The moves are all there. That’s the first thing I noticed when I watched the series premiere of Better Call Saul. The moves that made Breaking Bad so great — the pacing, the little winks of foreshadowing, the insights into the characters, etc. — are all right there on the screen. There’s no guarantee that repeating these moves will result in the kind of long-term success and critical acclaim that Breaking Bad had, but, I mean, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould didn’t forget how to make television in the last 15 months. Spin-off or not, they remain pretty good at this.
Which brings us to the events in last night’s premiere. Premieres, in general, are tricky. You need to lay the groundwork and introduce the characters while still telling an interesting story. Better Call Saul could take a little shortcut there because most of the audience was already familiar with Saul/Jimmy/Gene (more on that last one in a minute), but even then it had work to do because, well, Jimmy ain’t Saul. Not yet, at least. There’s a great moment in the premiere where we see him walking through the parking lot towards a Cadillac — Saul’s whip of choice — only to reveal that he’s heading to the car next to it: a run-down, mismatched, urine-colored used Suzuki whose model name is, fittingly enough, the “Esteem.” It tells us so much of what we need to know about where he — and we — are right now and how much has to happen before we all get to where we’re headed.
That doesn’t mean we can’t see the map, though. The most obvious example of this is the skateboard ruse that takes up most of the back half of the episode. Trying to land a high-profile, shady client by paying off a pair of two-bit jackass grifters to put everyone’s life and property in jeopardy so he can swoop in and pretend to be the conquering hero/savior is a very Saul Goodman thing to do. But even before that, we saw a glimpse of it in the courtroom, when he tried to sell a jury on what basically amounted to a “boys will be boys” defense for a trio of clients who mutilated and sexually defiled a corpse. He’s still a little short on cash, prestige and connections, but he’s already long on schemes.
As far as the rest of the set-up, things are already coming into focus there, too. We’ve got the corrupt county official and his wife; Jimmy’s big shot attorney older brother, who has fallen from grace — and a position of power in the prestigious law firm he founded — due to a self-diagnosed sensitivity to electromagnetism that teeters over into madness; Mike Ehrmantraut as a sticker stickler parking lot attendant at the courthouse who quickly becomes a menacing thorn in Jimmy’s side (and, man, did I ever love how he was introduced); and the first glimpse — TUCO! — of how he might move from “criminal lawyer” to “criminal lawyer.” A lot going on already here. Most of it very good.
*****
Man, how great was that opening? Seeing Saul as Gene in that Cinnabon, rolling out dough, his glorious Trumpian combover reduced to a few scraggly hairs zigzagging across his otherwise bare scalp, one eye always fixed on potentially shady customers who may or may not be mentally removing his mustache and putting things together, it was… heartbreaking, really. Especially when we saw him later on at home sitting by himself in the dark with a drink in his hand watching a reel of his old local commercials. Like, that’s his life now. And he’s not here via the witness protection program, either, so he doesn’t even have that safety net under him. He’s just on his own in Omaha, making cinnamon buns and watching VHS tapes of his glory days, in constant fear, until he dies. You get the feeling Walt got the much better ending of the two.
But it was also beautiful, from a technical standpoint. It reminded me of the “Crystal Blue Persuasion” montage from Breaking Bad. And like that montage, the song they used — in this case, “Address Unknown” by the Ink Spots — really hit the nail on the head. Like I said up top, these guys are pretty good at making television.
*****
Stray thoughts:
– Sometimes I like to see myself as a steely TV viewer who has seen everything and can’t be swayed by fan service, and then other times, I squeal like an excited child when I hear a familiar character’s voice emanating from an off-camera booth in a parking lot, or see one stick his head out of his grandmother’s front door. MIKE! TUCO! WE’RE GETTING THE GANG BACK TOGETHER!
– “Cucumber water is for customers only!”
– One episode in and you can already kind of see this equation developing: Slippin’ Jimmy + law license + unsavory characters met through being a public defender and other chicanery + a dire financial situation = Saul.
– Rhea Seehorn, the actress who played the lawyer at his brother’s firm who he shared the cigarette with in the parking garage, also played a lawyer on Franklin & Bash. She was Franklin’s on-again, off-again love interest and noooooooooo one cares about this but me. Good chat.
– It’s a little funny, if you think about it a bit, that Michael McKean and Bob Odenkirk — two dudes with serious comedy pedigrees — are playing brothers in a drama. Not “bad” funny, just “odd” funny.
– Favorite bit of foreshadowing from last night: the shot of the dented trash can as Jimmy walked into the fancy law firm, which was paid off with him whaling on it as he exited. I kind of hope that’s his thing. Like, for the rest of the series. I would enjoy that.
Your thoughts below.
