Better Call Saul -- The Prequel That Surpassed Its Origin
Better Call Saul Is a Masterpiece in Its Own Right.
When Better Call Saul was first announced, skepticism was reasonable. How do you spin off one of the greatest dramas ever made? What most people expected was a lighter, comedic companion piece. What they got was something far more devastating.
A Story About Becoming Someone You're Not
On the surface, this is the origin story of Saul Goodman — the slippery, joke-cracking criminal lawyer from Breaking Bad. But strip that away, and what remains is a portrait of a man named Jimmy McGill: charming, brilliant, and desperately hungry to be seen as good.
The tragedy is not that Jimmy was always rotten. The tragedy is that he wasn't.
Unlike Walter White, whose descent can be read as ego unleashed, Jimmy's transformation is something quieter and more painful — a slow erosion driven by rejection, grief, and a world that kept telling him he didn't belong in the light.
Character Work: The Finest on Television
Bob Odenkirk delivers what may be the most underappreciated lead performance in prestige TV history. He carries Jimmy's entire arc — the hustle, the wit, the heartbreak — without ever tipping into caricature.
But the supporting cast is equally extraordinary:
- Kim Wexler: The moral and emotional center of the show. Her arc is arguably more complex than Jimmy's — and her choices hit harder because she knows better.
- Mike Ehrmantraut: A man of brutal competence and deep guilt, fleshed out here in ways Breaking Bad never had room for.
- Howard Hamlin: What begins as an obstacle becomes something genuinely tragic. Few characters have been so thoroughly and quietly redeemed.
No one is wasted. No one is simple.
Patience as a Narrative Virtue
Better Call Saul is a slow show — and that slowness is intentional. It trusts its audience in ways that most television simply doesn't.
A scene might hold on a character's face for an uncomfortably long time. A subplot might simmer across an entire season before it detonates. The show understands that dread, built carefully, lands harder than shock.
This patience pays off in a finale that earns every single emotion it asks you to feel.
Visual Language: Cinematography as Character
Shot by shot, Better Call Saul may be the most beautifully composed show ever made for television. Directors like Michelle MacLaren and Thomas Schnauz treat every frame as an opportunity for meaning.
The color palette is deliberate and consistent:
- Black-and-white for the flash-forward Gene timeline — a life drained of color and consequence
- Warm, dusty tones for Albuquerque — a world that looks inviting but swallows people whole
- Clinical fluorescent blues for the legal world Jimmy is always trying to crack
The camera frequently places characters behind glass, bars, or doorframes — always observed, always constrained.
The Kim Problem: Complicity and Love
The show's most uncomfortable achievement is what it does with Kim Wexler. She is written as an intelligent, ethical, principled person — and yet the audience watches her make choices that are increasingly hard to defend.
Better Call Saul poses a question that cuts deeper than anything Breaking Bad asked:
What does love cost you when you give it to the wrong person — or the wrong version of yourself?
Kim doesn't lose herself to addiction, ambition, or rage. She loses herself to something far more ordinary: the seductive thrill of being clever, and the slow blurring of lines that happens in any long, close relationship.
A Finale That Demands Something From You
Where Breaking Bad ended with a kind of dark catharsis — Walter White dying on his own terms — Better Call Saul offers something more uncomfortable. Its finale is an act of accountability without redemption, honesty without reward.
Jimmy/Saul does not get to be a hero. He gets to be honest. For a man who built his entire identity on performance and misdirection, that is the most radical thing the show could ask of him.
It's not satisfying in the conventional sense. It's better than that.
Why It Deserves to Stand Alone
For too long, Better Call Saul was discussed primarily in relation to Breaking Bad — as context, as companion, as explanation. That framing sells it short.
Taken on its own terms, it is:
- Structurally: more daring and patient than its predecessor
- Emotionally: more nuanced and quietly devastating
- Visually: more ambitious and consistently stunning
- Thematically: more interested in the texture of ordinary moral failure
It is a show about how good people rationalize bad choices — and how the rationalizations eventually become the person.
Final Thought
Better Call Saul asks a simple question in the most complicated way possible:
At what point does the role you play become the person you are?
Jimmy McGill knew who he was. Saul Goodman was an act.
By the end, even that line had disappeared.
"I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really... I was alive." — A line from another show, about another man. But it echoes here too.