‘Better Call Saul’ lives up to ‘Breaking Bad’ and you’re missing it

Many think that ‘Breaking Bad’ is the best series in the history of television. And although such a drastic and definitive sentence will always entail a necessary debate, it may be. Or at least it is very high in the ranking. Some love ‘Breaking Bad’ but believe there is another series even better: ‘Better Call Saul’. “Nowadays I meet people every day who tell me that ‘Better Call Saul’ is their favorite of the two. I love to hear that”confessed in an interview Vince Gilligan, creator of ‘Breaking Bad’ and co-creator with Peter Gould of the spin-off, which is both a prequel and a sequel to the original series.

Many fans of the story of how Walter White became Heisenberg may not have been able to get hooked on the tragedy of Jimmy McGill, a lawyer with too much talent for deception and traps who, despite himself, ended up becoming Saul Goodman, the character that Bob Odenkirk plays so well. After all, the spin-off has taken its time to tell us about this transformation: in the sixth and final season, which premieres this Tuesday, April 19 on Movistar Plus+, Jimmy has already legally changed his name but has not yet fully embraced his new personality.

A series that demands patience and reformulates television rhythms

The slowness of its pace and the progress of its plots, something that ‘Breaking Bad’ was also accused of at a certain point, has been one of the great criticisms that ‘Better Call Saul’ has received. A few days ago the prestigious American media Atlantic published an article in which a TV critic confessed that he used the Netflix x1.5 button to watch it: “It can be magnificent. It can also be tedious. Tedious with frequent scenes of brushing teeth. Tedious with subplots over several seasons about nursing home bills. Tedious with slow and repetitive observations about the human condition. So tedious that I stopped watching it after three years.”.

And although this statement, coming from someone who is dedicated to analyzing television fiction, seems embarrassing and questionable to me, the truth is that I can understand it. During its early years, ‘Better Call Saul’ tested the patience of dedicated viewers.. Especially in an era in which we consume fiction sometimes in the worst conditions (with the mobile in hand, doing other things while we watch the series in the background, or directly putting them at a faster speed), this is a work that requires that you stop to watch it calmly, adapting to its leisurely pace and its long sequences in which the characters carry out actions that are at first sight banal.

In a similar way to David Lynch in the fantastic ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’, Gilligan and Gould dare to reformulate television rhythmswhich have traditionally been slaves to immediacy and constant impact to keep the viewer hooked and not change the channel.

The third season began with a 10-minute scene in which Mike Ehrmantraut, the legendary elderly thug from ‘Breaking Bad’ played by Jonathan Banks, scrapped his car in complete silence.. From what had happened at the end of the second season, we had to assume that she was doing it to look for a tracking chip, but it was never explicitly explained in words. When he does find it, we see Mike go through an elaborate and gradual plan throughout the episode whereby he ends up depleting the chip’s battery, replacing it with his own, and letting the people following him pick up the new chip thinking it’s the one. old, so that Mike can then follow his spies and find out who is watching him.

What in most series would have been counted with an ellipsis and two lines of overexplanatory script, is a plot of several long scenes without dialogue in the hands of Gilligan and Gould (The latter, the creator of the character Saul Goodman in ‘Breaking Bad’, has been acting as solo showrunner since the third season of the spin-off). If this sounds like Chinese torture to someone, it’s because they’ve never seen ‘Breaking Bad’ or don’t remember its visual power and narrative excellence. ‘Better Call Saul’ inherits from its mother series the taste for unexpectedly spectacular shots, the original positioning of the camera and the construction of unforgettable images. Ugly New Mexico becomes Gilligan’s created universe in an intriguing western full of unusual beauty.

Beyond the visual, ‘Better Call Saul’ simply finds pleasure and narrative juice in the most mundane processes. At the end of the day, this is the series of a lawyer in which the legal profession is not idealized or oversized as is usually seen in the audiovisual. One of the greatest climaxes of fiction, in its second season, consists of seeing Jimmy carefully falsify some documents throughout an arduous and extensive job… in a copy shop. And believe me, he is fascinating to watch.

An outcome that rewards patience

And, here’s the key: it’s ultimately satisfying. As in ‘Breaking Bad’ (although this one was much less leisurely), the wait and the staggered construction of its different plots have been leading to an outcome that will reward patience. Not in vain the fifth season was the best of the entire series.

An ending, by the way, that will not be as explosive as that of its mother series but, in a strange way, it does feel more tragic. Because Jimmy McGill’s story is less spectacular than Walter White’s, his fall into hell less showy; but at the same time it is much more human. Walter was a man who became a monster when he was consumed by a bitterness and an evil that he had numb. Jimmy is just a poor devil underestimated by the world (and especially by his brother, Chuck, one of the great characters in the series played immensely by Michael McKean) who wants to be a good lawyer but always ends up letting his tricky instincts take over. “You’re just going to keep hurting people, Jimmy, that’s what you do”Chuck told him in the season three finale. “In the end you are going to hurt everyone around you. You can not avoid it. So stop apologizing and accept it. Hug him. Honestly, I’d respect you more if you did.”.

As we know that Jimmy will end up becoming his alter ego, the lawyer who defends drug dealers and murderers and gets rich off the crime Saul Goodman, Chuck’s words hurt especially. Because that is the great discovery of ‘Better Call Saul’: it makes us fall in love with Jimmy, that man we never met in ‘Breaking Bad’ because he was already “dead”.

And those words also resonate when we think of Kim Wexler, the best character in the series and the best performance, that of Rhea Seehorn. Kim is to Jimmy what Skyler was to Walter: love interest, Jiminy Cricket and at times also an accomplice in his misdeeds. But its evolution and depth, often bestowed by Seehorn’s acting between the lines, are such a delight that even in the most unbearable moments the leisurely pace kept me hooked.

Of course Kim is, along with Nacho Varga (Michael Mando), the most important character whose fate we do not know because he was not mentioned in ‘Breaking Bad’. At this point, before starting the last season, the question is no longer whether Kim Wexler will live but whether Kim Wexler will end up succumbing to darkness like Jimmy. And I don’t know which of the two options is more painful for me to imagine.

Two series in one (and one much better than the other)

That said, ‘Better Call Saul’ is not perfect even if we willingly accept the pact of patience that it demands from the beginning. As the series progresses it becomes more and more evident that he is telling two stories in one, not always connected.: that of Jimmy McGill on the one hand and that of the drug traffickers and criminals that will populate the universe of ‘Breaking Bad’, with Mike, Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) and Hector Salamanca (Mark Margolis) at the helm. This other half is the least interesting and it often seems that the writers tell it because they feel they owe it to the original series and its fans, filling ‘Better Call Saul’ with cameos from more or less important characters from ‘Breaking Bad’. In the sixth season it has already been confirmed that we will see Walter and Jesse, the iconic protagonists of the series played by Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul.

That its most unnecessary and soporific parts are precisely those that connect more directly and explicitly with ‘Breaking Bad’ says something good about ‘Better Call Saul’: it has reached a status where we can consider it more than just a prequel. It’s a series in itself, and one with some of the most thought-provoking cinematography and direction on television today and thoughtful, thoughtful writing. It is undoubtedly one of the best series on the air, and it will continue to be for the next few months (the final season will end in the summer). Better or worse than ‘Breaking Bad’? I don’t know the answer, but that we can ask ourselves the question should already be a reason for a lot more people to be watching it.