Better Call Saul is currently on a mid-season hiatus, halfway through its sixth and final season. When it started back in 2015, it was definitely a dessert for those of us who weren't quite ready to be finished with the fine meal of Breaking Bad. It was fun to see the further (earlier) adventures of some of the characters we enjoyed so much from the flagship series, but "fun" was pretty much all it was in season one. The drama felt rather low stakes, and the moral grey areas it explored were "shades of white."
But even in that first season, Better Call Saul didn't feel "slow" so much as "methodical." And that careful pace turned out to be one of the best things about the show. In both its season-long story arcs and the plot threads of individual episodes, Better Call Saul is so deliberate about what it's doing... which, ultimately, was to redraw existing stars into a whole new constellation. The show may have started as all prequels do, prodding the audience to take more interest in two or three known characters whose backgrounds we didn't really need to know more about -- but it pulled off two amazing magic tricks along the way.
First, it turns out that we actually did need to know more about the returning characters of Breaking Bad. You might have imagined that Vince Gilligan and his writers really said all they had to say on "slowing sliding into evil" with Walter White, but Better Call Saul unveils three compelling back stories for three other BB characters. Best of all, these arcs each feel organic -- neither afraid to sometimes be exactly what viewers would expect, nor always forced to be surprising just to thwart those expectations.
Second, Better Call Saul introduces a host of new characters with journeys of their own -- and in my view, those turn out to be even more compelling than those of the Breaking Bad "transplants." There are at least four new characters on the spinoff series who have their own important tale to be told, and the writers have used them brilliantly to generate tension that most prequels don't have. The prequel problem, in a nutshell, is that you know exactly where characters are going to end up, and that ultimately deflates the stakes of the story. With so many BCS characters having unknown fates, the audience is unsettled all over again. Even the knowledge that "they weren't in Breaking Bad, so something terrible must happen to them" isn't sufficient to inure you to the twists and turns in their tales.
The craft of Better Call Saul is as good at the micro level as it is at the macro level. Television is sometimes called "radio with faces," and while the age of visual effects has moved the needle on that, this series challenges it in a way that has nothing to do with CG. I don't think there's another show on television that tells its stories as visually as Better Call Saul. Almost every episode has long scenes with no dialogue at all. The series defies "watching while on your cell phone," demanding your focus -- and rewarding that focus. You see characters take time to think, and understand what they're thinking. Exposition is often omitted; you'll have to watch a scene unfold (or sometimes even a whole episode) to catch up with the context. The writers are smart, and they assume the audience is too.
In six seasons, spread out over 7 years, yes, there have been some stumbles. (A season-long arc explaining the origin of a secret underground meth lab from Breaking Bad was compelling only at its character-centric conclusion.) But generally, each new crop of Better Call Saul episodes has been more compelling than the last -- especially the 7-episode "half season" that ran just weeks ago. I'm eagerly awaiting the final 6 in mid-July.
Breaking Bad was famously a series that "stuck the landing" with a great series finale. (At a time when many other long-running series were perceived to have blown it.) If lightning can strike twice with the finale of Better Call Saul, I truly believe the show will be seen as equal or greater than the series that spawned it. I give Better Call Saul an enthusiastic A.
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