Television Review: “Better Call Saul” goes deeper and darker in the first episode of its third season.
Major Spoilers Ahead.
It’s got to be a damn near impossible task to produce a worthwhile sequel to one of the most beloved shows of all time. Think about the unreal degree of pressure the show’s creators must face, from both fans and critics alike. Imagine if their had been a bawdy standalone spinoff about Pauly Sicero, Tony’s right-hand guy on “The Sopranos,” or if “Deadwood’s” Calamity Jane had gotten her own one-hour drama about life in the cruel South Dakota frontierlands.
The shows I’ve just mentioned are indisputably some of the most acclaimed of these last twenty to thirty years. They signify peak T.V.’s big risks, and the artistic echelon that all showrunners surely hope to achieve when working at their zenith. Personally, and I don’t think I’m alone here, I would argue that Vince Gilligan’s “Breaking Bad” — the hyper-propulsive and downward-spiraling tale of a Chem-Teacher-Turned-Meth-Kingpin whose soul rots and corrodes as his power slowly grows — could be mentioned in that same very rarefied company. This makes the presence of “Better Call Saul,” a low-key spinoff about Saul Goodman a.k.a. Jimmy McGill, Bob Odenkirk’s droll criminal lawyer from “Breaking Bad,” all the more inexplicable. The fact that “Saul” turned out to be better than anyone expected seemed like even more of a surprise.
There were some complaints when the show first premiered that “Better Call Saul’s” first season was too laid-back: that not enough happened, that the show valued character over plot, often to its detriment. To be fair, “Saul” does lack “Breaking Bad’s” seemingly effortless penchant for generating white-knuckle suspense, and it’s certainly less hyper-kinetic on the whole. However, to bemoan the lack of action scenes or villainous soliloquies in “Better Call Saul” is to miss a much larger point. This is a show that has more in common with the great crime literature of George V. Higgins and Elmore Leonard –where wiseguys and lowlives spend a lot of time casually shooting the breeze, usually in between stick-up jobs and other related scams — than with anything out of the more typically turbo-charged T.V. drama factory. Whereas “Breaking Bad” anchored its noose-tightening narrative around Bryan Cranston’s increasingly demonic and very actorly lead performance, the breezier “Better Call Saul” is more attuned to Odenkirk’s hangdog talents. The result is not necessarily better or worse than “Breaking Bad” but simply different: more concerned with behavior and psychology than plot, though cruelty and viciousness do inevitably find their way into Gilligan’s sun-scorched Southwestern milieu.
The second season of “Saul” was where Gilligan’s show went from being a fitfully engaging black comedy that unfortunately lived in the looming shadow of one of T.V.’s great dramas to a genuinely gripping morality play about a man who simply does not know how to tell the truth. Watching Jimmy McGill transform from a well-meaning but opportunistic schmuck scrambling to put a few bucks together so he can shoot a low-rent T.V. commercial into a predatory shark who can confess to a felony without so much as blinking an eye takes a lot more patience and finesse than people realize. Also, I’m sure there were folks who doubted that the normally more genial Odenkirk — who, prior to “Breaking Bad,” was mostly known for his work in the alt-comedy community and on HBO’s great cult sketch series “Mr. Show” — could make the sort of Jekyll-and-Hide transformation that the show was asking him to make. Jimmy’s losing battle for his soul, coupled with the violent misadventures of police-officer-turned-underworld-enforcer Mike Ehrmantraut — a character, beautifully rendered by Jonathan Banks, who, as far as I’m concerned, deserves a spin-off of his very own — makes “Better Call Saul” one of the more absorbing dramas on television, even when it feels like nothing is happening in the so-called “story”.
The chilling cliffhanger of season two, where Jimmy admits to gross malfeasance in his handling of the Mesa Verde case while his brother Chuck (Michael McKean, moving) gets his confession on tape, leaves “Better Call Saul” fans in a curious place. On one hand, we know Jimmy is going to make it out of this whole nasty ordeal alive, so he can transform into Saul Goodman and start assisting his very important client many years down the line. Chuck is a different story. McKean plays Jimmy’s brother as a supercilious and prideful man — one whose moral compass is made of greater stuff than his no-good brother’s. It’s that kind of pride, though, that typically comes before a great fall, and it compels the viewer to ask: is Chuck going to end up belly-up in a ditch somewhere out in the desert?
