Better Call Saul Is No Breaking Bad, But It’ll Be Just as Addictive

Ben Leuner/AMC

The first time we meet Saul Goodman—in a Breaking Bad episode titled “Better Call Saul”—is on a TV screen, as the star of a comically janky local TV commercial for his legal services, complete with inflatable Statutes of Liberty and a tinny rendition of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The first time Walter White meets Saul, Walt offers him $10,000 to keep a client from talking to the DEA—and when Saul isn’t immediately compliant, kidnaps him at gunpoint and threatens to kill him.

And that’s when we learn who Saul Goodman really is: a man who can talk himself out of an empty grave and into $50K with both his hands tied behind his back. Saul knows how to talk to desperate men, because he has been a desperate man, and more accurately, because he still is. Despite all his swagger, there is always the faint smell of sweat to everything he does, even and especially as the fat stacks of cash roll out across his desk. In Better Call Saul, the prequel spinoff to AMC’s critically acclaimed meth drama, we finally get to learn a little more about why. It’s not the same as Breaking Bad, but it promises to be just as addictive.

As with so many seasons of its predecessor, Better Call Saul opens on a flash-forward, where we find Saul (Bob Odenkirk) not plying his trade in the familiar world of Albuquerque, New Mexico, but working at a Cinnabon somewhere very cold. Much like the famous pool scene that foretold the plane crash in Breaking Bad’s second season, it’s filmed in black and white. Its lingering shots of sliced dough and silver trays are shown in a way that makes them look as methodical as Walt and Jesse’s meth manufacturing, except that he’s baking pastries instead of cooking drugs—and for minimum wage, not millions.

When a burly man sitting in the Cinnabon gives Saul a long look and starts walking towards him, we see Saul tense up—has something finally caught up with him? When the man passes him by and embraces a child, Saul heaves a sigh a relief, although a larger danger surely lingers. Later, when he heads home, we see him pour a glass of bourbon and dig an old VHS tape out of a box: a cut of his old legal commercials, just as cheesy and hamfisted as ever. He watches them with tears in his eyes, like a divorcee lingering over an old wedding video.

Where is Saul? What’s he running from? Why is he working at Cinnabon but living in what looks like a fairly expensive house? Expect these questions to linger over the show’s entire first season, especially after we flash back to 2002, which serves as the present-day of the prequel. Saul is still the same old seedy lawyer, although now he’s going by the name Jimmy McGill. It’s hard to tell if this is a pseudonym or the revelation of his real name. Back in Saul’s first Breaking Bad appearance, he claimed that he wasn’t really Jewish, and thus that “Goodman” was just an affectation. Perhaps he was never really Saul, either, that it was his “Heisenberg” all along.

Ursula Coyote/AMC

And as disreputable as his strip mall offices might have seemed to Walt, they’re practically palatial compared to where we find him in 2002: a sad little storage room behind the laundry area of a Korean nail salon—very likely the same one he later tried to convince Jesse, Walt, and Skyler to buy for money laundering purposes. At the moment, however, he’s not on very good terms with the proprietor: “Cucumber water for customers only,” she snaps when he tries to pour himself a cup.

It’s funny to think of the Saul we meet in Breaking Bad as a success story, but after the parade of humiliations and failures we see him endure in the premiere (not unlike the ones we saw Walt endure in his early episodes) that’s exactly how he seems, in retrospect. Better Call Saul is smaller a show, in some ways, about a smaller man with a different sort of desperate ambition. While Saul might never have had the lofty scientific ambitions of a man like Walt, he possesses his own kind of brilliance, albeit one soaked in flop sweat and wearing far cheaper clothes.

At its heart, as creator Vince Gilligan told WIRED, Saul’s story is an addiction story. “It’s not an addiction story in the sense of he’s addicted to drugs or alcohol or gambling or sex,” Gilligan says. “It occurred to us that Saul’s addiction is to the world of outlaws. … He has an innate understanding of life’s less fortunate people—because he’s been unfortunate himself, we’re going to learn. And he wants to do right, but he does not want to be a chump, or a victim. And partly because of that, he’s drawn toward the outlaws of the world. Not the petty crooks, but the big thinkers, the guys who dream.”

Presumably, there are going to be a lot of retrospective revelations in Better Call Saul, but that’s one of the best so far: That Saul and Walt were essentially symbiotic organisms, men who perfectly enabled each other’s addictions. Walt’s lust for power was insatiable, but Saul’s hunger is a bit more modest; he wants to be the middle-manager to Walt’s king, for a little bit of Walt’s cold blue shimmer (and cold hard cash) to rub off as they brush shoulders.

The big question for Breaking Bad fans is whether or not Better Call Saul is worth watching. It certainly is. Although the desperate chronicles of a seedy attorney might not have quite the same high concept punch as a terminally-ill, meth-cooking high school chemistry teacher, there’s a similar sort of desperate ambition that runs through the heart of both shows, and one that is hard to look away from.

Having been able to screen the pilot, it’s clear to see this is most definitely a show made by Vince Gilligan, from its tantalizing cold open to the familiar faces who show up in unexpected ways. And of course, there are all the satisfying little details that so often pepper his work, from the court officer we watch doodle a unicorn-riding barbarian on a notepad, to the one red door we see on Saul’s rundown car, a vestige of some sort of accident—or perhaps something more.

Music often proved consequential (or at least thematically appropriate) in Breaking Bad, and so it may be worth paying attention to the lyrics of the song that opens the show, “Address Unknown” by The Ink Spots: “Oh how could I be so blind?/Who’d think that you would never be hard to find?/From the place of your birth to the ends of the earth/I’ve searched only to find: address unknown.”

Is it a song that reveals something about the Saul we meet in the future? Is he the one searching for someone in the frozen north? Or is it the other way around? Did he get into the nondescript minivan of an extractor—like he told Jesse to do when things got ugly—and is someone now searching for him?