|
My rating |
IMDb’s rating | Rotten Tomatoes | |||||
|
Acting |
Script | Directing | Average | Critics | Audience | Critics |
Audience |
|
9/10 |
8/10 | 8/10 | 8,3/10 | Not available | 9,2/10 | 100% | 93% |
Numbers obtained from IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes on April 8, 2015.
WARNING: DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED SEASON 1 OF BETTER CALL SAUL YET.
Ever since “Breaking Bad” ended in 2013 with huge popularity among the audience and the critics, there have been great expectations about its spin-off “Better Call Saul,” which would be a prequel focused mainly on Saul Goodman’s (Bob Odenkirk) story.
I’ve always found prequels to be extremely interesting, since we can finally understand more about the characters and what happened in their lives before we met them. And a prequel about the lawyer who helped Walter White and Jesse Pinkman sounded really appealing. Even before its first season aired, the show had already been signed for two seasons (a bold move considering the high level of expectations and criticism the show would face). After its season finale this week, I can understand why they needed at least two seasons to tell this story.
Vince Gilligan kept the same strategy that worked on “Breaking Bad”: the episodes often have flashbacks to an older story, so that we can better understand the reasons why the characters are acting that way, with the exception of the first episode, in which we find out what happened to Saul after his story with Walter White ended.
So, who is Saul Goodman, after all? As it turns out, he is Jimmy McGill, a lawyer who got his law degree from an online Law School and who had a tough beginning in his career. Shadowed by his brilliant brother, who was a famous and successful lawyer and now is facing some sort of panic syndrome, Jimmy never had a chance to work in a proper law firm as a lawyer (only as a mail boy). As he tries to make a living alone, we see him with almost no money at all, accepting cases in court to represent defendants who don’t have lawyers for a small price.
His office is only a small room in the back of a nail saloon, whose owner won’t even let him drink the water offered to the clients. So we see him trying hard to get cases any way he can: scheming, following possible clients, going into trashes (literally) to find evidences to a case, etc. Still with no money, he decides to focus on elderly law, since older people usually need legal counsel with their wills. He is treated poorly by everyone around him, with the exception of his friend Kim (Rhea Seehorn). He is, therefore, in a worse living situation than Walter White’s in “Breaking Bad” (apart from the cancer, of course), which is interesting to know, since lawyers are often seen as successful professions and we tend to forget that not all of them work in big law firms.
We also learn a little bit of Mike’s background (Jonathan Banks) and how his relationship with Saul began. It’s really interesting to understand why he is that way. I didn’t like the episode that was almost entirely dedicated to him, though.
Overall, it’s a really good show and it didn’t disappoint me. I’ve heard some people complaining about the season, saying that nothing really “happened,” but I really enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to season 2. It’s a well-written show and it focuses more on the depths of the characters that most shows around.
