Yeah, series creator Vince Gilligan, or maybe series star and executive producer Bob Odenkirk, who, I assume, are largely responsible for the endless flow of pretentious crap that is, for the most part, the sum and substance of the Breaking Bad spinoff Better Call Saul, the AMC cult fav/mega hit, whose sixth and final season just aired, though I haven’t seen it yet, because I watch it with a year’s delay via Netflix.
I was a sometime fan of Breaking Bad, flaying it just a bit in a two-part “series” I did for the Bright Lights Film Journal, Heavy TV: Breaking Bad, Girls, and Mad Men and Heavy TV, Part Deux: Breaking Bad ends badly, Girls gets girly, and Mad Men explores sex, death, and ketchup, but I liked enough of it to take a chance on Better Call Saul. Big mistake!
I found Breaking Bad to be often pretentious and artsy. Well, Better Call Saul makes Breaking Bad look like Charlie’s Angels. We get, first, long, impossibly tedious, black and white clips of poor Saul’s post-BB career, a new identity as a total nerd, the manager of a Cinnabon outlet in a nameless mall—because Hollywood hot shots like Vince and Bob love to imagine what Hell—the life that ordinary people live—must be like.
Once we get past all the black and white lugubriosity, we get to the “real” story, the prequel to Breaking Bad, in which we meet Saul in his previous incarnation as “Slippin’ Jimmy”, a small-time hustler who specializes in getting hit by cars, but not very hard, and then collecting a nifty cash settlement. Why this is considered cool is way beyond me, but for some reason it is.
Later we get to the “real” story, which I found utterly ridiculous. See Jimmy’s a lawyer (or at least he becomes one; I may not have been paying attention), because his older brother is a big shot lawyer with his own firm. So, okay, a lot of “little brother” issues, plus his big brother is paranoid about electronic surveillance or something, plus another lawyer in the firm is this gorgeous chick (Kim Wexler, played by Rhea Seehorn) who Jimmy is crazy about and who loves Jimmy but knows he’s not cut out for the big time and she wants to be sensible.
Well, I didn’t have time for any of this. For one thing, I’m a big brother, so I really couldn’t relate, plus all the paranoia stuff, and the idea that big shot lawyers are, you know, evil, struck me as boring as hell, so I gave up. Occasionally I would check back in, hoping that there would a little gangsta action, and occasionally there would be. Imperturbable hitman “Mike” (Jonathan Banks) showed up as a parking lot attendant, which gave me some hope, though the fact that he eventually becomes an imperturbable hitman to provide for his daughter and granddaughter was a trope I’d seen too often.
However, when imperturbable drug lord Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) showed up, my enthusiasm rekindled, and I watched the show in pieces, skipping all the stuff about Jimmy’s brother’s firm, not to mention the occasional black and white stuff. By season 5, the two pieces of the show are finally coming together: Jimmy has become “Saul”, he and Kim are together, just two crazy kids, or, at least, two crazy thirty-somethings, and Jimmy has an idea: Let’s go house hunting! Just to look!
So he takes her to an enormous mansion and starts showing her around. “Lots of space!” he exclaims, and indeed there is. If you want to park a helicopter or two in the living room, well, they’ll fit, without any crowding! But why, otherwise, you would “need” all that room, other than to say “Look how goddamn rich I am!” is another matter.
I totally gagged on the show a few minutes later when Kim, on her own, stumbles into a large, white room lined with shelves. Well, knowing Hollywood snobbery, I expected her to exclaim “Look at the library!” Silly me! It’s something much more important! A shoe closet! “For all your Louboutins”, Jimmy exclaims. For what is life without, I don’t know, 500 pairs of shoes at $795 a pop!
Yes, that is the “good life” as defined by Vince/Bob. Who wants to live your life chained to a Cinnabon store, selling sugar frosting to fat-ass flyover folks for maybe $50 K a year (in a good year!), or a high-class tight-ass big time corporate lawyer making maybe $1 mil per annum at best! You ain’t cool until you get the counter up past $10 mil per annum at a minimum and can buy your lady $40,000+ plus in shoes! That’s real class!
