Better Call Saul is an Antidote to Modern Times
(spoiler-free) thoughts on a rewatch, intended for the unwatched
On my flight to London yesterday, I rewatched the second half of Better Call Saul season 5 and the first half of season 6. For those who don’t know, Better Call Saul is a prequel show to Breaking Bad which started in 2015 and wrapped up in 2022.
Because BCS didn’t get nearly the same media coverage as Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones or the other recent shows of that caliber—and it is of that caliber—I had forgotten just how great it is. BCS doesn’t come up in conversation the way Breaking Bad does, so my enjoyment hasn’t been socially reinforced.
BCS is a great TV show, maybe one of the top ten shows of the last twenty years, but what makes it truly unmissable is that it features two or three of the top ten episodes ever made. There’s a problem, however: The feature that makes a handful of episodes out-of-this-world great is also the reason the show didn’t get the recognition it deserves. Vince Gilligan, the show’s writer, is absurdly, almost painfully, meticulous. He allows himself multiple episodes or even seasons to build up a single payoff. He plans out every step, every detail, every perspective, such that a single conversation in season 6 might redeem hours, days, or, if you were watching live, years of investment. I study YouTube videos of Michelin starred restaurants a bit obsessively, and the way a top kitchen orchestrates mise en place is pretty analogous to how exacting and relentless his writing can be.
Gilligan’s approach took time to develop. If you’ve seen Breaking Bad, you might recall bits and pieces of this approach. In season 2, black-and-white flashbacks of a burned stuffed animal in a pool get explained in spectacular fashion later on. Breaking Bad season 5 features the episode Ozymandias, long ranked by IMDb as the #1 television episode ever made (until Attack on Titan fans one-starred it en masse to make room for themselves at the top). But the first half of that season was relatively unmemorable, primarily because Gilligan was already maturing his practice of long, multi-episode setups for an operatic conclusion—in that case, an excellent conclusion indeed.
It’s hard to make TV that way. People stop watching. I think a lot of people gave BCS a try, but compared to the glitz and schmooze they might have expected from the TV lawyer, BCS is more about a tragic and insecure relationship between two brothers than it is about a cartel lawyer. Gilligan writes characters like himself, characters who have seemingly infinite patience, who will take a car apart piece by piece to find a tracker or will stake out an empty home for days on end. And he’s not afraid to keep the camera rolling. Even Ozymandias took time to show Walter White rolling a barrel down a long country road.
This is one long way to say: BCS isn’t as well-regarded as it should be because we no longer have the patience for slowness in narratives. Movies are becoming less and less popular. We watch shows at 2x speed. We’re addicted to TikTok. Our content consumption reflects a culture increasingly reliant on instant gratification.
Gilligan’s shows are the perfect example of the importance of slowness in storytelling. Breaking Bad and BCS are about individuals who break bad, who commit acts of evil. In their telling, they painstakingly reveal the psychology of men and women undergoing the slow, almost passive process of continuous moral decline. Admittedly, BCS might be on the extreme end—especially in the first two seasons, its slowness could be considered indulgent, even meandering—but given how well it utilizes that slowness, I think it becomes worth it. And depictions of believable, dare I say informative, psychological change take time. They require space. They ask for a medium and an audience who will give them room to breathe, and Netflix doesn’t offer that—not anymore.
Our inability to produce (and consume) the kind of storytelling that allows characters to develop organically is not an isolated gripe; it is a driving force behind the franchise-agnostic decline in our culture’s content quality. Think about the ending of Game of Thrones (spoiler alert, but if you haven’t seen it, I’m doing you a favor by spoiling it): Danaerys Targaryen goes crazy and massacres thousands of innocents. George R. R. Martin, the author of The Song of Ice and Fire, the sprawling, overwritten, unendingly intricate mess of novels on which GoT is based, once said that the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself. You could argue that Dany’s psychological reversal is in line with that goal. After all, GoT is a criticism of heroes, the fantasy magic sword, and the religious savior. Dany on a dragon is all of those things, so a conclusion in which power and paranoia corrodes her initial intentions and our bastard “hero” is forced to kill her and then leave into exile might really have been the proper ending to Martin’s song. But the show got caught up in set piece battles and dragon fire, and we will never get to see what might have been.
