifth will be the last, even though that would match Breaking Bad's perfect season structure - we know that there is a finite nature to all of Better Call Saul's characters, and yet we crave them. We want more of Ehrmantraut's survivalism, of Fring's utterly cold criminality, even the desert blandness of Albuquerque and the sand-washed normality of the American West that provides such a flattened canvas for the drug crime on which both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad pivot. And, weirdly, we want Jimmy to succeed, just as we did Walter White. There is no morality tale here: White may have had somewhat best intentions to monetising his chemistry expertise, but he had, as soon as he decided to take that path, crossed over to the dark side. McGill was probably already there. Now we wait to see how far he goes there. Season 5 cannot come soon enough. It’s all good, man.