Was Better Call Saul Better Than Breaking Bad Or Was It Just Bad?

Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad spin off gave fans of the original show a continuation for everyone’s favourite slime ball lawyer Saul Goodman. The show has wrapped up now, and with El Camino having already wrapped up the story of Jesse Pinkman, it would seem this is finally the end of the Breaking Bad saga.

But was Better Call Saul great?

It’s a controversial question because the show is loved by so many, but as I was watching the last season I started to question if it really was a great show, or if I was just watching it through Breaking Bad tinted glasses. Breaking Bad was for many people, the greatest TV show of all time. I’m undecided if I’d go that far, but I certainly wouldn’t deny it. Breaking Bad was so good.

I think everyone would agree that Better Call Saul wasn’t as good as Breaking Bad, and it’s not even really fair to expect it to have been. As a spin off which is primarily a prequel, we could be certain that we know the fate of the main character and a lot of the other characters around Saul. Taking away this element of the unknown certainly meant that we could be certain that Saul wouldn’t be in too much danger…at least until he met Walt, who as we all know is the danger.

The first seasons of Better Call Saul showed Saul in the days before he became Saul Goodman and was known as Jimmy McGill. He was a wannabe lawyer who was in the shadow of his older brother Chuck, who was a much better lawyer, but also allergic to electricity…or so that was the story. We also had other lawyer characters including Kim, who is Jimmy’s love interest and Howard, who is Jimmy’s rival.

The fact that none of these characters were ever mentioned or factored into Breaking Bad always gave a sense that ultimately, they wouldn’t be important to enrich the story we already knew. It doesn’t mean that whatever new story is being told couldn’t be a great new chapter, but then again this show was a prequel.

If this show had been the continuing adventures of Saul Goodman and it explained that after the ending of Breaking Bad Saul had somehow managed to get away with his involvement with Walt and Jesse, it could have showed what he got up to next. We could have been introduced to his estranged wife and brother and we could have explained their absence throughout all of Breaking Bad as not knowing that he had become known as Saul and they only knew him as Jimmy McGill.

Perhaps the story could have been that Saul was already on the run from someone and Saul Goodman was in fact his undercover name. Sure, he wouldn’t be likely to show his face on billboards and TV commercials if that was the case, but they could have got around that easily enough.

The point isn’t to say an alternative idea for what Better Call Saul could have been, but to highlight that if this had been a new chapter that took place entirely after Breaking Bad, the show could have built up into something just as dramatic and compelling as the show it spun off from.

And do I really mean to imply that I don’t feel Better Call Saul wasn’t all that dramatic and compelling? Yes. I do actually. Not because it wasn’t enjoyable, because it really was. But Jimmy McGill’s transformation from wannabe lawyer to the crooked lawyer that is Saul Goodman wasn’t that compelling. Whereas Breaking Bad showed us the slow transformation of Walter White going from a mild mannered school science teacher to becoming an evil drug crime lord, Jimmy McGill started the show with a reputation of being somewhat dodgy and crooked.

If we had seen that Jimmy was really an honest and innocent person who discovered that he was not only capable of being a devious and sneaky lawyer, but that he could also do it guilt free that would have been a development in his journey. And maybe showing him too mild and honest and going to the dark side would have felt a repeat of Breaking Bad. But as it was, I genuinely felt that Saul by the end was pretty much the same character as Jimmy we saw at the beginning.

And I do get it. Saul was already a liked character on Breaking Bad, and if they had altered the character too much for the prequel, they may have lost the audience that wanted to see more of Saul’s antics. But by making Jimmy McGill recognisably the same as the Saul he would become meant it was just week after week of Saul Goodman capers…and that wasn’t compelling enough.

The evidence I point to for this comes from the show’s dramatic shift into being Breaking Bad lite for much of the show’s run.

Right from the start of Better Call Saul, we also had the character Mike from Breaking Bad. Mike died in Breaking Bad, and when we first meet him, he is working at a toll both. This is a far cry from the right-hand man of Gus Fring that he would become in Breaking Bad. Clearly it was always the plan to show how Mike got involved with Gus in this show, but as soon as they did, the show felt like two separate shows that were competing for screen time.

One show was something of a lawyer-based sitcom starring Jimmy and Kim, and the other was the true prequel to Breaking Bad that starred Mike, Gus and the Salamancas. Often the two sides of the story would have absolutely nothing to do with each other and when they did they felt forced.

One issue was that Breaking Bad established that Saul didn’t know who Mike’s contact was whom would turn out to be Gus. I feel like they should have retconned this into Saul lying and that Saul had always been involved with Gus just to keep the title character of Better Call Saul in the thick of the action.

Alternatively, it could have been Chuck who it turned out was secretly a criminal and working for Gus. That would have a been a great way to connect the new characters to the ones we knew from Breaking Bad.

The longer Better Call Saul went on, the more I had the feeling that episodes would only feature Saul or Kim in minor roles and often the Breaking Bad cartel storyline with Hector and Gus would take over. In this sense the stuff with Gus and Mike and Nacho felt like there was the element of danger and threat and the stuff with Jimmy and Howard feuding would feel like an episode of Breaking Bad by have a comedic side story with Badger and Skinny Pete. The title character shouldn’t have felt third rate in his own show, and whilst this is a harsh take, it’s not an unfair one.