When GoT ended the way it ended, I declared (quite melodramatically) to a friend that the Golden Age of Television had died. I was a little premature—Gilligan gave us one final entry. But if you loved The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Game of Thrones (pre-season 7), Breaking Bad, or Bojack Horseman, not just for a narrative rollercoaster but for powerful storytelling and profound character development, there hasn’t been much else of value released in the TV medium since The Battle of the Bastards.
This isn’t to say good content is no longer getting added to streaming services. We’ve got The Bear, we’ve got Baby Reindeer—but these shows are a whole different animal (pardon the pun). The episodes are not meant to be watched as standalone works. Their unique effect is developed by taking advantage of the fact that they are not, ultimately, normal TV shows. The Bear is some weird, beautiful, irritatingly inconsistent melding of the 2000s mockumentary and the drama. And the exceptional Baby Reindeer almost presupposes the knowledge that its episodes will be binged to immerse viewers in the warped minds of its characters, taking advantage of the suspension of disbelief and emotional openness created by a watched-six-episodes-straight altered state of consciousness in order to plunge you into sections of the human experience which might otherwise be too foreign, or too disturbing.
But you couldn’t watch either of them on a television set. You couldn’t gather around with your family, put on a 25-minute episode of The Bear, watch a neat, meaningful story get constructed, executed, and finished. You couldn’t discuss it and then wait for next week. Maybe I’m being excessively nostalgic when I say that that style of television storytelling doesn’t exist anymore. But hasn’t the content delivery system changed? Hasn’t TV lost its social component in our cultural vision? Doesn’t it seem like our brains, at a neurochemical level, crave something different?
It’s happening in movies as well (though thankfully a much longer tradition of high quality independent movie making should prevent holistic decline). If you’ve watched Minions: The Rise of Gru, or Kung Fu Panda 4, or any of the ridiculous Marvel multiverse movies, it becomes easier and easier to see that movies have become about stimulation and escape more than they are about quality and meaning. My hot take is that I found Across the Spider-Verse a big disappointment, not because it wasn’t beautifully animated or well voice-acted or generally quite entertaining, but because it gave itself three hours and still couldn’t tell a complete story. When, as consumers of media, did we become so okay with letting writers and producers string us along? Somehow, just sitting down and telling a story has become taboo. We have to wait for the next episode, the next season, the next movie, for the prequel, the sequel, for a whole new series to explain what came before. And, almost inevitably, what we end up with is empty and tired.
In years past, when a finale sucked, it tended to be because the creators took a bold but unsuccessful creative direction. I’m thinking about Lost, or even How I Met Your Mother. But now, when finales suck, it feels like the writers just didn’t care—like they thought it doesn’t matter. Or worse, they figured we don't care. But it matters! It matters when The Rise of Skywalker is a nonsensical mess, when the best part of Stranger Things season 4 is a song, when Game of Thrones season 8 is the biggest letdown in TV history, when almost every Marvel movie since Endgame has been a whole bunch of action-packed nothing.
When these shows end badly, it doesn’t just mean the last week of a multi-year experience was a bit of a letdown. Unfortunately, that’s not how narratives work; conclusions carry weight. This ever-expanding list of failed endings implicitly breaks our trust that the shows in which we invest our time and attention over months, years, and sometimes decades have purpose beyond trading attention/money for dopamine. Exploitative content creation makes us forget that our stories, that the process of storytelling, the form, the content, the going to the theater, the sitting on the couch, the gathering around the campfire, has genuine human utility. The transformation of television from challenging art to mindless entertainment is designed to combat boredom and artistic thinking. The catch is that boredom and thinking are pretty anticapitalist modes of existence. So it matters—it really matters—when our corporate overlords at Disney and Netflix offer us garbage in a spoon, and we shut up and thank them. Between social media and TV, I worry that we are sleepwalking into a world in which dopamine is sold as a cure to the disease of quiet, but quiet isn’t a disease and dopamine isn’t a cure.
Anyway, that seems like enough Jaiden rant for the day. If you want to watch some good TV, check out Better Call Saul. It’s boring for eighty percent of the episodes, then unrelentingly exceptional for the remaining twenty. Don’t worry, if you get tired, you can just skip the boring parts—after all, I started my “rewatch” halfway through season 5…