"Better Call Saul" Review: The Spin-Off That Had No Right to Work
A network wanted more money out of a finished franchise, and what came back was a six-season tragedy that stands beside the show it came from. On Jimmy and Kim, the case for Chuck McGill, and the strange fact that most of this cast was never supposed to exist.
When Breaking Bad ended, I couldn't picture another show reaching that level, let alone surpassing it. So when a Saul Goodman spin-off was announced, my expectations were modest. Some good jokes. A bit of extra texture on characters people already liked. Fine, and unnecessary.
What Spin-Offs Usually Are
Television spin-offs are usually one of two things: fan service, or a way to squeeze more revenue out of something an audience has already paid for. That doesn't automatically make them bad, but very few carry the care that would make you argue they needed to exist. The risk runs the other way, too. Go back to characters people love without a real story to tell, and you can damage them retroactively.
And this one genuinely started with AMC wanting more from the franchise. Which is what makes the result so hard to believe. Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould went back into that world and produced a second masterpiece.
I expected this show to live permanently in the original's shadow. I would never have put them in the same conversation. Instead, Better Call Saul picked up the ball Breaking Bad was rolling and threw it further down the field.
Jimmy and Kim
Breaking Bad has peaks nothing else reaches. Better Call Saul does things Breaking Bad could not.
The difference is in the writing of the leads. Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler are two of the best-written characters television has produced, and I do not say that loosely. Jimmy keeps being offered the legitimate version of the life he wants and keeps finding it unbearable. Kim is the more remarkable creation, because she is the one character in this universe whose ending nobody could look up in advance.
That last point is worth sitting with. Kim does not appear in Breaking Bad. She was invented for this show, which means every scene she is in carries a genuine question mark, and the writers used that ruthlessly. Rhea Seehorn plays her with such control that the eventual breaks are devastating.
In Defence of Chuck McGill
The cast here is deep, and I think Chuck is the one who gets undersold.
Most people land on a fairly settled verdict about him, and I understand why. But the Chuck-and-Jimmy dynamic is far less black-and-white than the consensus allows. Both of them are right about certain things, and both are indefensible about others, sometimes inside the same scene. Chuck's assessment of his brother is not wrong. What he does with that assessment is cruel. Jimmy's grievance is legitimate. What he does with it is unforgivable.
That is genuinely rare writing, and it is why the relationship stays interesting on a second pass. Like Kim, Chuck exists only here, invented wholesale for a prequel about a character who never once mentioned having a brother.
A Prequel That Should Not Be Able to Pace Itself
What baffles me most is the arc timing.
Prequels have a structural problem: the audience knows the destination, which normally drains the tension out of the journey. This show solves it by pacing each arc so precisely that none ever feels rushed toward its known endpoint. You reach what looks like the summit of a character's development, and then something arrives that reframes everything underneath it.
Six seasons and 63 episodes, one more than Breaking Bad managed, and almost none of it is filler.
Two Shows, Balanced
The show also balances the legal world and the cartel world for years, without either side starving.
I came in wanting more Mike and more cartel, and that is the natural instinct for anyone arriving from Breaking Bad. It took me a while to notice that the law firm material was carrying the show. Through the first three seasons, the Jimmy, Kim, Chuck, and Howard story is the most compelling thing on screen, while the cartel plot quietly builds in the background for later.
Characters Who Were Never Meant to Exist
Here is the part that turns this from a good show into a small miracle.
Mike Ehrmantraut only exists because of a scheduling conflict. Bob Odenkirk was unavailable for a Breaking Bad episode where Saul was meant to handle a clean-up job, so the writers invented a fixer to do it instead. Jonathan Banks got a one-off part that became one of the franchise's central figures.
Lalo Salamanca and Nacho Varga come from a throwaway line. In the desert, believing he is about to be killed, Saul blurts out two names, Ignacio and Lalo, purely to establish that this lawyer has dangerous enemies. Gould and Gilligan went back to that scrap years later and built two of the best characters in either show out of it.
Kim and Chuck, the emotional core of the series, came from nothing. Even Saul's endgame comes from his own offhand joke in Breaking Bad about ending up managing a Cinnabon in Omaha, which the prequel turned into its black-and-white framing device.
So the foundation of this show is a scheduling accident, two names invented in a panic, and a punchline that it produced is remarkable.
Advice for Anyone Starting
Two things.
Be patient. The show takes its time, and it is doing that on purpose.
Understand that this is not Breaking Bad. It is slower, sadder, and more interested in ordinary human failure than in criminal escalation.
It does become extremely intense eventually. When it does, you will find yourself looking back at the earlier material and realising those were the good times. If you come to this from Breaking Bad, you will spend the early seasons wanting one particular thing, and when you finally get it, you will understand that the arrival was never the point. Getting there was.
The Verdict
One footnote that suits the show perfectly: 53 Emmy nominations across six seasons and not a single win, which is the record for the most nominated series never to take one home. Chuck McGill would have had something to say about that.
Kudos to Peter Gould, Vince Gilligan, and everyone who came back to make this. Breaking Bad paved the way for one of the greatest shows ever made, and the more impressive thing is what Better Call Saul does in return: it makes clear that Breaking Bad is not complete without it.
I am glad I was around to watch this universe close properly.
