Loved Breaking Bad? Better Call Saul is just what you need in lockdown
With the fifth season finale of the best show on TV coming to UK screens on Tuesday, there has never been a better time to get invested in the brilliant Better Call Saul (Netflix). Before lockdown, a slow-burning prequel to an intense 21st-century US classic – Breaking Bad – might have felt like a heavy commitment. But if you are looking for somewhere to focus your feeling of simmering dread as lockdown stretches ahead, this immersive, exhilarating television comes highly recommended. It is even more exciting and enriching than the show it is leading us towards.
Watching Better Call Saul works particularly well in these extraordinary times because of its novelistic qualities. It also requires patience (which feels fitting, given the state of the world), but that patience reaps rewards. It tells us the tragic, funny story of an unravelling, comedic everyman – the somehow-always-adorable Jimmy McGill – who becomes the flashy, trashy lawyer Saul Goodman. Even though the decision to remake himself sends him spiralling him towards a world of terrifying drug lords, it is the wider scope of Jimmy’s vivid world that keeps us returning.
Here – with minimal spoilers for newcomers – is why you should be using lockdown to lock into it.
The pre-credit opening sequences
Better Call Saul is a show full of incredible detail, even before the episodes begin. In some openers, we are thrown far into Jimmy’s future, past his last moments in Breaking Bad, when he has taken on another new identity, Cinnabon sales assistant Gene Takovic. In these scenes, which are filmed in black and white, he is literally and symbolically stripped of colour, but slowly starts to show flashes of his old, risk-taking ways. Then the oversaturated, fizzy brightness of the show’s title whizzes in.
The sets – and suits
Since we are talking about oversaturated brightness: oh, to be the costume and set designers on this show (not to mention going into detail about the gorgeous Georgia O’Keeffe deserts and twilight Edward Hopper evening scenes). Jimmy’s primary-coloured shirts and insane ties, which arrive when he starts calling himself Saul, are a constant delight. No longer a littleleague lawyer twitching in the shadow of his brother Chuck (brilliantly played by Michael McKean), he is now in your face and entirely his own man, keen to take all the other desperate-to-achieve little guys with him.
The fate of Kim
If Rhea Seehorn doesn’t become an Oscar-winning film star in the future, I will throw beer bottles out of my window. She is brilliant as Jimmy’s longterm partner, Kim Wexler, her every stately smile and twitching eyebrow suggesting what is bubbling within. Kim has worked incredibly hard to become a respected lawyer, fitting into court life perfectly, despite a tough start in life. She is moral, too, valuing her pro bono work above that of her corporate clients.
But she is also a master of the scam, possibly even more so than Jimmy (the penultimate episode of season five revealed this in terrifying style). She is a fascinating foil to him in so many ways, like a mirror image. Also, she doesn’t feature in Breaking Bad at all – she is not even mentioned in passing. The hope that she avoids a horrible exit keeps me going. Come on, Kim ...
TV’s best-ever henchman: Mike Ehrmantraut
Mike Ehrmantraut is Better Call Saul’s beating heart. A corrupt former police officer who becomes a henchman for Gus Fring (the chicken shop entrepreneur who runs a multimilliondollar drug ring on the side), he is a character who can do awful things in a heartbeat and brush them off like dust, but he never loses his tenderness (the death of his son and his love for his granddaughter are never far from his mind). Jonathan Banks’s face is a thing of malleable majesty, too. It can channel a hilariously weary old dog in the face of Saul’s escapades, a deeply broken old soul and a terrifying killer. In the latter respect, he has company …
A brilliant new villain
If you thought the wheelchairbound Hector Salamanca, well known in Breaking Bad, was the most frightening psychopath in the Vince Gilligan universe, think again. His nephew Lalo (Tony Dalton), appears like a lightning bolt in season four. Never before has a dazzling smile under a well-groomed moustache been so utterly, spleen-crushingly chilling.
The music
Taking its lead from Breaking Bad’s brilliant soundtrack, Better Call Saul keeps twisting the atmosphere in its choices of songs. Lola Marsh’s version of Somethin’ Stupid adds a welcome light breeze as Jimmy and Kim’s lives are shown slowly spiralling away from each other. The belly-deep vocals of Yma Sumac, the high priestess of Peruvian exotica, add extra eeriness to some destructive actions in season five, episode seven. You realise that other shows, such as Killing Eve, have learned similar lessons from these juxtapositions of scenes and sounds. By adding more layers of intrigue to already rich tapestries, you make viewers want to unpick them even more.
The slowly unfurling Breaking Bad cameos
A bald head walking into the room … the return of a certain vacuum cleaner salesman … all the signs that we are creeping towards Breaking Bad’s beginnings are there. Better Call Saul’s writers and directors pay attention to every element as they carry their viewers with them, respecting our investment and intelligence and pulling out every stop. This isn’t just great TV. It’s all good, man.