Better Call Saul: A shaky successor to Breaking Bad

The announcement of Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul was met with equal parts glee and trepidation. Breaking Bad had already earned its place in the pantheon of TV's all-time great dramas, and the chance to spend a little more time in that world, with one of its greatest characters, was impossible to turn down.

But the failures of countless spin-offs loom large, and Better Call Saul is easily the highest-stakes spin-off in modern history. None of the shows typically held to represent the "golden age of television" — The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men — has even attempted to extend its reach with a spin-off. Done well, a Breaking Bad spin-off could make the legacy of a great show even greater; done poorly, it could serve as an embarrassing footnote on Breaking Bad's legendary run.

So: is Better Call Saul a worthy successor to Breaking Bad? It's a complicated question — and Saul Goodman is the kind of guy who'll keep working on you until you take his side — but after three episodes, I can't say I'm wholly convinced yet.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

There's a lot to like about Better Call Saul. Bob Odenkirk is a 52-year-old actor with recent performances in everything from FX's Fargo to the Oscar-nominated Nebraska, but this is the first meaty lead role he's ever had the chance to play, and he doesn't waste the opportunity. We're reintroduced to him six years before Breaking Bad under his real name, Jimmy McGill, long before he cynically adopted the "Saul Goodman" moniker. ("My real name's McGill," he once explained in an episode of Breaking Bad. "The Jew thing I just do for the homeboys. They all want a pipe-hitting member of the tribe, so to speak.")

As the series begins, Jimmy is scraping by as a public defender, making $700 per case as he tackles the dregs of Albuquerque's criminal population. Odenkirk is particularly terrific in these courtroom scenes, spinning his clients' generally ludicrous stories with the rapid-fire hucksterism of P.T. Barnum. In its best moments, Better Call Saul shakes up the tropes of TV's innumerable sleepy courtrooms by infusing them with the lively, jagged energy of Odenkirk's performance.

Unfortunately, this is also where Better Call Saul hits its first snag. This isn't just a courtroom drama; it's an origin story, and Odenkirk, who was magnetically sleazy in Breaking Bad, has toned his performance down accordingly. If Breaking Bad took Mr. Chips and turned him into Scarface, Better Call Saul takes Daniel Webster and promises to turn him into, well, Saul Goodman. But we've already seen Saul Goodman at his peak, and it's hard to shake the nagging feeling that Better Call Saul will be a lot more fun when Jimmy McGill shakes the vestiges of morality (and Bob Odenkirk gets to take the handcuffs off).

Within the first episode, Odenkirk is joined by another fan-favorite Breaking Bad alum: Jonathan Banks, reprising the role of the dead-eyed, gravelly-voiced enforcer Mike Ehrmantraut. But the series also introduces plenty of new faces. There are a pair of idiotic skaters with a proto-Jesse Pinkman vibe; a scheming new client with unsavory connections to Albuquerque's criminal underworld; a fellow lawyer who doubles as a kind of quasi-love interest; and Jimmy's older brother Chuck, coping with an illness I've been asked not to describe. That's a lot of new territory to explore — but in the three episodes I've seen, none of the show's new characters makes a real impression. It's not even clear which of them will play a significant role in the show's future.

The gulf between the old characters and the new is emblematic of the biggest problem with Better Call Saul: all of its greatest strengths — the main cast, the guest stars, the visual aesthetic — originate in Breaking Bad. (The first two episodes, which retain the basic cinematography and style of Breaking Bad, were directed by Vince Gilligan and Michelle MacLaren — the two directors behind many of Breaking Bad's truly great episodes.) I'd rather focus on Better Call Saul as its own series, and not as an extension of Breaking Bad — but Better Call Saul implicitly insists on being compared to Breaking Bad. It's there from the beginning of the pilot, which provides a dour (and so far totally unnecessary) glimpse of Saul's life following the events of Breaking Bad, casting a long and depressing shadow over the events of Better Call Saul.

But while Better Call Saul makes it virtually impossible not to think about Breaking Bad, it can't possibly measure up. The key to Breaking Bad's legendary narrative momentum was its focus. From the very beginning, the stakes were clear: Walter White, with just months to live, needed to make and sell enough crystal meth to ensure a brighter future for his family. By the end of the pilot, we'd met a half-dozen characters — a wife, a son, a brother-in-law and sister-in-law, as well as a student-turned-partner and a pair of adversaries — who were already trapped by the decisions Walter made.

The circumstances of Jimmy McGill's life at the start of Better Call Saul are much less dire than the problems faced by Walter White at the beginning of Breaking Bad. That's not necessarily a problem; TV stakes don't need to be life-or-death. But they do need to be clear, and Better Call Saul throws a lot of spaghetti at the wall. Jimmy is ostensibly broke, but he seems to have plenty of work at the courthouse. There are problems with his brother, but it's not at all clear how they can be resolved. Does Jimmy face any danger from his dalliance with Albuquerque's criminal underworld? Or from the partners at the law firm that still uses his brother's name on its masthead?

Like all spin-offs, Better Call Saul is being overly scrutinized, probably unfairly, in the shadow of its parent series. Breaking Bad the TV series didn't become Breaking Bad the cultural institution until well into its fourth season, and it got there, in part, by spending years getting smarter and deeper without critics and viewers picking over every flaw. For all the missteps of these first few episodes — and my troubling sense that every installment was weaker than the one before it — there's a lot to admire about Better Call Saul. It just needs to take those elements and turn them into a show with its own identity.

Given that AMC has already renewed Better Call Saul for a second season, there's plenty of time for the show to grow into its own. This is one last time when the creative team behind Better Call Saul would be wise to return to the words of Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad: "If you're committed enough, you can make any story work."

Better Call Saul premieres on February 8.