Its meticulous shabbiness inspires nostalgia for a slightly less overheated TV era, when shows didn’t have to jostle and compete and shout ‘look at me!’ for attention. In the streaming era, we seem to be losing the patience for such storytelling, with shows constantly one-upping each other for shock value, from The Witcher to rise-and-fall dramas Super Pumped and WeCrashed.Īs Taylor Antrim of Vogue explains: "Saul looks like nothing else on TV.” Like its predecessors, Better Call Saul combines strong, cinematic visuals with methodical storytelling to give audiences a complex portrait of the land of opportunity’s shadow-world.Īs it comes to an end, so does the golden age of TV. Three reasons Better Call Saul works: a scriptwriter's perspective You have to really crunch the psyche of a person to get them to change fundamentally.“ I think one of the themes of Better Call Saul is that real, fundamental change of a person is driven by some pretty hard and powerful forces. Unable to be himself, and yet unable to affect real change by the book, the corporate world eats away at his resolve until there’s nothing left but the thrill of the scam. This is what makes Jimmy’s slow transformation into Saul Goodman so despairing, and yet so relatable. Mad Men, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the 'Golden Age' of televisionįaced with these untenable conditions, Jimmy descends further into the world of the con, gradually forsaking his idealism and fulfilling a destiny that others – institutions, colleagues, his brother – have written for him. Shut out of institutions they’ve earned the right to re-enter - and so they do whatever it takes to survive outside of those institutions. No matter how much Jimmy tries to appease the establishment, and his brother, Chuck (a formidable Michael McKean), he can never quite shake his reputation as “Slippin’ Jimmy”.įor Berman, this is where Better Call Saul excels, in showing us the hypocrisy of the American judicial system, where “even the attorneys who uphold this system don’t really believe in second chances.” But his past as a small-time conman makes this transition impossible. We pity Jimmy in particular as he tries in vain to be accepted by the corporate mainstream. Like Jimmy, their tragic arcs are amplified by the choices they feel they are forced to make. IMDBīetter Call Saul resonates because it’s filled with characters who feel smothered by dead-end compromises, like Ignacio “Nacho” Varga (Michael Mando) and Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), both of whom are caught in the orbit of the drug cartel. Rhea Seehorn as Kim Wexler and Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill in Better Call Saul. She, too, realises that law and justice are not always the same thing. Like Jimmy, Kim is torn between the stability of corporate life and her passion for public defender cases. His girlfriend-turned-wife, Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) remains the primary voice of reason until the end of season five, when she succumbs to the lure of Jimmy’s scheming ways. We like Jimmy because he is kind, irreverent, resourceful and idealistic. If anything, Jimmy is one of life’s losers, struggling to hold onto his individuality in a corporate system that thrives on conformity. He is not a Dexter Morgan or a Tony Soprano. Jimmy is not the romanticised anti-hero Walter White is. While Breaking Bad felt slick and gritty, Better Call Saul feels painfully real. Better Call Saul, by contrast, is renowned for its unhurried momentum and painstaking focus on the minutiae of the legal world.Īs David Segal of The New York Times put it:įor decades, law firms have been portrayed on television as realms of glamour and intrigue. But thanks to intelligent dialogue, skilful shifts in tone, and multifaceted characters, the show has established its own unique legacy under the guardianship of creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould.īreaking Bad was notorious for fulminated-mercury explosions and gruesome deaths ( 271 deaths compared to 65 in Better Call Saul, as of the penultimate episode). As a prequel spin-off, Better Call Saul was always going to be compared to its beloved predecessor.
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