Better Call Saul Portrait of the Con Artist as a Younger Man
In this week's print TIME, I talk to Bob Odenkirk and co-creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould about their Breaking Bad prequel featuring the man who would be Walter White's lawyerBetter Call Saul premieres on AMC Feb. 8and review the new show. The article is for TIME subscribers, so I can only share so much of it pro bono. But I will say that I was skeptical of the ideaas I say in the article, it had shades of 2001's The Lone Gunmen, the superfluous, dark-comic X-Files spinoff that Gilligan also ranyet after three episodes, I have to say it's pretty good. And in fact, "pretty good" might be the right ambition for this series, even if it necessarily risks unflattering comparison to the grand sweep and ambitions of Breaking Bad. On its face, Saul is a similar show with a similar arc Jimmy McGill Saul, before he adopted his nom de bus bench is a struggling but essentially law-abiding guy who, we know, will slip-slide the crooked path to criminality, or, at least, criminality-enabling. The reverse, ironically, of the redemption and name-changing of the New Testament's Saul., What distinguishes it in the early going is precisely that it has different aimsit takes the character seriously, but it's more of an entertainment, more picaresque. And ultimately, it's about a different kind of figure, I don't want to claim to have Better Call Saul entirely figured out after three episodes Breaking Bad, after all, was itself a more comic show in its early going, making more of the absurdity of a chemistry teacher in his tighty whities figuring out how to become a meth dealer. OK, to the extent that you can consider a show that involves dissolving a dead body in acid to be comic. It changed its tone and aesthetic as Walter White evolved, and maybe its prequel will also. Or maybe it won't, and maybe it will simply remain a diverting, well-executed lagniappenot one of the greatest series on TV, but that's certainly no crime. For now, I simply tried to measure Saul by the yardstick would I want to watch this show if I knew none of the references, none of the characters' back stories? I was a doubter. But for now, Saul, or should I say Jimmy, has fast-talked me into believing.