Add to this that we already knew the fate of Gus, Mike, Hector, the cousins, and it meant the only people on the grittier side of the story who were in real danger were the likes of Nacho and his father. Nacho was a cool addition to the show as he had been name dropped in Breaking Bad, but without any other context other than being a name. In this regard the prequel filled us in to understand more about something we didn’t know before.

But Better call Saul also wasn’t just a prequel.

From the very beginning of the show, we would see scenes that were shot in black and white and we knew that these were scenes that took place post Breaking Bad with Saul Goodman on the run. These scenes basically topped and tailed each season, until the last one when things suddenly caught up to Breaking Bad, skipped over it, and then had a few adventures of Saul stupidly getting involved in needless crimes which lead to his eventual arrest.

And this is what really bothers me. Saul getting involved in stealing clothes and expensive items form a mall wasn’t a needed action by Saul, and needlessly put him at risk of getting caught. And then did. With all the characters that had been established in the first few seasons of Better Call Saul, wouldn’t it have been better to have set up a story where someone recognises him, and he is then forced into certain action that leads to his downfall.

It makes me think of the movie Catch Me if You Can with Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio. That movie is the true-life story of a guy who committed loads of crimes and used false identities to evade capture. There is one scene where DiCaprio who plays the criminal, called Tom Hanks who plays an FBI agent and says he’s tired of running. Tom Hanks realises that Leonardo must have met a girl and wants to settle down. Being settled down in a new life makes it impossible to run or risk losing the new life he wants to lead.

I’m not saying Better Call Saul should have just done that, but at the same time…why not?

The sad thing about Saul’s post Breaking Bad life is that he foreshadowed it in Breaking Bad, being worried about ending up as a manager working in a Cinnabon. This was shown to have happened from the start of Better Call Saul when they showed the black and white flash forwards.

But what if this had been a slight misdirection, and Saul was actually happy. That this was a few years after Breaking Bad and he had a new wife, maybe some children and was a loved member of his community. And then one day a character he met in Breaking Bad, or a new character who was established in Better Call Saul who knew him as Jimmy McGill walked into the restaurant and ordered a cinnamon bun.

This could have led to this person blackmailing Saul, or threatening his family. That would have upped the tension dramatically. Someone trying to extort money from Saul or use him to do their bidding or he’d risk losing his family and/or going to jail.

Screw it, let’s say this person was Kim. Imagine if they had showed Saul’s relationship with Kim just as they did, but instead it the show being Jimmy’s spiral into the dark side, it was Kim who broke bad. What if the reason Saul became Saul was to escape Kim who had gotten involved with organised crime, and the end of the prequel phase of Better Call Saul was Jimmy having to get away from or rid himself of Kim. And then after the events of Breaking Bad Kim shows up for round two.

They still could have done flashbacks with Walt and Jesse, but these could have been used to connect Kim into the main story of Breaking Bad. Show times where she had been involving herself in Saul’s life to cause chaos and maybe even cause some of the bad things that happened in Breaking Bad to happen.

To me this would have been a great use of the show as a prequel. Don’t just show us some random events that happened before the story we knew, but use the prequel to tell us new things we didn’t know about the story we already love. Build upon it, flesh things out and build up some real stakes by the end.

But again, the point isn’t for me to write my fan fiction of an alternative Better Call Saul. Again, I just want to highlight that what we got ended with Saul getting arrested in a dumpster and then ruining his own trial to spend the next eight decades in prison. Sure, this may have seemed in some small way like a kind of redemption or acceptance of his fate for all the bad he was involved with, but did it really do justice to everything that we had seen in all the seasons of the show?

The post Breaking Bad part of the story didn’t have any relevance to what we had seen with Mike, or Gus, or the cartel. Well except that this had led to Howard being murdered, but this was just a small way in which the Jimmy side of the story connected to the Mike side of things. And the makers of the show have already said that they hadn’t originally known what Howard’s fate was going to be and that it wasn’t always the plan to kill him.

To me, killing Howard was the one tiny way they could connect some dots between two separate story threads which weren’t coming together very often or very well.

The storyline of the final episode where Saul spoke to Mike, Walt and Chuck in flashbacks about time travel and regret were nicely done scenes but would have been much more meaningful if they had started putting this thread into episodes much earlier.

I am of the view that Breaking Bad is a near perfect story. By the end of the penultimate season I felt that they could have ended the show and pretty much all loose ends would have been tied up. The final season of Breaking Bad had the challenge of building up a new main villain after the death of Gus, and it didn’t build someone who was a worthy successor to Gus with the Uncle Jack character. It was still a thrill ride and if the end of season 5 had Walt almost getting away with things, season 6 was the unravelling of everything.

Mike died, Hank died, Jesse crumbled, and Walt went all out evil. It wasn’t the happy ending season 5 looked to give us, but it still made sense and kept building the stakes.

Better Call Saul had the opportunity to make whatever was set after the events of Breaking Bad one final explosive chapter in the saga of Walter, Jesse and Saul, and it didn’t go that route.

Instead, we got a show that always seemed to struggle with what the main storyline was and where it was leading, and it ended with something that people will say was fitting of the character of Saul, but for the reasons I’ve stated I believe that Better Call Saul, could have done Better by Saul.

I rest my case.

You can get loads more Movie and TV show articles in the Movies/TV section of the site, and don’t forget to check out the Geek Battle comedy panel show on the Extreme Improv XStreamed YouTube Channel