Better Call Saul (2015-2022/Season 1-6)

 

Rating: ★★★★★ 

Easily one of the best television shows of all-time. In no particular order it's up there in elite company with The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men and Succession. It's incredibly difficult to constantly produce and put out 5-star quality content from start to finish, season to season, especially the longer a television series goes on, and that's what the above mentioned shows do, and probably to a stronger degree only The Sopranos, Mad Men and Better Call Saul.

I was one of the earliest proponents to throw out Better Call Saul >>> Breaking Bad claims, and I'm glad to see it's becoming a more popular belief amongst the general culture. For those of you who might not get this comparison, these two shows are related in the same fictional universe, and showrunner-writers Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould are behind both of them. Don't get me wrong Breaking Bad, despite its overrated awards-darling status, was still a great show, and a lot of the brilliant cinematic techniques that the showrunners and actors refined in Better Call Saul got its introduction with Breaking Bad.

There are various reasons as to why I believe BCS is better. But as I was watching its season finale, these two reasons stood out to me most:

1) Walter White, an interesting dynamic character in himself, was a bit of an old man's "what would you do if you found out you were going to die in a month's time" wet dream. A chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin? Exactly. Exciting, thrilling and funny as the BB ride might have been, there's no looking past that. And also, he was a bit of a bully, which made it harder to empathise with him.

While on the other hand, Saul Goodman/Jimmy McGill is a much more believable, grounded story of a young man who lives in the shadow of his older brother turned corrupt lawyer. He is an everyday man with everyday problems, and the way he uses his smarts, charms and cunning to negotiate his way through this series is truly tremendous to see, and it also gets us as the audience to empathise with him despite his morally ambiguous traits which lean much heavier on the side of bad instead of good.

2) Kim Wexler! Dynamite. Female fucking power, ladies and gentleman. BB suffered in a sense that it did not have a second strong character alongside, or just behind Walter White. In BCS, Saul's love interest Kim Wexler plays that second strong role as she walks with him side-by-side from start to finish, and the way she is written is just truly impeccable. Easily one of the best fictional females put to screen, not even most women writers could come close to write such a good female character. Her own single agency is always felt from start to finish, and it could have been so easy for Gilligan and Gould to just fall in with the mainstream crowd of today's mainstream liberal media of "the woman is the hero" by the end of the series, but they did not! They have fucking integrity, thank you God. They made Kim every bit as strong and complex as Saul every bit of the way as the series progressed.

And to close out this already long review (seriously, I could write a whole essay if I wanted to about this show), with the productions of BB and BCS, Gilligan and Gould will certainly go down in the history books for being two of the early pioneers of turning television cinematic. They etched out their own distinct style. Their genius of drama storytelling and writing detail is quite unmatched on certain levels, and it peaks here with BCS. The Coen Brothers influence is quite clear to see on their style, certainly with the morally ambiguous characters in a morally ambiguous nature of reality storyworld. But its with their strong humanism in the way they wrote the characters and how they related to each other in BCS where they set themselves apart from the Coens. Seriously, Saul Goodman might just be the most complex and intriguing fictional character to ever be created. Saul gone.