It remains to be seen. Gilligan has teased that this new season of “Saul,” which just kicked its third season off with a terrific installment called “Mabel,” will not only be darker and more brutal than the earlier seasons of the show, but that certain key players from the “Breaking Bad” universe (namely, Giancarlo Esposito’s polite, chicken-slanging drug lord Gus Fring) will be popping up in later episodes. While I generally believe that all this shared-universe horseshit is slowly eroding our ability to appreciate the merits of individual works of art, I also trust Gilligan and his creative brain trust to sew these characters into the larger fabric of the narrative in a way that doesn’t feel half-assed. Remember, this is the creative team that has given us episodes of T.V. like “Fly” and “ABQ”: works of pitch-perfect short-form drama that have forever altered the landscape of television storytelling. Could “Better Call Saul” ever possibly live up to that golden standard?
If the premiere installment of season three is anything to go off, the answer is a resounding “oh, hell yes”. “Mabel” is just the latest example of Gilligan and company forgoing cheap thrills in favor of slowly and methodically tightening the screws. Aside from one fairly major reveal near the end of the second act, not a whole lot happens in “Mabel” — at least not to the untrained eye. Jimmy and his romantic/legal partner Kim Wexler (the outstanding Rhea Seehorn) have the Mesa Verde deal all sewn up and Mike is still taking very careful steps in his quiet war against the Salamanca crime family. And yet, as always with “Better Call Saul,” it’s Gilligan’s attention to detail that draws us in. If “Breaking Bad” was a more rigidly plotted, action-packed show, “Better Call Saul” adopts the leisurely, detail-obsessed pace of a crime procedural. It may seem like not a whole lot is going on in “Mabel,” but for viewers who are paying attention, we can see that Gilligan is setting our hero up for one hell of a collapse — as well as leading him into the arms of the man who will become his most trusted client.
Season three of “Better Call Saul” opens, like the first two seasons, with an eerie black-and-white prologue that flashes forward six years after the events of “Breaking Bad”. We see balding, depressed-looking Jimmy McGill — now officially Saul Goodman, and still managing a Cinnabon in a New Mexico mall complex — sitting by his lonesome, eating a sandwich and reading the newspaper. In his immediate purview, we catch a glimpse of a young hooligan trying, and failing, to pocket a stolen item. When the kid is apprehended by the mall’s security, the guards look to Jimmy for a visual confirmation of the perp’s identity. Tellingly, he refuses to give them one. As the kid is dragged off, we see Jimmy rise from his seat and shout: “Say nothing, you understand? Get a lawyer!”
Now obviously, Jimmy is talking to this poor schmuck who’s just been nailed for stealing and yet, in a less literal sense, Jimmy is also speaking to himself — whether he knows it or not. Our lead character’s actions throughout the rest of “Mabel” highlight Gilligan’s striving antihero at his almost ambitious and nakedly opportunistic. As always, Jimmy is convinced that, through sheer grit and determination, he and Kim will reach the gilded heights that they’ve dreamt about over countless plates of Chinese takeout and late nights spent crunching numbers at the office.
After three seasons, it’s still fascinating enough just to try and get a grip on what exactly drives Jimmy towards his unscrupulous and sometimes life-endangering ends. He seems to genuinely believe that he’s helping people who are too disenfranchised to seek more reputable legal representation, and yet the means by which he achieves these ends are often horrifying. There’s the guy we saw in Season One — when Jimmy was literally just a low-rent con man getting his kicks by bilking barflies out of petty cash — and then there’s the Jimmy McGill of “Mabel,” whose belief in his own line of bullshit seems practically bulletproof. Just watch how Jimmy handles a volatile situation with an unhappy military man whom he duped in season two: through an almost athletic display of self-rationalizing, Jimmy manages to dig himself out of a hole that would bury less tenacious men.
