TV Review: Better Call Saul "Uno"

Walter White’s lawyer makes his opening argument.

Review by Brandon Wolfe

If a Breaking Bad character had to be spun off, “criminal” lawyer Saul Goodman probably made the most sense (an entire show about Walter Jr. spending an hour each week at the breakfast table would dry up fast). The character was not only a regular source of engaging comic relief, but he was also the one character who had a life outside of Walter White’s corruptive quagmire, a life that the parent series never really sought to explore. Saul, of course, had a bustlingly shady practice involving any number of Albuquerque-based goons and ne’er-do-wells. Walt and Jesse might have been his most pivotal clients, but they weren’t the only ones, and seeing Saul in action (or even in a courtroom) in the service of something other than bailing out the eternally imperiled meth duo is a concept that could have legs. The last thing television needs is another show about lawyers, but Saul Goodman is hardly your average TV legal eagle.

Yet the pilot of Better Call Saul presents that eagle with clipped wings. It opens with a mournful black-and-white depiction of Saul in his dreary post-Walt life, having fulfilled his prediction from Breaking Bad’s ending stretch of winding up glazing buns at a Cinnabon in Nebraska. Saul’s desolate existence, livened up only by sporadic grips of “they’ve found me!” paranoia, stands in stark contrast to the ostentatiously unflappable huckster we’d grown accustomed to. Saul’s only escape from this soul-deadening emptiness is drawing the shades and popping a tape into the VCR filled with his old TV commercials, in a sad attempt to remember a time when he was still alive. Confined to wage-slave oblivion, recalling the glory days is all the man has left.

Those glory days are where Better Call Saul plants its flag as a series, flashing back to six years B.W. (Before Walt). However, the series overshoots the salad days that Saul undoubtedly regales himself of within the glow of that VHS cassette, as it immediately drops us into another point in time when Saul wasn’t living high on the hog. When we meet Saul (who goes by his real name, Jimmy McGill, at this point in the timeline) in the past, he’s still trying to carve out a living as a defense attorney, and failing miserably. He shucks and jives in front of a jury to try to exonerate a trio of teens who’ve done some unspeakable things to a cadaver’s head and his reward for his services is a measly $700. Meanwhile he works out of the cramped backroom of a dingy nail salon (possibly the very same one he will one day attempt to sell as a front to an uninterested Jesse Pinkman) with a desk full of past-due bills. He’s also immersed in a beef with a major law firm, of which his brother Chuck (Michael McKean) is one of the founding members. Chuck has taken an extended leave of absence due to some murky personal issues and Jimmy wants the partners to buy his brother out for the large sum he feels Chuck is owed. Chuck, living by lantern-light and gripped by paranoia, isn’t any help in the matter, leaving Jimmy to handle his affairs when Jimmy can barely handle his own.

That’s when Better Call Saul exposes the origin point of Jimmy/Saul’s stint as unscrupulous shyster, when he seeks out the lunkhead skater duo (a sort of proto version of Breaking Bad’s dimwitted Badger and Skinny Pete) who earlier in the episode unsuccessfully attempted to scam him by staging an accident where one of them bounced off of Saul’s windshield while the other angrily demanded a payday. Saul intends to use these guys and their routine in the service of reeling a wavering client into the boat, with the iffy logic that if she gets in bed with Saul on a personal injury claim, she’ll also sign off on the greater matter of him representing her husband in a major embezzlement case. While the scam works in the sense of getting the skater and windshield acquainted with one another, the car flees the scene, leading the “victims” to grab onto a truck McFly-style in hot pursuit while Saul also rushes to intercept, leading all three men into a dangerous situation involving a nasty character Breaking Bad fans will know quite well.

Given that Breaking Bad often employed a furious momentum in its narrative, “Uno” moves at a surprisingly sluggish pace. Running at an unnecessary hour and fifteen minutes, most sequences drag on far longer than they need to and the episode struggles to get its pulse going until the hit-and-run scam kicks into gear near the end. The decision to air the second episode the very next night seems like a smart move because “Uno” all by its lonesome doesn’t exactly launch the series off like a rocket. Setting the table for Saul’s eventual rise to success means spending a lot of time with him being down on his luck, which isn’t much fun to watch.

The other issue that threatens to plague Better Call Saul is the prequel dilemma. Because we know that Saul will be alive and thriving when he meets Walt in the future, we’re also very much aware that nothing of any true consequence can ever happen to him on this show. Moreover, while that surprise villain appearance at the end of “Uno” is an enjoyable jolt for longtime fans, it also feels somewhat detrimental. Breaking Bad already took place in an Albuquerque that rarely seemed to contain more than a dozen people at any given time. Having Saul already crossing paths with a major character from that series has the very “Vader built C-3PO” effect of making the universe seem very small (this, of course, does not include Saul’s earlier encounter with Mike Ehrmantraut, since we know that those two characters have a preexisting relationship and that Jonathan Banks will be a series regular on this show).

But in spite of pacing issues and blatant fan service, there’s every reason to expect that Better Call Saul will succeed as a companion piece to its mother show. Bob Odenkirk can more than carry a series, and once Jonathan Banks enters the fray more significantly, all pistons should be firing. The show still has much it will need to figure out as it goes along, such as whether it will veer more toward comedy or drama, procedural or serial, as well as just how much Breaking Bad they will feel the need to cram into the mix at the potential expense of cultivating a unique identity. It’s easy to succumb to the temptation of sneering at a spin-off out of hand, but with Vince Gilligan steering the ship, expecting an Angel seems more feasible than a Joey.

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