It was more likely that the bright, easy-going cook Jesse was leading to new adventures. Instead, of course, Aaron Paul went on to voice Todd in BoJack Horseman, who is essentially a more lovable Jesse minus the crystal blue persuasion. Just as Frasier emerged from Cheers improbably, so Saul emerged from the corpse of Breaking Bad. Over six series, Better Call Saul evolved into a deeper and more beautiful drama about human corruption than its predecessor. It morphed into something more visually luxurious than Breaking Bad while never, for a moment, losing its verbal dexterity and moral compass. A recent episode, for example, featured a virtuosic sequence of shots through the interior of Saul’s apartment, unfolding like the interior of a Dutch Golden Age painting. At times, all plot development stopped for a few hypnotic moments, the camera lingering on a frayed dollar bill caught in a cactus thorn, or some abstract composition of a piece of metal sheet blown in the desert. Tina Parker as Francesca Lindy. Photo: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television Very little television has the confidence to spend its time in this way. And the same goes for those long, wordless scenes of workers (usually men) doing things, whether they’re making cinnamon rolls in Omaha, pulling off an elaborate scam, building a method lab under a washing machine, or, as Mike once calmly he did, changing a window frame like a handyman while south of the border away from the drug thugs who wanted to kill him. Vince Gilligan and his colleagues know there’s something comforting about seeing someone do work they’re proud of – manual, meticulous, informed work that proves the antidote to craft in the everyday (what the late anthropologist David Graeber called “ balls jobs”) . Silliness aside, there is, in Gilligan’s worldview, a respect for the work and for honoring its depiction on screen – even if that work is cooking up pure intoxicants or manipulating the legal system. Really, there’s nothing on TV right now that dares to fool us in these ways, nor has there been a show in a long time that has switched between story lines, confident that the audience is knowledgeable enough to keep up. How strange, perhaps even unique, to find a large-form drama that does not insult our intelligence, but sets it in motion. Giancarlo Esposito as Gus Fring. Photo: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television That means that, after 61 episodes of meticulous filmmaking, writing, and acting (not to mention a mid-season heart attack on set for dear old Bob Odenkirk that made me, and no doubt other fans, selfishly worry that, just maybe , we’d never get to see an episode (called Saul Gone) that gave us an end to that story), Better Call Saul was a near-constant delight and a lesson in how television can be cinematic as well as engrossing, epic as well as fiercely focused on detail. For these reasons, for me at least, it was one of those things that has become extremely rare in the non-stop binge-arama of date-TV entertainment. His final episode is, as a result, sweet sadness. . From the outset, all that being said, this was not a promising case. For Breaking Bad, Gilligan had the idea that Walter White’s journey from chemistry teacher to pork-pie hat-wearing drug kingpin traced the dramatic arc from Mr Chips in Scarface. But Better Call Saul has no such character development: Saul has always been a bad guy, even when Jimmy first appeared. Or so we might assume, until the final moments of this perfect finale – when we finally leave the star of this unpredictable spin-off.