Chuck still has the drop on his brother, having nabbed Jimmy’s most damning confession to date on tape in last season’s haunting finale, “Klick”. Of course, Chuck’s methods aren’t the kind that would go over swimmingly in any court of law, but I presume Gilligan is saving that Joker card for later in the season. Soon, Jimmy’s eccentric electrophobe brother finds himself backed into a corner, considering a compromise in one of those classic Gilligan “gotcha” moments that used to induce increased heart rates in “Breaking Bad’s” later, more adrenalized seasons.
Mike’s arc in the first episode, meanwhile, is a small marvel of procedural detail. After attempting to strike out against his enemies near the end of “Klick,” Mike was met with a chilling note left on the windshield of his car that read, simply: “Don’t”. As such, the weary old bruiser is re-assessing his game plan. Figuring that the Salamancas must have bugged his vehicle to track him to their very remote desert location, Mike takes his beat-up old heap (a 1987 Chevy Caprice, natch) to an underworld fixer. The guy strips the car of all its parts, in one of those dreamy montages set to Southwestern, bluesy rock n’ roll that both this show and “Breaking Bad” do to near-perfection, and locates the bug. Boom.
Mike’s war with the Salamancas is far from over, but the old man is also smart enough to know that he’s playing chess, not checkers. This tense, hemmed-in second act of “Mabel” is about as perfect as “Better Call Saul” gets, and as opposed as I am to the whole world-building trend on an fundamental level, I still concede that I would be wholly welcome to the idea of a standalone show about Mike Ehrmantraut. Banks is so effortlessly wonderful here that it makes you wonder why he wasn’t brought into the universe of “Breaking Bad” sooner.
As it moseys along its wayward path, “Better Call Saul” is growing darker and more confident in its visual storytelling, while also shedding much of the unfortunate baggage that come with being a part of the larger “Breaking Bad” universe. I’m sure there will be a stream of fanboy theorizing when Gustavo Fring does finally show up in this world, but you know what? I’m not particularly interested in that way of consuming this show, which is more layered and complex than these reductive assessments would ever have you believe. Whereas “Breaking Bad” grew more thrilling in its later seasons, its sense of nuance often diminished, resulting in a harshly black-and-white, moralistic final stretch in which Cranston’s domestic drug lord got what we all feared was coming to him.
If I were to employ a musical analogy, “Better Call Saul” is the jazzy, constantly surprising collection of B-sides to “Breaking Bad’s” colossal and ambitious concept album. It’s a sly, seemingly incidental show that can seem slight at times because it doesn’t insist on its own importance. It’s also far funnier than “Breaking Bad” ever was, even in its early seasons. A lot of this has to do with Odenkirk’s innate gifts as a performer: he possesses comedic timing that other actors would kill for, and I’ve been wondering when someone was going to smarten up and cast him as the lead in something. It feels safe to say at this point that Odenkirk, who has been a generous supporting player and character actor until this point in his career, has found the perfect vehicle for his very specific talents.
As “Better Call Saul” marches towards its gloomy finish, Mr. Odenkirk has consistently grown into his own as a dramatic performer, conveying Jimmy’s ongoing skirmish with his conscience with a rumpled, down-low… well, I suppose integrity’s not the right word for it, but perhaps magnetism? Come to think of it, Jonathan Banks is quite funny in this show too: some of Mike’s line-readings are so patently ridiculous, yet delivered with such stone cold seriousness that you end up laughing, almost as a way to relieve the tension. Rhea Seehorn is also quite brilliant in her own way, managing to sell us on Kim’s battered sense of idealism with winning pathos: she might be the only character in this world who can safely say she has a totally clean conscience.
Of course, a clean conscience doesn’t last long in such a cynical world, which begs the greater question of whether Kim will make it out of this season alive. For “Breaking Bad” fanboys who wish that “Better Call Saul” would hurry up and tell its story with a little more urgency, I have bad news: if “Mabel” is any precedent, season three is not going to be that. This is, of course, terrific news for true fans of the show, for whom Gilligan’s consistent displays of patience and subtlety are a welcome respite. A storm is just on the horizon in season three of “Better Call Saul,” and I, for one, can’t wait to be there when it breaks. Grade: “Mabel,” A-.
