By sticking the landing in both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad, Gilligan has become a modern television legend.
By sticking the landing in both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad, Gilligan has become a modern television legend.
N ow that Better Call Saul has wrapped up its sixth and final season on Monday night with an excellent finale, Vince Gilligan has accomplished what few, if any, television creators ever have: He launched one of the greatest shows ever, then sustained a spin-off that is worthy of its predecessor.
There is a long list of sitcoms between the 1970s and the 1990s that spun off from their original series and had successful runs of their own (Happy Days/Laverne & Shirley; All in the Family/The Jeffersons; Cheers/Frasier). But in those cases, it was just a matter of taking characters from one show and putting them in a different environment for a different set of comedic scenarios.
The extraordinary feat that Gilligan has pulled off is an order of magnitude more impressive.
Breaking Bad is arguably the greatest dramatic television show ever made. People can make arguments for various other shows, but what seals it for me is that not only was the show incredible (amazing acting, characters, mix of action, suspense, comedy, drama, and creative cinematography) — but it was also consistently good.
Many shows are great for a season or two but then run out of steam well before they are put out to pasture. Breaking Bad started out at a breakneck pace, gathered steam as it went along, kept getting better and delivering surprises, and ended with a tense final season that was brought to a satisfactory conclusion.
Gilligan already deserved to be in the pantheon of television greats for his work in creating, writing, and producing Breaking Bad.
When I first heard of plans for a spinoff series centered around the ambulance-chasing lawyer Saul Goodman, I was skeptical. He was an important recurring character in Breaking Bad, but not one of the central characters, and he was often there for comic relief. How much could they really milk out of the character? This would be like David Chase, after wrapping up The Sopranos, deciding to do a new series about Hesh building his loan-shark business.
And yet, they somehow figured out a way.
Together with Peter Gould (who wrote the episode of Breaking Bad that introduced Saul Goodman’s character), Gilligan managed to put together six seasons of a show that also got stronger as it went along and reached a satisfying conclusion.
The show served mainly as a prequel to Breaking Bad, but also as a sequel. It had a lot of appearances and intersecting plot lines featuring characters from the original, but also created dynamic new characters, led by Saul’s love interest and sometimes partner-in-crime, attorney Kim Wexler. Two of the key characters in Better Call Saul (Ignacio “Nacho” Varga and Lalo Salamanca) were literally created from a two-second throwaway line in the second season of Breaking Bad. The show included just enough fan service and cameos of Breaking Bad characters to be fun, without it coming off as forced or distracting from the main plot points.
Better Call Saul managed to hit emotional notes that one could never have anticipated based on what we knew of Saul before it began. It also managed to further explore the theme of what makes people with tremendous potential struggle with the temptations of the dark side. This is not only a “breaking bad” story of Saul, but also of Kim, and of corrupt ex-cop Mike Ehrmantraut.
[Note: For those who have not watched, stop reading at this point, as there will be spoilers.]
While Breaking Bad ended with a dramatic shootout, the main action sequence of Better Call Saul’s finale (a police chase) wrapped up in the opening minutes of the show. Much of what follows ends up being legal negotiations over Saul’s punishment. Within that, however, there is a lot of drama and suspense.
The question pervading much of the episode was: Does Saul have one last trick up his sleeve to get away with it all? And for a while, it seems like he does, as he manages to talk federal prosecutors down from what could be multiple life sentences, to a mere seven years at a country club–style prison.
At one point, the audience is left wondering whether he was going to betray Kim in the end so that he could get an even sweeter deal.
And yet, we soon find out that his true aim was to get Kim back to Albuquerque to hear him come clean with a full confession concerning his culpability in assisting Walter White in building his meth empire. This blows up all his great lawyering, and sends him into a much rougher prison for 86 years.
While at first glance, it may be unrealistic to think that a selfish, lying, and scheming lawyer would do that to himself, it was actually consistent with the complex character the writers had been building for six seasons.
In an earlier season, he is able to manipulate an elderly lady into settling a class-action case that would mean a huge payoff for him. But he then feels guilty that his scheme involved alienating the lady from all her friends at a retirement home, so he takes the heat and the significant financial hit.
At a different point in the series, when he humiliates his brother by doctoring legal files, Saul is home scot-free. Until he sees his brother, a brilliant lawyer, eating himself apart, at which point he confesses — which eventually leads him to be suspended from the bar for a year.
So, the ending of Better Call Saul may not be happy. But it is certainly fitting. And it marks an impressive end to the Vince Gilligan Albuquerque crime universe.