Broken Pawn: TV Binge Review - Better Call Saul

Better Call Saul mixes sophomoric lawyer 'action' with some of the best characters on television.

Two weekends ago I found myself alone with my beagles while Kathy went to Long Island to get Ben back from school and visit Matt in Virginia. I didn’t have any side programming work to occupy myself with and it was a three day weekend to boot. With all the extra time on my hands I decided to have Daisy and Baxter’s now annual fried chicken taste test and in addition I had enough time to binge watch the first three seasons of AMC’s tragi-comedy 'Better Call Saul'.

Better Call Saul is a prequel of sorts to the highly thought of ‘Breaking Bad’ which chronicled the transformation of high school science teacher Walter White into the drug kingpin known as Heisenberg. The prequel stars White’s lawyer Saul Goodman who left Breaking Bad in the next to last episode by paying a fixer for a new identity saying he would be lucky to be managing a Cinnabon in Omaha’. And that is where Better Call Saul starts – with Saul managing a Cinnabon in Omaha with a name tag listing his name as ‘Gene’. Each of the three seasons starts with a ‘Gene in the Omaha Cinnabon’ scene and then flashes back to the past which is the present as far as the show where Saul is Jimmy McGill, a con-man turned lawyer with his own cast of characters including a lawyer brother that is homebound due to a supposed hypersensitivity to electromagnetic fields, his girlfriend Kim who works for his brother’s law firm, and Howard who is brother’s law firm partner.

The show perks up considerably when Mike Ehrmantraut is on screen.

The first season of the show starts out with Jimmy as a primordial Saul Goodman. He is not as slick as the later version but nearly as cynical and just as clever. He runs scams to try to convince an embezzling couple to hire him and shows off his pre-law scamming skills by conning bar patrons with his friend Marco. There is a slow but steady mix in the series to most of the Albuquerque drug underworld that became staples of Breaking Bad. The first episode featured appearances by Tuco Salamanca and Mike Ehrmantraut and later seasons have brought in Lydia, Gus, and Hector Salamanca.

The progression of Jimmy is interesting to watch as his scams evolve from tricking marks at a bar out of a few hundred dollars to bribing a bus driver to fake a breakdown for time to convince his elderly nursing home passengers to join his class action lawsuit. His scams culminate in stealing documents from his brother’s house and changing the data to get the client to switch to his girlfriends new practice. This last scam gets him suspended from the bar for a year in a case of self-sabotage since the early Jimmy has a soft heart and confesses his chicanery to his brother to keep him from thinking he has made a terrible mistake and turning into a recluse, never suspecting his brother was scamming him and tape recorded the conversation. This is typical Jimmy who convinces one of the elderly members of his class action suit to settle for the first big offer by turning her friends against her but later getting her friends back by exposing his complicity. Jimmy and the law firms he competes and cooperates with is sort of LA Law in a funhouse mirror and entertaining but not something that would make this appointment television for me.

One way to bring down a truck!

What did make me watch 25+ hours of ‘Better Call Saul’ was the adventures of the aging bald ex-Philly-cop turned parking lot attendant Ehrmantraut who is far and away my favorite character on the show. I know Mike as a enforcer for drug dealing Gus in Breaking Bad and his ‘breaking bad’ journey in order to first avenge his son’s death at the hands of some crooked cops to taking on odd jobs as a protection enforcer or second story man is fascinating. Ehrmantraut needs the money for his daughter-in-law and granddaughter but finds himself increasingly drawn into the drug business. Mike ended season three avenging the killing of a good samaritan who was killed as a result of Mike's robbery of a Salamanca drug running truck by making a deal with Gus to launder $200,000 in stolen drug money to give to the samaritan’s wife.

My favorite Mike Ehrmantraut scene!

My affinity with Mike probably comes from my being an aging balding man myself. I have no pretensions that I ever was or could be the bad actor that Mike is but I can still dream. To me Mike is the star of Better Call Saul. My favorite Ehrmantraut scene is when Steven Ogg (Simon of Walking Dead fame) is giving him grief about not bringing a gun to a bodyguard job. Mike says if he needs a gun he’ll use one of Ogg’s and then proceeds to prove his point by taking Ogg’s a gun out of his hand, cracking him in the neck with the gun, and then relieving the choking Ogg of his other weapons. Another great Ehrmantraut scene shows him letting his granddaughter drill holes a garden hose while explaining to his daughter-in-law that he needs a soaker for some outdoor plants. Mike then puts spikes in the holes and uses the hose as a lightweight device to disable Salamanca’s drug running truck in the desert so he can rob it.

I found the investment of 25+ hours watching Better Call Saul well worth my time. The action, storytelling, and cinematography are exceptional. I am of the opinion that I would not be nearly as enamored with the show if I hadn’t binge watched. Each episode had plenty of slow moving parts which were not as irritating when a morning or afternoon would have multiple scenes with Mike to balance out the lawyer drama stuff that I find boring. The show is scheduled to air Season 4 on Monday nights starting on August 6th. My live television viewing is mostly reserved for Sunday night apocalypse shows but as soon as season 4 of Better Call Saul ends I will head right to Netflix to binge watch the show.