Everybody Loves Bob

I s there anyone who doesn’t love Bob Odenkirk? He has managed to turn the moral corkscrew that is Jimmy McGill into one of the most memorable characters in television history for the 13 years he’s been playing him on Breaking Bad and now Better Call Saul, which has just returned for a feverishly anticipated final season.

Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman has become the all-time con man/charmer in television history, and the Illinois-reared Odenkirk infuses the character with a sort of Midwestern decency and humility that counterbalances the unspeakably shameless and vile acts of the character to effect a dramatic tension rarely approached in any art form. Odenkirk is one of the reasons why serialized television has surpassed the motion picture as the leading storytelling format in American life. Chief credit, of course, must go to the current crop of writer-producers who are crafting narratives with a depth to match that of the finest novelists. Odenkirk recalls a day before he became the great American shyster when he was considering a pile of movie scripts and a pile of television scripts. The worst TV script, he says, was better than the best movie script.

While he was in his 40s and still looking for his big breakthrough, Odenkirk writes in his memoir Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama, the phone rang with an offer to do a guest shot on what I feel is pretty clearly the greatest television series of all time. Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan loved Odenkirk’s off-the-wall work on HBO’s nutty 1990s sketch-comedy half-hour Mr. Show and, without asking for an audition, offered Odenkirk a four-episode arc as Walter White’s skeezy lawyer Saul Goodman. Odenkirk had never seen the show and didn’t even know what it was, so he called a friend, who told him it was the best thing on TV. That grabbed his interest. But Odenkirk could only do three episodes because on the fourth week he was committed to a guest shot filming How I Met Your Mother. Gilligan had to replace Saul that week, so he quickly wrote up a new character to take his place that week: Jonathan Banks’s Mike Ehrmentraut.

Things clicked instantly. Odenkirk was shooting his very first scene as the oily but diabolically clever lawyer Saul Goodman when a crew member shouted out, “Can I get a job on the spinoff?” Everybody laughed. Odenkirk later tried to watch the series at home, but with two little kids around, you can’t exactly watch while “someone named Krazy-8 was about to get dissolved in a bath of acid,” he writes. He didn’t get around to watching his own show until after the third season. Some embarrassment resulted from this lapse: After reading one script, he asked his co-star Bryan Cranston, “So. Gus is . . . your friend, right?” Cranston looked at him and said, “You’ve never seen this show, have you?”

Breaking Bad’s popularity was slow to build, but playing Saul “was, and will remain, the biggest cultural phenomenon of my earthly idyll,” Odenkirk says. He modestly labels himself merely “a bystander who got caught up in it, that’s all.”

By the time Odenkirk went to San Diego’s Comic Con to promote the last season of Breaking Bad he was treated “like a Beatle in ’63.” When Gilligan started to ask whether Saul could indeed be the focal point of a spinoff, Odenkirk wasn’t sure: “He’s no hero, and, by my estimation, awfully hard to root for.” At lunch with Gilligan and fellow writer-producer Peter Gould at the Chateau Marmont shortly after Breaking Bad wrapped, the actor blurted out, “Well, the first problem you’d have is to make the character likable.” Then the show was greenlit, and Odenkirk learned that, like Breaking Bad, it would be filmed in Albuquerque, far from his family in L.A. So he turned it down: “Who was going to cook my kids meals with oatmeal, spaghetti and a hammer?” One of his handlers was dumbfounded: Didn’t he want to be a big star? The answer was no. “I am in this to entertain myself. Here’s how much fame I need: ‘just enough’ and no more.”

Odenkirk’s son Nate overheard his dad turning down the offer on the phone and told him, “You’re going to disappoint a lot of people.” Disappoint a lot of strangers, Odenkirk corrected, but the boy added, “Some of them are my friends.” He told his father to do the show: “We’ll take care of things at home, and we can take a break from those three meals you make that we love so much.” His daughter Erin also urged Dad to take the job.

Somewhere in the first season, Odenkirk wrote himself a note: “Every line is emotional.” The standard of excellence, the commitment, is revelatory; I don’t think Better Call Saul will turn out to be as great as Breaking Bad, whose final season is simultaneously the most exciting and most affecting work of storytelling this century, but it could be a strong rival. “Everybody brings their A game, nobody lets a line go by that doesn’t track, and we trust one another when we’re asked to go somewhere fresh, dangerous, uncertain,” Odenkirk writes. He calls Saul “the biggest break of my career by a fair margin, and I’ll never be able to repay the universe, or [Gilligan and Gould] for it.”

In its final episodes, you can bet that Odenkirk will be despicable/likable all the way, playing one of the quintessential antiheroes of our time. “The ‘better angels of our nature’ may be the ones we want leading us forward,” Odenkirk says, “but the worser angels are the ones that we seem to want to watch onscreen.”